Not necessarily.
Lots of website designers and developers will automatically want to offer you a brand new website when you contact them for help. Often, this can be due to the personal preferences of that specific developer, rather than because you need a completely new website. Sometimes, a developer may suggest a brand new website simply because they don’t understand how your existing website is put together.
We’re different.
There’s no ego involved in the advice we give our clients. Instead, we simply focus on the best options for you.
If your site is generally in good condition, you may not need a complete overhaul of your current website. Instead, your site might just need a little bit of TLC.
Polishing up an existing website could involve small changes, or could mean making some substantial changes, like a new theme or some custom code. But in general, if a website is working, you don’t usually need a brand new site. Instead, you just need to improve the areas that aren’t working.
If you want a brand new bathroom, you wouldn’t knock your whole house down to install a new suite. But, if your bathroom needed some major work, such as a new floor, that’s the section you’d replace first. Then you’d add the bathroom suite. Then you’d add the bathroom suite.
We treat your website in the same way. We won’t completely disregard your website and start from scratch unless it’s necessary, and sometimes, even some relatively major changes can be made within the bounds of your existing site. If major changes are needed, we’ll start with these and move on to more minor alterations.
One of our current clients approached us with a website that had several hundred pages. The theme of the website – and the software the site relied on to work – was 2 years out of date. This meant adding new features to the site was very difficult, and the load speed was very slow. In this case, we suggested rebuilding just the part of the website that was out of date. Nothing else on the site needed to change. Rebuilding the theme was a modest sized project in itself, but now that it’s completed, our client can add new features really easily, and the website itself is much faster.That one project saved about 4 seconds of load time per page (i.e. each web page now loads about 4 seconds more quickly than it did before).
So yes,, in some circumstances, it’s more economical to rebuild a website from scratch and create an entirely new site, but not always. When options are available, we’ll discuss them with you and ensure you make the right decision for you and your business.