“Our website needs a refresh” is how the conversation usually starts. But refresh can mean two very different projects with very different price tags: a redesign — new skin on working bones — or a rebuild, where the bones themselves have to go. Choosing wrong in either direction is expensive: pay for a rebuild you didn’t need, or pour design money into a foundation that’s crumbling. Here’s how we tell them apart.

Signs a redesign is enough

If the site loads fast, works on phones, and the content management is tolerable — but it looks dated, the messaging is stale, or it no longer matches your brand — that’s a redesign. New typography, layout, photography and copy on the existing platform. It’s the cheaper project, and when the foundation is sound, it’s the honest recommendation. A good tell: your complaints are all about how it looks and reads, not how it works.

Signs the bones have to go

Rebuild signals are different in kind: pages take five seconds on a phone and no amount of image-squeezing fixes it; small edits require a developer; the platform or plugins are so old that updates break things; security patches have stopped coming; or the site simply can’t do what the business now needs — customer logins, live inventory, integrations. Cosmetics can’t fix structure. Redesigning a site like this is repainting a house with a cracked slab.

The question that decides it

Ask: in two years, what does this website need to do that it doesn’t do today? If the answer is “look better and say the right things,” redesign. If the answer involves verbs like log in, sync, quote, book, or track — the site is becoming an application, and building those on a shaky base costs more than starting clean. This is also the moment to reread our five signs you’ve outgrown your website; if three of them hit home, you already know.

Either way, keep what’s working

A rebuild doesn’t mean torching your search rankings or your best content. Pages that rank get preserved and redirected properly; content that converts gets carried over; analytics from the old site tells the new one what to prioritize. When we scope these projects, the audit comes first — sometimes it talks a client down from a rebuild to a redesign, and the project gets smaller. We’re fine with that.