Does Your Site Need a Rebuild?

It’s a question you’re probably afraid to ask. To be perfectly honest, we can’t blame you. No one wants to have to rebuild their Site, it costs money, it costs time, and it usually costs you sleep as well. Even if you have a good agency and avoid that third issue, it’s still a lot of work that you’d probably rather avoid. Unfortunately, like putting off a trip to the dentist, leaving the problem will only make it worse. So if you suspect your Site may be due for an overhaul, then make sure to read on and find out. You’ll be grateful you did later.

Does It Still Do What You Need?

This is almost always going to be the first question you ask yourself when considering if your site is in need of a rebuild. If your site is no longer fit for purpose, then it’s definitely time to book it in for some major changes. There are several ways in which your Site can fail you, so let’s look at a few.

The most obvious way in which your Site can fail you is always going to be if you're running a digital store. Are you able to show off your products, not just beautifully, but quickly? Can those products be searched and filtered easily and effectively? Does your checkout accept a variety of popular payment methods? All these and more can prove crippling to your store if not implemented well, no one is going to come back to repeat a bad experience.

But what about if that’s not what your Site is for? If your Site isn’t functioning as a store making sales directly, it can still serve your business by attracting leads and driving traffic to where you do make money. In that case, the question becomes: Is your Site bringing in the leads it should be? A website has the vast sea of the internet to fish up leads from, if it isn’t pulling its weight, you need a redesign.

Another problem, especially for venerable old Sites, is whether they interact well with the great many devices Sites have to run on now. Once upon a time all websites were viewed on a desktop, but smartphones and tablets are here to stay, and websites need to respect that. If your Site can’t be viewed on all the devices people want to view it, you need to fix that urgently.

Of course you can solve some of these problems, at least temporarily, with smaller patches, but that can lead to another problem.

Does the Backend Still Make Sense?

If a wing mirror falls off your car, you don’t take the car down to the wreckers, you duct tape it back on until you can get it fixed properly. When the bumper comes loose, duct tape that too. If your coolant runs out, water will do, and so on. These quick fixes and patch jobs can be great for keeping you going where you otherwise would be forced to stop, but we all know what happens next. The patch job is doing just fine, so you keep it, no need to go to more effort and expense when you have a fix that’s already working. Over time more and more patches are added, and more and more become permanent additions. Eventually the Frankenstein’s monster you’ve created takes on a life of its own, and you have no idea where to even begin wrangling it into submission.

If you’ve been adding upgrades, fixes, and patch jobs to your Site for some time, there’s a good chance there are aspects of it that you can’t identify and are afraid to touch for fear of breaking something. At best, you’re looking at a system that requires you to spend 15 minutes on a 2 minute task because the whole thing is built out of spare parts and workarounds.

If you’ve got a problem like this, you don’t have much choice but to throw it out and start again. Quick fixes are an attractive option, but beware of what they may be costing you in the long run. A streamlined system is a profitable system.

Does It Still Suit Your Business?

If you’ve managed to avoid falling victim to any of the aforementioned issues, congratulations. Now however it’s time for the final angle from which we’ll be considering your Site, whether or not it suits your business. This may sound a lot like the first angle we looked at, but whereas before we looked at the Site purely in terms of function, now we’re going to look at the form it takes.

Does your Site reflect who you are as a business? Does it show off what you have to offer as best you can hope? Does it match your current branding? An outdated Site can be confusing, even off putting, to Customers. If visually your Site has fallen behind your business, it needs an update. Sometimes all that means is replacing some photos with fresher fare, but if the changes your business has undergone are extensive (and whose business hasn't after the pandemic?), a more extensive overhaul is in order.

A Site that’s ugly and clunky where your business is slick and streamlined is a Site that’s doing you a disservice. Don’t let that mismatch drag you down.

So there we have a number of issues that can mean it’s time for a redesign. If your Site is suffering from any of these, start investigating how quickly you can fix them. Even better, dig deep for other issues you can fix while you’re there, chances are there’s something that can be improved upon.