Redesigns & Rebuilds

When a rebuild is worth it

Usually it is one or more of these, and you probably already know which:

• It takes several seconds to appear, especially on a phone
• It looks wrong or is awkward to use on a phone, which is where most of your visitors are
• It was built on a platform you are paying for monthly and cannot easily leave
• You cannot change your own prices or hours without asking someone
• It looks like it was made a decade ago, because it was
• It is on WordPress and you are quietly worried about it being hacked

Keeping the rankings you already have

This is the part people are right to be nervous about, and the part that gets done badly most often. If your web addresses change and nothing is done about it, every link Google has for you leads to a dead page — and the rankings you spent years earning go with them.

So the addresses are mapped before anything is built. Where a page keeps its address, it keeps it. Where one has to change, the old address is redirected to the new one, which tells Google the page has moved rather than vanished. Your existing text and images come across too, tidied rather than thrown away.

Done properly, a rebuild usually improves your position rather than costing it — because the new site is faster and better structured than the old one.

What is usually making the old site slow

Almost always the same short list: enormous photographs uploaded straight from a phone or camera, a page builder loading its whole toolbox on every page, a stack of plugins each adding their own weight, and fonts and tracking scripts pulled in from half a dozen other companies.

The rebuild removes all of it. Photos are resized and converted to a modern format, the page builder goes entirely, and the site ends up loading nothing from anyone else's servers.

How it runs

I look at your current site and tell you honestly whether a rebuild is worth it — sometimes the answer is that a few fixes would do. If it is worth it, you get a fixed quote before any work starts.

The new site is built alongside the old one, so yours stays up the whole time. You review it, we adjust it, and only then do we switch over. The changeover itself takes minutes.

What I need from you

Less than for a site built from scratch, because most of it already exists. Access to your current site and your domain, whatever photos you have, and an honest steer on which pages actually matter to you.

That last one is worth thinking about. Most older sites have accumulated pages nobody reads and nobody has looked at in years. A rebuild is a good moment to decide what earns its place — fewer, better pages almost always beat more of them.

If you have lost the login to your domain or your old site, say so early rather than late. It is usually recoverable, but it can take a couple of weeks and it is the one thing that genuinely holds a launch up.

What it costs

The same as a new build, because it is the same work: $175 a month on the Website Plan with nothing down, or a one-time build from $3,800 that you own outright. Carrying over your existing pages and rankings is part of the job, not an extra.

See the pricing page for the full breakdown, or send me your current site and I will tell you what I would change.