Redesign or rebuild? How to tell if your site is worth saving
Not every dated website needs replacing, and not every tidy-up is enough. The distinction usually comes down to whether the problem is on the surface or underneath.
Does it work properly on a phone?
Not “does it appear” but does it work. Can you tap the buttons without zooming, read the text without pinching, fill in the form without fighting it?
Most of your visitors are on a phone. If the answer is no, and the site was not built responsively in the first place, this is usually a rebuild. Retrofitting a fixed-width site into a responsive one is often more work than starting again.
Can you edit it yourself?
If changing a price means emailing somebody and waiting three days, the site is working against you. Sites built as hand-coded HTML with no content management, or on a platform whose owner has vanished, tend to fall here.
If you can log in and change things but it is ugly, that is a design problem, and design problems are fixable without starting over.
Is it built on something still supported?
Check what it runs on. If it is a current version of a mainstream platform that is simply out of date, updating and redesigning is realistic. If it is built on something abandoned years ago, or a proprietary builder from a company that no longer exists, nothing you do to the surface changes the fact that the foundation is not maintained.
Sites running on very old server software fall in here too, and this one is not optional. Unsupported software does not receive security patches.
Is the structure right, or just the paint?
Sometimes a site looks dated but is fundamentally sound: the pages are in a sensible order, the content is accurate, and it just looks like 2016. That is a redesign. New styling on the existing structure.
Other times the real problem is that nobody can find what they need, the services are split across nine pages that should be three, and half the content describes a business you no longer run. That is a restructure, and once you are restructuring you are most of the way to rebuilding anyway.
What we would say
Keep the domain either way. That is the part carrying your search rankings, your printed materials and every link anyone has ever made to you. Whether we rebuild or redesign, it goes back on the same address with the old pages redirected, so nothing you have earned gets thrown away. There is more on that under website redesigns.