We typically start talking to clients about rebuilding their website at the 3-5 year mark. There are times we recommend it sooner, and some can wait longer, but 3-5 years is a good rule of thumb. But the real answer depends on a lot of factors, including your timeline and budget, but also why you need to rebuild your website.
To start out, here are a few questions you should ask as you consider rebuilding your website:
How Long Does It Take to Rebuild My Website?
We tell clients to expect a 3-4 month turnaround for custom development. A lot of factors play into the total time, such as:
- Do we need new content like photos, videos, etc.?
- How many people are involved in your decision making process?
- How many pages are on the website?
- Are there any additional custom features?
The bigger the project, the longer the timeline, and vice versa. In our experience the number one reason rebuilds take longer than expected is when we have long feedback loops, such as organizations that have multiple people involved in the decision process.
How Much Does It Cost To Rebuild My Website?
The cost of a new website depends on the scope of the work, including how many pages you need and whether you need custom features or new content. Our custom websites start at $15,000 and go up from there.
When Should I Start Talking About Rebuilding My Website?
This really depends on how your organization is going to make decisions. The faster you can make a decision on things like budget or design direction, the more leeway you have. Ask your organization questions such as:
- Do you have a board that needs to approve the expense?
- Does it need to go into next year’s budget?
- Will you need to get multiple quotes?
- Do you have a specific launch date you need to hit?
- Is your business seasonal?
Understanding how you make decisions can help us guide you on the overall timeline, and when you should get started. But in general, the earlier you decide to rebuild, the sooner you can get started and ultimately have a new website.
How Do I Choose a Developer To Rebuild My Website?
Rebuilding your website is a sizable investment, and who you choose to build it can make or break the whole project. We recommend clients evaluate web developers based on four main criteria:
- The developer’s portfolio: Does the developer have well designed websites in their portfolio? Or do they look like a template chopshop? Have they worked with organizations like yours?
- Process: Do you want a lot of input into the design and content? Make sure your development partner can give you that white-glove experience. Have they clearly understood your business’ pain points and addressed those in the proposal of work? Make sure they will actually solve your big issues.
- The technology stack used: Sometimes, migrating to a new and unfamiliar content management system (CMS) can be a big lift. Or maybe you know you need to switch to a new CMS. Make sure your developer partner has expertise developing on that platform.
- Price: You may not know what to expect to budget for a custom website, but you need to make sure you’ll see a return (even an intangible return) for your investment into a new website. Are you going to get $100,000 worth of value out of the site? How about $20,000? Or is it only worth $2,000 to solve the issues?
What CMS should I choose to build my website?
As you consider rebuilding your website, you need to think about what content management system the site should be built in.
Most clients want a CMS to allow non-developers to make easy, fast updates. WordPress is one of the more popular CMS; it can integrate with a lot of other technologies, it’s widely used, free to use, and very customizable while still being user friendly.
We prefer WordPress — it gives you flexibility to build a custom website with powerful integrations, but it’s also easy to use. We’ve built custom CMS platforms when it’s beneficial for clients, but that can be more expensive, and ultimately more limiting.
DIY platforms like WIX and Squarespace are popular, and easy to edit, but have some issues with scaling and adding custom features.
Shopify is our preferred ecommerce CMS — it has some really powerful tools and built in analytics that make selling products online really easy and effective.
What Does Hustlefish Recommend?
We’ve mentioned some basic ways to determine if you should rebuild your website. But you might be wondering if there’s more to it than just timelines and budgets.
The short answer is, yes, there are other considerations you should look at. When we evaluate if it’s time for a website rebuild, we look at five key factors:
- Overall design and branding
- Your marketing strategy
- How your site was developed
- Existing content throughout
- Ability to update or make changes
Here are our thoughts around each factor, and questions to help you evaluate if it’s time to rebuild your website.
Design Reasons That You Should Rebuild Your Website
Websites have evolved quickly over the years. The way we use websites, the way we expect them to look, and how they work has changed dramatically.
Over the last 10 years, the shift towards mobile devices has completely changed the way websites need to be designed. On top of that, powerful animations and interactive elements can be integrated into a website. This creates new ways to highlight key areas or pull users’ attention to specific calls to action.
Trends also change quickly in website design. If you look at the best website designs this year, you’ll see cutting edge designs that really push the envelope. That might not be what your brand needs, but it is the direction web design is headed. But it also reveals how quickly websites can become dated.
Will I See an ROI on a New Website Design?
Once again, the answer depends. Depending on your industry and how your website fits into your overarching marketing strategy, we might not recommend a rebuild. Our goal is always to keep your business and budget in mind, and sometimes that means putting off a redesign project until it makes sense.
But if your company’s brand image is a differentiator, you should be thinking about how your website looks.
Similarly, if your website is a key piece of your marketing strategy, you should be thinking about how the design looks. Your website is often the first experience someone has of your brand — you want to make sure that experience projects your brand the way you want to show up in the market.
Think about it this way: imagine you’re looking for a lawyer for your business. You narrow it down to two lawyers:
- One who works out of his basement office. When you show up to meet with him, he greets you in shorts and flip flops and offers you a seat on his couch.
- One who works in a modern, downtown highrise. You are greeted at the door and she looks and sounds professional, offers you water, and walks you into a conference room reserved for your first meeting.
Both these lawyers may be fully competent, but who do you think you’d hire?
The point is, first impressions matter. How your brand shows up to your target audience is important, and an outdated website can cost you business.
What Does Data Say About Website Rebuilds?
Much of design can be subjective, but for clients with transactional business models, there are also objective reasons to redesign your website.
For ecommerce and lead generation websites, design can drastically change your conversion rate. For example, on one client website we implemented A/B testing and made slight design changes that increased a product page’s conversion rate over 300%. If we apply the same conversion rate optimization tactics across their site, that client should see their sales volume nearly triple.
As you can see, there is an objective, data-driven reason to care about the design of your website.
Marketing Reasons That You Should Rebuild Your Website
Beyond optimizing conversion rates on your website, there are other good, marketing reasons that it could be worth considering a rebuild.
Search Engine Optimization
If organic search is important to your marketing strategy, a rebuild could be important to help your website bring in organic traffic.
A couple questions worth asking:
- Does your website structure make sense?
- Is the current website loading extremely slow?
- Do you have a steady stream of organic traffic?
- Can you edit the meta description and title of each page?
- Do you know how to post new content on your site, such as blog posts or events?
Because SEO is an ongoing process, you have to understand how your website works in order to do it effectively. If you can’t access certain aspects of your site or don’t know how to update content, it could be time for a rebuild.
Conversion Optimization
The other big marketing reason to consider rebuilding your website is conversion optimization. Overall, was the user experience on the current designed with conversion in mind?
Your business website should take users on a journey that leads them to taking some kind of action (a conversion). Whether it’s signing up for a demo, booking a consultation, downloading a guide, or buying a product, your website needs to be action oriented and designed to convert users into clients.
Some questions you should consider:
- Do you know what the highest converting page on your website is? Do you know why?
- Are you able to A/B test changes you make to ensure updates are improving conversion?
- Do you know what the average conversion rate is for websites in your industry?
- Do you know what type of traffic is converting the most?
Development Reasons That You Should Rebuild Your Website
People often forget that the web is a living, breathing thing. It’s not static. Things change, and change fast — even the core technology itself.
If your website wasn’t developed in a sustainable, long-term way, it’s likely you’ll have big issues within just a couple years. Especially if it isn’t well maintained or regularly updated.
As devices, browsers, and other technologies continue to evolve and change, your website will need at least some maintenance to keep up. After 3-5 years, it’s worth considering whether you would benefit from a complete overhaul. We’ve worked on maintaining some older sites that we didn’t build, and eventually needed to have a frank conversation with the client about the wasted time/money spent on band aid solutions. Eventually, you get to a point where the band aids cost more than just building something too. Especially if you factor in opportunity cost if a critical component of your website breaks during a key campaign or right when you send that big proposal, etc.
Some questions to consider:
- How often does a technical issue impact your website’s uptime?
- How much are you investing monthly on maintenance?
- How much time does your team spend editing the website?
Content Reasons That You Should Rebuild Your Website
There are lots of ways that your business model can change over time, and that change needs to be reflected in the structure of the content in ways your current website might not facilitate.
For example, we’ve had clients whose business model changed so dramatically, their current website simply couldn’t make the pivot. They were adding new products or service lines — but they started selling their product directly from a website that wasn’t setup for ecommerce. They merged business units and needed to bring in a ton of content from another website, but at the end of the day, rebuilding their website was the only way to make sure they presented a coherent and user-friendly platform.
Questions to consider:
- Do you need a dramatic feature update? Like the ability to sell products from your website, integrating a new CRM, etc.
- Has your business model changed substantially since you built your website?
- Are there new product lines, or service types that don’t fit into your current offerings and how they’re presented on the website?
- Is there any new content needed on the site? Such as team bios, a blog, etc.
Editability: The Final Reason To Rebuild Your Website
In this day and age, making updates to your website should be really simple.
Content management systems (CMS) have come a long way since they were invented. You should no longer need to pay a developer $150-$200/hour to make simple content edits on your website.
You really shouldn’t even have to pay for new page templates. Web design is shifting towards modular design and visual editing tools. That’s why our team thinks through web design in the modular sense, allowing clients to use custom built sections and blocks to create brand new pages. Obviously, we’re always there to help and support as needed, but if you want to bring content updates in-house, your new website should make it easy.
Ultimately, the answer to the question “when should I rebuild my website” is unique to every business. We explored the various different factors that we hear clients use to think through the decision, but ultimately, there’s not a simple answer that fits everyone. Hopefully, this information was helpful as you consider your rebuild project!
If you think it’s time for a rebuild, or want an expert opinion, we’d be happy to chat about it! Just drop us a line with a good time to chat, and we’ll go from here.