"My website is five years old. Is it time to rebuild?" It's the question we hear most often at the start of a consultation.
Our answer is usually the same: forget the age for a moment. Some ten-year-old websites still work beautifully. Some built last year are already holding the business back. Whether you should rebuild comes down to whether the site can still do its job today, not how long it's been around.
Here are five checkpoints. Each takes about ten minutes to run yourself, and by the end you'll probably have your answer.
Checkpoint 1: open it on your phone and see if you want to keep reading
Pull out your phone, open your website, and pretend you're a customer seeing it for the first time. Do you have to pinch and zoom to read the text? Are the buttons easy to tap? Is the form easy to fill out? How long do the images take to load?
Most customers meet you for the first time on a phone. If the mobile experience makes them want to close the tab, it doesn't matter how good the desktop version looks.
Pass if: you can read a whole page on your phone without zooming, content shows up within three seconds, and forms submit without a hitch.
Checkpoint 2: who do you call to change one line of text?
Say your business hours change, a price goes up, or you add a new service. Can you update the website yourself in 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A website you can't change slowly turns into a website that's out of date. And when what customers see doesn't match reality, it hurts trust more than having no website at all.
Pass if: you or a colleague can change text, swap images, and post a notice on your own, 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 check whether you show up in the first two pages of results. Then search your company name and see whether your website is the first result.
For 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, something's wrong with the site structure, and no matter how much content you write, nobody's seeing it.
Pass if: a search for your company name finds you, your main service keywords show up in the first two pages, and the number of indexed pages is close to the real number.
Checkpoint 4: does the website still describe who you are?
Your website was written a few years ago. Are the services, positioning, and target customers still the same today? Plenty of companies have changed direction in the past few years while their website keeps describing the old business. Clinics add self-pay treatments and bring on new 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 back then, and forcing new content into it only makes a bigger mess.
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 on? 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? If you're on WordPress today, WordPress or an AI website system? compares what maintenance looks like on each.
You won't notice any of this day to day. You only find out how serious it is when something breaks. 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: we see these 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, outdated 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 the better value. At that point the problems usually sit in the structure and the platform itself, and fixing one exposes the next. Rather than pouring money into a website that can never be fully patched, put the same budget into one that will serve you for the next five years. For how to size that budget, see What does a company website cost?
If you failed checkpoint 5, deal with that first, whatever the others say. An unmaintained platform is a risk problem, not a user-experience problem.
If you do rebuild, the old work isn't wasted
A lot of 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 earned carry over 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've built in our portfolio.