"My website was built five years ago. Is it time to rebuild it?" It's the most common opening line we hear in consultations.
Our answer is usually: set its age aside for now. Some ten-year-old websites still work beautifully; some built last year are already dragging the business down. Whether to rebuild depends on whether the website can still do its job for you today, not on how old it is.
Here are five checkpoints, each of which you can check yourself in ten minutes. By the end, you'll probably know the answer.
Checkpoint 1: open it on your phone and see if you want to keep reading
Take out your phone, open your website and pretend you're a customer seeing it for the first time. Do you have to zoom in to read the text? Can you tap the buttons easily? Is the form easy to fill in? How long do the images take to load?
Most customers now see you for the first time on a phone. If the mobile experience makes people want to close the tab, it doesn't matter how good the desktop version looks.
Pass if: you can read an entire page on a phone without zooming, content appears within three seconds, and forms submit without a hitch.
Checkpoint 2: who do you call to change one line of text?
Imagine your opening hours change, a price is adjusted or a new service is added. Can you update the website yourself within half an hour? Or do you have to email whoever built it, wait a week and pay a fee?
A website you can't change slowly becomes an out-of-date website. When what customers see doesn't match reality, it damages trust more than having no website at all.
Pass if: you or a colleague can change text, swap images and post a notice yourselves, without worrying about breaking something.
Checkpoint 3: search for your service and see if you can find yourself
Google "your area + your service", for example "Puli dentist" or "Taichung association courses", and see whether you show up in the first two pages of results. Then search for your company name and see whether the first result is your website.
A more advanced check: search "site:yourdomain" on Google to see how many of your pages it has indexed. If your website has thirty pages and Google has indexed five, there's a problem with the site structure, and no matter how much content you write, it isn't being seen.
Pass if: searching your company name finds you, your main service keywords appear in the first two pages, and the number of indexed pages is close to the actual number.
Checkpoint 4: does the website still describe who you are?
The website was written a few years ago. Are the services, positioning and target customers the same as today? Many companies have changed direction in recent years while their website still talks about the old business. Clinics add private treatments and change doctors while the website still shows the old lineup.
This checkpoint has nothing to do with technology, but it's often the strongest reason to rebuild. The site structure was planned around the services you offered at the time, and forcing new content into it only gets messier.
Pass if: you can read every page of the website without once thinking "that isn't us anymore."
Checkpoint 5: is anyone still maintaining the platform?
What was the website built with? Is that platform still being updated? Have the plugins gone a long time without an upgrade? Who renews the hosting when it expires? Can you still reach the people who built it?
You don't notice this day to day; you only find out how serious it is when something goes wrong. Websites injected with malware, a plugin conflict that turns the whole site into a blank page, hosting that expires with nobody to renew it and data that can't be recovered: these things happen every year.
Pass if: you know where the website is hosted, who maintains it and how often it's updated, and you know there's a backup.
Adding it up: fix or replace
How many of the five checkpoints did you fail?
One or two: a fix is usually enough. A broken mobile layout can be restyled, out-of-date content can be rewritten, and poor indexing can be corrected with the right settings. Ask the original vendor, or ask us, to assess it; it will cost far less than a rebuild.
Three or more: a rebuild is better value. At that point, the problems are usually in the structure and the platform itself, and fixing one exposes another. Rather than pouring money into a website that can never be fully patched, spend the same budget on one that will serve you for the next five years.
If you failed checkpoint 5, deal with it first, whatever the others say. An unmaintained platform is a risk issue, not a user-experience issue.
If you do rebuild, the old work isn't wasted
Many people worry that rebuilding means starting from scratch. It doesn't. Articles, images and product data can all be migrated; old URLs can be set to redirect automatically to the new ones, and the search rankings you've built up move across with them. What gets rebuilt is the structure and the look, not years of content.
To find out which category your website falls into, enter your URL in the consultation form and we'll take a look before we talk. You can see the websites we have built in our portfolio.