Rebuild or repair your website?

What decides between a rebuild and a repair?

Where the problem sits. If the weaknesses are in the words, the images and a few settings, repair them on the site you have. If they are built into the theme, the plugins or the way pages are put together, every patch will be undone by the next one, and over two or three years a rebuild can work out cheaper than the patching.

Owners usually come to this question from the other end: the site looks dated, so it must need replacing. Looks are a weak reason on their own. A plain site that answers the buyer's questions and loads fast is worth keeping. If you have not yet checked whether your site sells at all, start with the five-question brochure test, then come back here.

When are patches enough?

When the platform is sound and only the content is thin. Typical repair jobs on factory websites:

• Rewriting the home page heading to say what you make and for whom.
• Moving specifications out of PDFs into page text.
• Compressing oversized photographs, which on many factory websites are the main reason for slow loading.
• Adding a separate quote form with a file upload.
• Adding certificates, capacity and approvals as text.
• Fixing the business name, address and phone so they match everywhere.

If your own staff or any competent developer can make these changes in days, repair; none of them needs a new site.

Six signs patches will not hold

Plugin weight. A WordPress site with 40 or 50 active plugins, several doing the same job, is fragile. Each update risks breaking something, and each plugin adds scripts to every page. Removing a few helps. When the site depends on most of them, untangling it can cost about as much as starting clean.

Theme lock-in. Many sites are built with a page builder or a purchased theme whose layouts are stored in its own format. Change the theme and the pages fall apart. If every new page has to be copied from an old one and adjusted by hand, and the layout breaks when you add a table, you are locked in.

Core Web Vitals that will not move. Google's targets, set out on web.dev, are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits on mobile and desktop. If images are compressed, caching is on, hosting is decent and the mobile figures still fail, the weight is in the theme and its scripts. The reasons are covered in why "SEO-friendly" sites fail Core Web Vitals.

No room for product and industry pages. A brochure site often has one Products page with a gallery and no template for individual products. If you need 30 product pages, each with a specification table, and 6 industry pages, and the site has no way to produce them consistently, adding them one by one creates a mess that no buyer can navigate.

No structured data, and no way to add it. Structured data is the code that tells search engines what a page is about: this is an organisation, this is a product, these are its properties. Google's introduction to structured data recommends JSON-LD and calls it a way to give "explicit clues about the meaning of a page". Most modern platforms can carry it. If yours cannot, or it can only be added page by page by hand, that is a structural limit.

Nobody can edit without the original developer. The site was built by someone who has since moved on, the admin login is with them, or the code is custom and undocumented. If changing a phone number needs a phone call and a wait, every improvement will stall. Check also who owns the domain and the hosting account. If it is not the company, sort that out first, whatever you decide about the site.

A decision table

Read across each row and note which column describes your site. Mostly left column: repair. Two or more in the right column: price a rebuild.

The plugin count is a rough guide, not a rule. Twenty well-chosen plugins can run without trouble, while a handful of badly written ones can slow every page.

What a rebuild must not lose

The old site's addresses and the rankings attached to them. A site migration done carelessly can wipe out years of search visibility. Google's guidance on moving a site with URL changes is clear on three points: map every old URL to its new one with a permanent 301 redirect, expect rankings to fluctuate for a while during the move, and keep the redirects for at least a year.

A handover checklist for whoever does the rebuild:

1. Export a full list of current URLs, from the sitemap and from Search Console's pages report.
2. Map each one to its new address before launch, in a spreadsheet you keep.
3. Redirect each old URL straight to its final page, with no chains.
4. Keep the domain, the business name and the contact details identical.
5. Carry over every specification, certificate and case note, checked against the old pages.
6. After launch, watch Search Console weekly for pages that drop out.

Cost and timing are covered in what a rebuild can cost you, and the rest of the Rebuilds section covers the brief, product pages and forms. For the full scope and steps of a manufacturer rebuild, EbizIndia sets out what a website transformation for manufacturers involves.