Website stewardship guide 09
Before approving a redesign, identify what is making the current site hard to use or maintain. Some problems need a focused repair. Others affect enough of the site that a staged rebuild or full replacement is easier to justify.
← All website stewardship guidanceName the problems
Keep useful content
Investigate the cause
Compare project scopes
Test the result
Why this matters
An older-looking site may still have useful pages, familiar URLs, and reliable inquiry paths. A newer design can still hide broken forms or an editor nobody can use. Appearance is one reason to review a site, but the decision also needs facts about its content, platform, and everyday use.
Write a short decision brief: what is failing, who is affected, what should improve, and what must be preserved. Then ask your provider to compare repair, a staged rebuild, and a full redesign against the same needs. Include the business time required to approve content and test the result.
Responsible practices
List problems you have seen, such as a broken mobile menu or an unsupported platform. List visual preferences separately so they can still be discussed honestly. A redesign can include a new look, but it should be clear which work fixes a defect and which work changes appearance.
A problem can live in a paragraph, image, component, template, integration, or the platform itself. Ask the provider to diagnose that layer before estimating a whole-site replacement. Also consider whether a repair will survive the next update and whether your team can maintain the result.
Focused repair suits isolated defects on a supported foundation. A staged rebuild can replace shared templates or sections while preserving useful content and URLs. A full redesign may be justified when essential tasks, navigation, editing, and technology need coordinated change. A rebuild makes sense when repeated repairs would leave the main problem in place.
Build a journey inventory: a list of important pages and the tasks visitors complete through them. Keep accurate content, useful media, business-owned accounts, and stable URLs where they still serve the same purpose. If URLs change, prepare a URL map matching old pages to relevant new destinations and test the redirects.
Include content review, accessibility, integrations, training, hosting, redirects, testing, and post-launch monitoring in each option. Sequence major platform, domain, content, and visual changes where practical. Too many parallel changes make it harder to identify a failure or return to the working version.
Worked example
Hypothetical decisions, not fixed rules. Each assumes that the provider has inspected the site and verified the stated conditions.
The best explanation for the scope should name the problem it solves. Site age alone does not provide that explanation.
Repair or redesign decision
Write down the three problems that most affect customers or staff.
Identify pages, content, and functions you want to preserve.
Ask for repair, staged-rebuild, and redesign options with their remaining risks.
Agree how the business will decide that the work is complete.
Investigate the causes and document platform support, repair dependencies, and maintenance implications.
Plan redirects, content preservation, analytics continuity, testing, and rollback for any rebuild.
Demonstrate that the chosen scope resolves the agreed problems on mobile and desktop, including key customer paths.
Avoid these failures
Good website care lowers risk, but no provider can guarantee uninterrupted service.
Questions business owners ask
No. Check whether the platform is supported, the content is useful, staff can maintain it, and important tasks work. Those findings help distinguish a presentation refresh from a deeper rebuild.
When the essential problems require coordinated changes that repeated patches would not resolve sustainably. Compare the dependencies, testing, migration, and future maintenance of each option rather than relying on a fixed age or cost percentage.
Keep useful stable URLs when their purpose is unchanged. For moved content, prepare a relevant URL map and appropriate permanent redirects, then update links and monitor the move.
Which verified problems will it solve, what will be preserved, what is excluded, how will staff maintain it, and how will completion be tested? Ask for the content and migration work to be included in the scope.
Primary guidance
Plan the next step