People call me wanting a redesign. Maybe a third of the time I talk them out of it, at least for now.
Not because I do not want the work. Because a redesign is a specific tool that fixes a specific problem, and half the time the problem is somewhere else entirely.
Say what is actually wrong
There is a real difference between these two sentences. My website looks dated. Nobody is calling me.
You have been staring at your own site for four years. Of course you are sick of it. Your customers have seen it once, for forty seconds, and thought nothing about it at all.
So before you spend anything, go get the numbers. How many people landed on the site last month. How many called. If four hundred people came and one called, that is a conversion problem and a new coat of paint will not touch it. If eleven people came, the site is not the issue. Nobody can find you.
Cases where I say do not rebuild
Traffic is fine and calls are not. That is copy, layout, and the fact that your phone number is buried in the footer. Three fixes, a fraction of the cost.
Nobody can find you at all. Spend that money on your Google Business Profile and your local listings. A gorgeous site nobody visits is an expensive piece of art.
It is just slow. That is usually images and hosting. Fix those and the same site feels brand new.
You are three months from changing what the business does. Wait. Do not build a site for a company that is about to stop existing in that form.
Cases where I say rebuild
It does not work on a phone. Not looks a bit off. Actually does not work. That is most of your traffic and it is not fixable with patches.
You cannot edit it yourself. If adding a paragraph means emailing somebody and waiting three days, you have a hostage situation, not a website.
The platform is dead or the plugins have not been updated since 2019. At some point the foundation is the problem and you are pouring money into a structure that is going to need replacing anyway.
And the real one: the business changed. You do three things now and the site talks about the one you did in 2020. No amount of styling fixes that.
What I do on a first call
I ask what changed to make you start looking. The answer to that question tells me more than the site does.
Sometimes the honest answer is that you need a thousand dollars of fixes, not a full build. I would rather tell you that and have you call me in two years when you actually need the rebuild.