Guide · Decisions
When a redesign
is worth it.
Agencies are paid for rebuilds, which makes them poor judges of whether you need one. Here is the test we use before quoting, including the cases where we tell people not to bother.
Published 2026-09-08 · Formory Group
Four reasons to rebuild.
No mobile layout at all. 7,726 of the 34,180 GTA sites we opened are in this state. It cannot be patched on an old page structure and it costs you the majority of your visitors.
The platform is abandoned. 69 sites in our survey still run on software discontinued years ago. There is nothing to update and nobody to call.
It does not say what you do. A site that opens with a stock photograph and the word "Welcome" is not a design problem, it is a content problem — but it usually requires rebuilding to fix, because the structure has nowhere to put the answer.
Nobody can change it. If a price change means emailing a developer who no longer replies, the site is already gone; it just has not stopped loading yet.
Three reasons not to.
"It looks old." Looking dated costs less than people think, provided it loads fast, works on a phone and answers the question. Redesigning for taste alone rarely changes enquiries.
Nobody can find it. That is a search and listing problem. A new site will not fix it, and the rebuild will consume the budget that would have.
A competitor got a new one. Their site being newer says nothing about whether it works. We have measured plenty of expensive new sites that convert worse than the thing they replaced.
The middle path nobody sells.
Very often the answer is: keep the site, fix four things. Add HTTPS, make it work at phone width, write a real page for each service, put a form on it. That is a few hundred dollars of work against a few thousand, and it is what we recommend when it is true — which is more often than the industry admits.
If you do rebuild, protect what you have.
Map every existing address to its replacement and redirect it. Keep the text that already ranks. Do not change the domain unless there is a real reason. Rankings wobble for a week or two after any rebuild and settle; they do not come back if the URLs simply vanished.
Questions
The usual questions.
How often should a site be rebuilt?
When one of the four reasons above applies, not on a schedule. A well-maintained site can run for a decade.
Can you tell me which case I am in?
Run the free check on your address, or send it to us. We will say plainly which of the two it is, including when the answer is that we are not needed.
Will a rebuild lose my rankings?
Not if the URLs are mapped and redirected. That is the first thing we plan and the thing most rushed rebuilds get wrong.
Two minutes
Where does your
own site land?
Everything above came from opening real websites. Yours takes ten seconds: we load it the way a customer would and say what we find, including when the honest answer is that nothing needs doing.
Want the same for
your business?
Tell us what you do and where you work. We will look at what you have now and say plainly whether it is worth rebuilding — including when it is not.