As a business owner, it can be difficult when deciding whether it is time to throw out your old website or if it just needs a few tweaks here. Both options have the potential to bring more traffic to your website and to convert that traffic into paying customers at a higher percentage rate than before. However, when not done properly with the careful consideration it requires, both options have the potential to devastate your business and halt cash flow if your website is the main point of lead conversion. We have worked with many business owners who have had a redesign done by an external contractor previously, but the contractor failed to take the old websites organic rankings into consideration, which ultimately caused the new website to fail to rank on Google and that business owner was left wondering why they are no longer ranking for important keywords they used to dominate in the SERPs.

Let’s discuss the difference between a website refresh and a website redesign. What some of the risks and benefits of each option are and provide some guidance to which option may be best suited for your needs. Ultimately, this is only a guide and does not provide a thorough assessment based on your business. The best way to see which option would be best suited for your business is to get in touch with our website design team, we can have a chat about what you are hoping to achieve and then thoroughly investigate your websites current organic rankings on Google and its conversion optimisation score.

Our team at Caffeinated Marketing have a wide range of experience in working on both full re-designs and refreshes of many different websites, we can work with you to determine the best course of action and execute on that strategy.

What’s the difference between a website refresh and a full redesign?

Let’s see what ChatGPT says on the topic… 

“A website refresh is a lighter update to your existing site. It focuses on improving the look and feel and updating specific elements without changing the core structure or underlying systems of your website. Think of it as giving your site a facelift rather than building something new from the ground up.

A full website redesign is a comprehensive overhaul of your site. It goes far beyond cosmetic changes and rethinks both how the site looks and how it works. The process often involves creating new layouts, reorganising content, improving navigation, and possibly changing the underlying technology (CMS or backend).”

So a full website redesign is generally going to be far more involved than just giving a website a refresh, but we really need to determine what the underlying problem that we are trying to solve is, to determine which is the best course of action.

Are There Problems With Your Site?

The first place we need to start at, and the most important question to ask is “what are we trying to fix/achieve?”. This is a great starting point to determine what is best for your website, we don’t want to try to fix what doesn’t need fixing or try to sell you an unnecessary new website if your existing site only needs a few teaks here and there to get the most out of it. Likewise, there is no point trying to optimise an aging site, that is built on old, slow code and is going to need to be rebuilt from the ground up within the next six months anyway.

Let’s talk about some of the problems that might be identified with your website and try to discuss some potential solutions and reasons you might opt for a redesign or rebuild

My website is slow

There are so many factors that can cause a website to be slow to load that it is really hard to give a direct answer without more info. Some of the factors that can cause a website to load slow include;

• Cheap website hosting
• Unnecessary  plugins are being loaded
• No caching or optimisation plugin in use or configured incorrectly
• Unoptimised images

We would start by spending a couple of hours testing your website on our performance servers and testing various speed enhancements to see how much we can boost your website’s performance with optimisations.

My website looks outdated

If your website looks like it was built over 5 years ago, its probably time to redesign and rebuild your website for the next 5 years. This is not to say that older websites cannot convert as well as a more modern website, but generally they are not as well optimised.

My website doesn’t rank on Google

Just because your website doesn’t perform well on Google doesn’t mean you need a brand, in most cases. We would need to first compare your website to your best-performing competitors and examine the strengths and weaknesses of their websites’ technical structure and user experience, we would then compare this data with our evaluation of your website to determine the best course of action to give your website a boost in organic rankings on Google. In most cases, we would look at optimising your existing website as our main preference when looking to boost a websites rankings. This is because creating a whole new website can sometimes disrupt your websites rankings for a period of 4-8 weeks after launch. So if our main focus is to boost rankings on Google, we would look at refreshing and updating 

My website doesn’t convert traffic into customers

If your website is attracting a lot of traffic but not converting visitors into customers, we need to first examine the search intent. For example, if this traffic is coming through a passive or unrelated keyword to your product or service, then you wouldn’t expect a high conversion rate from that traffic set. There may also be problems with your website or in your lead pipeline. We have seen clients’ websites with incorrect email settings, which have caused them to miss hundreds of email enquiries, by thoroughly investigating your lead pipeline, we can ensure that leads are not getting missed.

What a Refresh Can Fix

If your website is just not performing to your expectations, but you are mostly happy with the overall design and user experience, then we would look into either refreshing the website with a once-off project or starting an ongoing SEO campaign, depending on what issues have been identified with your website.

What Needs a Full Rebuild

If your website looks like it needs a lot more than just a tidy up here and there, along with some fresh copywriting. Then we would probably be looking at creating a brand-new website for your business. 

Matching Your Needs to the Right Approach

As we have already discussed in depth, we can’t determine what is the best course of action for your website without first having a chat about what the core issues are and having one of our team members do some investigatory work. If you are considering a website refresh or redesign, please reach out to our team, and we will arrange a time for a Zoom or in-person meeting to catch up and discuss your business’s needs.