Sooner or later every business website starts to look tired, and the owner faces the same question: does it need new words and photos, or does it need to start over?
The first is a refresh. The site keeps its structure, its platform and its page addresses; you change what's on the pages. The second is a rebuild: a new design and new code, often on a new platform, with the old site retired.
If your bakery's site still lists last year's menu and shows the storefront before you repainted it, that's a refresh. If it can't be read on a phone and nobody remembers the login, that's a rebuild.
I build new websites for a living, so weigh my view accordingly. The signs and the test below are ones you can check yourself, with links to the sources.
Signs a refresh is enough
A refresh is enough when the bones are good and only the surface has aged:
- The structure works. Customers find what they came for. The menu makes sense, and there's a page for each thing you sell.
- The content is stale. Old prices, a service you dropped, staff who've left, a "coming soon" that came and went.
- The photos are dated. They show a different storefront, a different team, or stock pictures that never looked like you.
- It works on a phone and loads in reasonable time. More on how to check both below.
- Someone can log in and change it, whether that's you or someone you pay.
Not every problem that looks big is. A slow page is sometimes just oversized photos, which is a refresh-sized fix.
Signs it's time to rebuild
It fails on phones
If you have to pinch to read the text, the buttons sit too close to tap, or the menu doesn't open, the problem is the layout, not the words. It matters for search too: Google uses the mobile version of a site's content for indexing and ranking, which it calls mobile-first indexing (Google Search Central).
It's slow, and the slowness is built in
Google measures how your pages feel to use with three numbers called Core Web Vitals: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to a tap, and whether things jump around while it loads. My post on Core Web Vitals explains what fixes them. Some fixes take minutes. Others, like slow hosting or a theme that was never built for speed, are bigger, and that's when a rebuild is worth weighing.
The software underneath is out of support
Many sites, WordPress among them, run on PHP, a programming language with versions that stop getting fixes. Each PHP version gets two years of full support, then two years of fixes for critical security issues only, and then reaches its end of life. As of October 2026, the supported versions are 8.2 to 8.5, and 8.2's security fixes end on December 31, 2026 (php.net). PHP 8.1 and older get no fixes at all.
WordPress recommends PHP 8.3 or greater, and says the older versions it still runs on have reached end of life and may expose your site to security vulnerabilities (WordPress requirements). Moving to a newer version is often a setting at your host. If the theme or plugins break on it and nobody updates them anymore, you may be looking at a rebuild.
Nobody can edit it
The developer moved on, the login went with them, or the account is in someone else's name. If you can't get in, you can't refresh anything. My post on who owns your website covers what to collect so this doesn't happen again.
You've outgrown the builder
A website builder is a fine place to start. When you need what your plan can't do, a bigger plan may solve it. When you need what the platform can't do, it won't. My post on the real cost of a free website builder runs the numbers.
The business changed
New services, a new market, a merger, a new name. The pages and menu were built around the business you used to be, and changing words on them won't change that.
A test you can run today
Do these in order and write down what you find.
1. Open it on your phone
Use your own phone, on cellular data, not Wi-Fi. Read the homepage without zooming. Tap the phone number, open the menu, and send yourself a test message through the contact form.
2. Run it through PageSpeed Insights
Paste your homepage address into PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile results. My Core Web Vitals post explains how to read them.
3. Change one small thing
Update your opening hours, or just log in and find where you would. If you can't log in, or don't know who can, write that down.
4. Find out what it runs on
Ask your host or your web person which platform and PHP version the site uses. On WordPress, Tools > Site Health will tell you if your site is running an outdated version of PHP (WordPress documentation).
5. Read the homepage as a stranger
Does it say what you do today, where you do it, and how to reach you? Would you hire the business it describes?
Here's how I'd read the results. If the first four pass and the homepage only needs new words and photos, it's a refresh. If they pass but the business itself has changed, it's probably a rebuild. If the phone, speed, login or software steps fail and the cause is bigger than a setting, rebuild.
Keep your search traffic through a rebuild
Each page's address (its URL) is what Google has indexed and what other sites link to. The simplest rebuild keeps every address the same. When I moved this blog off WordPress in October 2026, every post I kept stayed at its address (what that move involved).
When an address has to change, Google's guide to moving a site comes down to this:
- List your old addresses first. Your sitemap, the most-visited pages in your analytics, and the pages Search Console shows other sites linking to. Include images and PDFs.
- Redirect each one to its closest new page. Use a permanent redirect, a 301 or 308, which tells Google to show the new address in search results (Google's redirects guide). Google says permanent redirects don't lose the credit a page has earned from links.
- Don't send everything to the homepage. Google says redirecting many old pages to one unrelated page can confuse visitors and may be treated as a "soft 404", a page Google counts as missing. Where several pages became one, redirect them all to it. Where a page is gone with nothing in its place, Google says the old address should return a "not found" error.
- Change one thing at a time. Google suggests a new domain, a new platform and a new design be done one after another, not together. If you're renaming the business too, consider moving the domain separately.
- Keep the redirects for at least a year, Google says, and from a visitor's point of view, indefinitely.
- Expect a wobble. Rankings can move around while Google recrawls. For a small to medium site, Google says most pages take a few weeks to move.
Refresh or rebuild with me
Every website plan I sell is a new site I design and build, so for an old site, a plan is a rebuild. Starter is five pages for $2,400, Deluxe seven for $4,080 and Premium ten for $6,720. Each is one build fee, paid in full for 10% off or half now and half before launch. From launch day, the $79/mo care plan covers hosting on Vercel with SSL, daily backups, uptime monitoring, and security and dependency updates. Stores beyond a simple shop, and migrations off an existing platform, are quoted separately.
On a site I've built, a refresh after launch is hourly work. Changes such as new text, new photos or new pages are $150 an hour in 15-minute increments with a 30-minute minimum, or $675 for a prepaid block of five hours. Swapping a phone number and two photos is usually half an hour, $75. Anything bigger than an hour or two is quoted first, or sold as the matching add-on.
Not sure which you need? My free homepage audit is a five-minute video review of your homepage covering speed and mobile layout, SEO basics and calls to action, emailed to you within two business days. Request your audit.
If your site runs on WordPress and you'd rather keep it, I host and look after existing WordPress sites, on LiteSpeed servers I run, case by case. Tell me about yours and I'll send a written quote for hosting and upkeep before anything changes. Content and design changes aren't included. A $500 deposit starts the quote; it's refundable until you accept, and credited to the work. Ask for a quote.
If it's time to start over, compare the plans and start your project.
