Your website has stopped keeping pace with the business, and you need to decide whether to fix it, move it to a new platform or start again. Pick the wrong option, and you lose months to work that doesn’t solve the problem. All the while, the site keeps costing you sales and leads.
Start with an audit, and agree before it begins which decision it needs to lead to. Past that point, our own team don’t fully agree on where the line sits. William Sharp, Account Manager, sees far more sites needing a rebuild than their owners expect. Sean Dwyer, Managing Director, will go a long way to avoid one. Kieran Priest, Project Manager, lets the size of the site decide.
An audit is a diagnosis. It looks at how the site performs, how search engines crawl it, how people use it and whether it does what the business needs. A migration moves your content, data and brand onto a new platform. A rebuild replaces the code underneath, and sometimes the whole site.
Sean splits every website into four parts before deciding which of these it needs. Function is what the business and its customers need the site to do. Content is whether it says what it should, structure is whether people can find their way around, and aesthetic is whether it looks persuasive.
Whichever part is failing points to the answer. A function gap often leads to migration. Failing foundations lead to a rebuild. An aesthetic problem should be tested with real customers before anyone redesigns anything.
In Williams’ experience, clients usually arrive expecting a small fix and find out they need something bigger; it’s rare for anyone to be told they can spend less. The need for a rebuild often shows up sideways, when another piece of work exposes a fault in the build.
One client came to us for an SEO programme. After the first round of site fixes and content work, rankings didn’t move the way they should have. An audit found the site was loading too slowly for Google to crawl the improved content properly. The first theory was to remove plugins, which made no difference. The cause was how the theme had been built in the first place, and fixing it meant close to a full rebuild.
“Lost here was months of time that SEO work could have been bedding in and gaining momentum, because the requirement for a rebuild was not captured early,” says William.
Sean starts from the opposite end.
“I think the world has enough technical debt. It would take inoperability in certain ways for me to start with ‘rebuild’ as the solution.”
For one of our e-commerce clients, the UX and SEO teams agreed that speed was the biggest improvement they could make. The checkout and product pages worked, and the budget didn’t stretch to a redesign. So the team rebuilt the code underneath for speed and left the design and e-commerce features as they were.
Kieran has a smaller example. A client with a small site needed a second one for a sister company. The team copied the original, changed the colour palette and swapped in the new content. That saved time and budget, and the client got a layout they already knew worked.
William agrees an audit is the right place to start. His warning is about what happens next: teams treat it as a to-do list to work through month after month. A handful of issues can be handled that way. When the list is long and varied, the audit is telling you something bigger.
“Is this worth working through slowly month by month, while a not fit-for-purpose website loses sales or leads, or should we take a smaller commercial hit on a rebuild in order to maximise its full potential a lot quicker?” says William.
Kieran sees the same with sites built mostly from plugins. After one recent audit, the team recommended a rebuild and carried over only the plugins that were essential. The size of the site sets the size of the audit, so a small site doesn’t need a large review to reach that decision.
Some sites are built on weak foundations, or no longer fit what the business is trying to do. Sean gives two examples: a business moving from lead generation to ecommerce, and a legacy system that takes so much time to keep running that “the juice is no longer worth the squeeze”.
At that point, patching the old site costs more than replacing it. William’s and Sean’s examples come down to the same test: whether the foundations can support what the business needs next.
Sean links migration to function. If a business is looking at a new platform, it’s usually because the commercial side isn’t getting what it needs from the current one. Work out what that gap is costing before you commit.
Will’s first step is an audit, as long as it leads somewhere. “Getting stuck after the audit step, and never moving forward on a subsequent action, is a real killer here.”
Once you’ve made the call, the next risk is the switch itself. We’re covering that in “How to protect revenue during a website migration or rebuild”. If you want a team that will tell you which of the three your site needs, read how Door4 works as a technical partner.
Contributors
Sean Dwyer, Managing Director, Door4.
William Sharp, Account Manager, Door4.
Kieran Priest, Project Manager, Door4.
Our latest articles, features and ramblings.
We explore performance marketing, AI, communications and optimisation.
“I think the world has enough technical debt. It would take inoperability in certain ways for me to start with ‘rebuild’ as the solution.”