"Our website needs work" gets said about two very different problems. One is that the site looks dated or converts poorly — a design and content problem. The other is that the site is slow, hard to update, or built on infrastructure nobody wants to touch — a technical problem. Paying for a redesign when you actually need a rebuild (or the reverse) is the most common way this money gets wasted.
Signs you need a redesign, not a rebuild
- The site is fast and technically sound, but looks like it's from a previous era of your brand.
- Conversion or bounce rate is the problem, not load time or maintainability.
- Content and information architecture need rework, but the underlying platform is fine.
This is a design, copy, and layout project — the existing infrastructure and CMS usually stay, and it's a smaller, faster engagement.
Signs you need a rebuild
- The site is slow — Core Web Vitals are failing, and it's costing you search ranking, not just aesthetics.
- Every content change requires a developer, because it was built without a real CMS or component structure.
- It's built on a page builder or legacy platform that can't support what you need next — a blog, a store, a client portal.
- It fails basic technical SEO checks — no clean HTML, no real meta tags, JavaScript-only rendering that crawlers struggle with.
This is an infrastructure project. The visual design might carry over largely unchanged, but the code underneath is being replaced.
The overlap case — most real projects
Most sites that come to us need some of both: an outdated look and a platform that's holding the business back. In that case, the right sequence usually is to define the new design once and build it directly onto solid infrastructure, rather than redesigning on top of the old platform and then rebuilding underneath it a year later. Doing both at once, in the right order, is usually cheaper than doing them sequentially.
How we scope this
Every website engagement starts with a short technical and content audit — what's actually broken, and what's just old — before we quote a redesign, a rebuild, or both. See what's typically included on our websites page, or check pricing for current fixed-price tiers.