When does a website need a redesign?
Being tired of your site is not a reason to rebuild it. Knowing when to redesign a website means separating what bothers you from what gets in the way of your visitors and your business.
What are the real signs?
The business has changed and the site still describes the old one. Visitors keep asking questions the site should answer. It is awkward on a phone. You cannot update it without calling someone. It takes long enough to load that you notice. Any one of these is worth acting on; several together usually mean the foundations no longer fit.
Which signs are not enough alone?
A competitor launched something new. The colours feel dated to you. A trend you have seen elsewhere is missing. You have simply looked at the same pages for too long. Owners tire of their sites long before customers do. If the site is clear, works on a phone and brings enquiries, a visual refresh may be nice to have, but it is not urgent.
Redesign or repair?
If the structure is sound and the problem is local, repair it: rewrite the home page, replace the photos, fix the phone layout, speed it up. If the problems are in the structure itself, such as the wrong pages, a system you cannot edit or a design that breaks whenever content changes, patching takes more effort over time than starting properly. An honest review should tell you which case you are in.
What should survive a redesign?
Whatever is working. Pages that people find through search should keep their addresses, or the old addresses should point to the new ones, so that links and bookmarks do not lead to an error page. Text that customers respond to should be kept, not rewritten for the sake of it. Make a list of what the current site does well before anyone opens a design tool.
What do I need before starting?
A clear statement of what is wrong, in terms of visitors and business, not taste. Access to the current site, the domain and the hosting. Whatever figures you have about which pages are visited, if any exist. And updated content: a redesign that pours old text into a new layout fixes less than you hope. Most of the improvement comes from saying the right things in the right order.
How do I avoid needing another one soon?
Build on something you can edit, so the site changes as the business does instead of drifting out of date. Choose a design that is plain enough to age well. Keep the structure flexible, so a new service or a new section can be added without breaking the layout. Sites that are easy to update stay current for years; sites that are frozen at launch start ageing the next day.
How I handle it
I begin by looking at the current site with you and separating what to keep from what to change. The new design is drawn in Figma and approved by you before anything replaces the old site. You receive the dashboard, so text, images and posts stay in your hands afterwards, with 180 days of support from the day the new site goes live. Send me the address of your site and tell me what bothers you most about it.
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