Every website gets patched, and most get patched well past the point where patching helps. The decision is not really about age. A six year old site that loads fast, ranks, and can be updated by your own staff is fine. A two year old site that nobody can change without calling a developer is already a problem. The question is whether the next fix is buying you time or just costing money on something that should be replaced.
Six signs it is past patching
Nobody in the business can change a price, a phone number or a photograph without asking someone outside it. That single fact costs more over a year than most rebuilds.
It is slow and every attempt to speed it up gives back a little and then stops. Usually that means the problem is the structure, not the images.
It looks broken on a phone. Not imperfect, broken: text overflowing, buttons unreachable, forms that cannot be filled.
The plugins or components it depends on are no longer maintained. This is a security problem before it is a functionality one.
Every change breaks something else. That is the clearest sign that whatever is underneath has stopped being understandable.
It cannot do something the business now needs, and the quote to add it keeps coming back higher than expected. That is the cost of forcing a new requirement through an old structure.
What a rebuild should not cost you
Your rankings. A rebuild that loses traffic has usually skipped one step: mapping every old address to its new one with a permanent redirect. Do that and the ranking follows across. Skip it and years of work are thrown away on launch day.
Your content. Text, images and pages move. There is no reason to rewrite everything simply because the site is being rebuilt, and plenty of reason not to.
Your independence. If the new site leaves you unable to change your own content, the main reason for rebuilding has been missed.
The questions worth asking before you agree to anything
Who owns the code and the design files when it is finished. The answer should be you, without having to ask.
Can our own staff update the content, and can we see that before we sign off. A demonstration answers this faster than a promise.
What happens to our existing pages and their addresses. A proper answer includes a redirect map.
What is the site built on, and how many other people could maintain it. Something only one agency understands is a hostage situation with an invoice.
When patching is the right answer
It often is. If the structure is sound and the problem is a slow page, an outdated design on two templates, or a form that does not work, fixing those is cheaper and faster and carries none of the launch risk.
The test is whether the fixes are converging or not. If each one holds, patch. If each one reveals two more, the structure is the problem and no number of patches reaches it.
Questions people ask
- Will a rebuild hurt our Google rankings?
- Only if the redirects are skipped. Every old page needs a permanent redirect to whatever replaced it, and that mapping should exist before launch rather than being sorted out afterwards. Done properly, rankings usually hold and often improve, because a faster, better structured site is a better one to rank.
- How long does a rebuild take?
- A typical business site is three to five weeks from kickoff to launch. What makes it longer is almost never the build; it is waiting for content and for approvals. Naming one person who can approve things shortens a project more than anything a developer does.
We do this
If you would rather have it done than do it, this is the part of what we offer that covers it.