Wondering if your website needs a facelift or a full overhaul? Here are five clear signs, plus the first steps to take before spending a dime.
Somewhere around half the organizations that write to us asking about a website redesign don't actually need one. They need a form fixed, some photos compressed, or a staff page brought up to date. The other half genuinely do need to start over, and most of them have known it for a year or two before they reach out. After enough of these conversations, the signs start repeating themselves.
The Signs We See Over and Over
You can't update the site without calling a developer. This is the most common one, by a wide margin. A program wraps up, a new one launches, and the website keeps advertising the old one because the only person who can edit it built the site years ago and answers email when he answers email. If publishing a news post is a favour you have to ask someone for, the site isn't really yours.
Mobile is broken, not just a bit awkward. Open your site on your own phone right now. Pinching to read text, menu links that won't tap, a hero image that shoves everything useful below the fold: these stop being cosmetic problems when most of your visitors are on phones. For the community organizations we've measured, mobile traffic often sits around 70 percent.
The site predates your current programs. One organization we worked with had a homepage describing three programs. Two had ended. The initiative bringing in most of their current funding wasn't mentioned anywhere. Staff spent real time fielding calls about services that no longer existed while their actual work stayed invisible.
The donate button is buried. Someone lands on your homepage with their credit card already out. How many clicks until they can give? We've found donate links tucked under Get Involved, then Ways to Support, then Online Giving. Three clicks, three chances to lose a person who arrived wanting to help you.
It's slow. Count the seconds while your homepage loads on an ordinary connection. Past three or four, people leave, and search engines quietly rank you lower for it. The usual culprit is enormous uncompressed photos. Which matters, because that particular problem doesn't require a redesign at all.
When You Don't Need a Redesign
That last point deserves its own section, because it's where we talk people out of hiring us more often than you might expect.
Slow loading caused by big images is an afternoon of compression work. A broken contact form is a fix, not a project. Stale text on a site you can actually edit is a writing job. If the structure still makes sense, if visitors can find what they need once the content is corrected, then what you need is maintenance. Paying rebuild prices for maintenance is money you'd rather have in programs.
I'll be blunt about the incentive here: rebuilds pay studios like ours far better than small fixes do. So when a full redesign is the first thing an agency recommends, before anyone has asked what's actually failing, be a little suspicious.
Refresh or Rebuild?
When the site really does need work, the question becomes how much. A refresh keeps your existing foundation: same platform, same rough structure, with updated design, rewritten content, maybe a page or two added. Weeks, not months.
A rebuild starts over. New architecture, new content strategy, often a new platform entirely. In our experience it's the right call in two situations: the platform itself is the problem (you can't edit anything without a developer, remember), or your organization has changed so much that no amount of patching makes the old structure fit. Patching a broken foundation doesn't save money. It just delays the real fix and adds the cost of the patches on top.
Our rough rule: one or two of the five signs, refresh. Four or five, especially the first one, rebuild.
Before You Spend a Dollar
Whichever way you're leaning, do some groundwork internally first. It sharpens every conversation you'll have with whoever does the work, us or anyone else.
- Write down what's failing, specifically. "It's ugly" gives a designer nothing to work with. "Our program pages are two years stale and nobody can find the contact form on a phone" gives them a scope.
- Name who the site is for. Donors, families, community members, funders, your own staff. They each come looking for different things, and the answer shapes whether you need fixes or a new structure.
- Spend ten minutes in your analytics. Which pages get traffic, where people drop off. Even basic numbers beat an hour of guessing around a boardroom table.
- Ask the person who updates the site. They already know where it hurts. They've probably been saying so for a while.
If you've done that thinking and still aren't sure whether you're looking at a refresh, a rebuild, or just a short list of fixes, that's a conversation we're glad to have, even if the honest answer turns out to be that you don't need us yet. Talk to us.
