Repair or rebuild? Your website is six years old

Your website is five or six years old. It still works, mostly. It looks dated, it is slow on a phone, and every change is an argument with a plugin.

The question is whether to repair it or start again — and the honest way to decide is not "how bad is it" but "what would I have to keep".

First, separate the site from its contents

A website is two things that people treat as one: the content, and the machine that displays it. Your text, prices, photographs and structure are the part with real value and the part you would have to write again. The theme, the plugins and the platform are replaceable.

Ask which half is failing. Content that has aged badly is a rewrite, and no rebuild fixes it. A platform that has aged badly is a rebuild, and no rewrite survives it.

Four signs that repair is still the right answer

• The structure is fine and the styling is tired. New typography, spacing and images on the same pages is a fraction of the work.
• One specific thing is broken — a form, a booking widget, a payment link.
• You are mid-campaign. Never rebuild the thing you are currently driving traffic to.
• Nobody has looked at it in two years. Do the audit before the decision; half the problems are content, and you will make a better choice knowing which.

Four signs it is time to start again

• You cannot update it yourself and every change costs money. That is a recurring tax, and it is the most common real reason people rebuild.
• It is unusably slow on a phone and the cause is the platform rather than the images.
• The platform is out of support or the plugins it depends on are abandoned. This is a security problem, not an aesthetic one.
• You have changed what you sell. Retrofitting a new business onto old page structure produces a site that reads like a compromise, because it is.

The thing people get wrong

They rebuild for the wrong reason: because the site looks old. Visitors are far less sensitive to dated design than owners are, and far more sensitive to not finding a price or a phone number.

Before committing to either path, look at what people actually do on the site. If they arrive and leave without contacting you, a nicer version of the same page will not change that.

Whichever you choose, take these with you

Three things outlive any decision on this page, and losing them is the only genuinely expensive mistake.

1. The domain, registered in your own name.
2. The content, exported somewhere you can read without the old platform.
3. The URLs. If page addresses change, they need redirects, or the search rankings you built go with the old site.

Get those three right and the repair-or-rebuild question stops being risky — it becomes a question of cost and timing, which is a much easier one.

If it turns into a rebuild, the four routes to getting one built is the next decision, and who maintains it afterwards is the one that prevents you being back here in five years.

Frequently asked

How often should a website be rebuilt?

There is no interval. Sites are rebuilt when the platform stops being supportable or the business has changed enough that the structure no longer fits — which might be three years or ten. Rebuilding on a schedule mostly moves budget from content to construction.

Will a rebuild hurt my Google rankings?

It can, and the cause is almost always changed URLs without redirects. If page addresses stay the same, or old addresses redirect to their replacements, rankings usually carry over. Losing them is a preventable mistake rather than an inherent risk.