Rebuild or refresh? A decision framework for your existing website
Most websites don’t need a rebuild. Some desperately do. Here’s a six-point test to tell the difference before you sign a quote.
Somewhere between “it’s fine” and “we need to start over” is a decision most owners procrastinate on. Rebuilding a site you already have costs money and feels like backsliding; refreshing a site that’s structurally broken is lipstick on a pig. Here’s how we think about it.
Refresh if …
- The site loads in under 2 seconds on a mid-tier phone.
- It’s on a modern stack (Next.js, Astro, well-maintained WordPress) that someone can still work on.
- Your issues are mostly aesthetic — outdated brand, wrong imagery, tired copy, a few pages that feel dated.
- Your conversion flow works; people do actually book or enquire.
- There’s less than 18 months of accumulated tech debt.
A refresh is brand work, copy work, imagery, and targeted template updates. Usually 1–3 weeks. Cheap, low-risk, high-impact.
Rebuild if …
- Mobile LCP is over 4 seconds and the fix list is a page long.
- The site is on a legacy CMS, abandoned theme, or custom PHP no-one’s touched in two years.
- You’re paying a developer every time you need to add a page.
- Conversion is broken: visitors arrive and bounce without a clear path to book, buy, or enquire.
- You’ve pivoted — new services, new audience, new positioning — and the site still advertises the old business.
A rebuild is starting from the goals, not the existing pages. Usually 3–7 days on a subscription model, or 4–12 weeks at a traditional agency. Bigger upfront cost, but it reopens the ceiling on what the site can do.
“You refresh when the foundation is sound. You rebuild when the foundation is the problem.”
The middle path people miss
If you’re genuinely unsure, a subscription model removes the commitment. Start a three-month Business plan; we rebuild the homepage and your two highest-traffic pages, keep the rest in place, and assess in month three. If it worked, continue. If the foundation was worse than expected, we’ve already migrated half the site and the remaining rebuild is shorter.
How this works at Stratevo, specifically
A full rebuild with us is 7 days from approved design, £89–£249/mo ongoing, no upfront build cost. A partial ‘refresh-then-rebuild’ is the same subscription, paced over two months so you keep working revenue pages live while we rebuild around them.
If you’re not sure which you need, book a 15-minute call. Show us your current site. We’ll tell you honestly — sometimes the right answer is refresh, and we’ll say so even if a rebuild is the bigger invoice.