The site is not producing enquiries, and someone has suggested a redesign. It is the obvious move and frequently the wrong one — expensive, slow, and it often changes the thing that was already fine while leaving the thing that was broken exactly where it was.

We build websites, so an article telling you that you might not need one is worth reading with that in mind. It is also the advice we actually give, because a redesign that does not fix the problem is a client who does not come back.

What a redesign is genuinely for

Three situations where rebuilding is the right answer.

The platform is the constraint. You cannot edit pages without a developer, it is not maintainable, or you are on something that cannot be made fast. If the site fights you every time you want to change it, you will never do the incremental work that fixes conversion — so the platform is the problem.

The structure cannot express what you now sell. The business has changed. You sold one thing to one market and now sell three to three, and the site has no shape for that. Restructuring a site that deeply is a rebuild whether or not you call it one.

It genuinely looks untrustworthy. Not dated — untrustworthy. There is a real gap between "designed in 2018" and "I am not entering my card details here". Only the second is urgent.

Note what is not on that list: we are bored of it, and a competitor's looks better. Both are real feelings and neither predicts enquiries.

What a redesign will not fix

If the problem is any of these, a new design carries it over intact:

Nobody can tell what you do. A clearer layout does not clarify muddled positioning; it presents it more legibly. This is a copy and strategy problem, and it is the most common one.

The proof is unverifiable. Logo walls, unnamed testimonials, "significant results". A new grid does not make an unverifiable claim believable. We went into this in why your B2B website doesn't generate leads — it is the single most common gap we find.

There is only one way to raise a hand. If the only option is "book a call", the not-yet-ready majority still have nothing to do after the rebuild.

Nobody is finding it. A site with no traffic converts a percentage of nothing. Redesigning it changes that percentage and not the nothing.

Enquiries are arriving and dying. If the form works and nobody follows up quickly, the site is not the problem and never was.

Diagnose it in an afternoon

Before deciding, four checks. None needs a developer.

Look at what happens after people land. Do they arrive and leave in seconds, or read and not act? Leaving instantly points at speed or a page that does not name their situation. Reading and not acting points at proof or a missing next step. These have completely different fixes.

Count the ways to convert. If it is one, and it is a call, that is the cheapest thing on this list to change.

Read your proof as a stranger. Take the claims and ask which could be checked by someone who does not trust you. If none survive, start there.

Time it on a phone on mobile data. Not your office wifi on a laptop. Google's Core Web Vitals put the "good" threshold for largest contentful paint at 2.5 seconds, measured at the 75th percentile of real loads — so if yours takes five seconds to become useful, you are not near the line, you are twice the wrong side of it. That is a trust problem wearing a technical costume.

The middle option nobody offers

The choice is presented as rebuild or do nothing, and there is a large space in between that agencies rarely propose because it is a smaller invoice.

You can usually rewrite the homepage, add a real proof section, add a lower-commitment conversion path, and strip the performance problems on the site you already have. Days of work rather than months. And it produces something a rebuild cannot: evidence about what actually moves your enquiries, which makes a later redesign a much better brief.

The order we would run it:

  1. Fix the proof. Cheapest, highest impact, pure copy work.
  2. Add a lower step. One genuinely useful thing that does not require a meeting. Ours are the Lead Leak Audit and The Qualified 25; neither requires talking to us, and both tell us a great deal about who is looking.
  3. Reorder the homepage around the reader's decision rather than your org chart. Often the same content, resequenced.
  4. Then speed, which is real but rarely the binding constraint on a site getting two enquiries a quarter.

If you do all four and enquiries still do not move, you have learned something specific — and now a redesign has a brief worth writing, because you know which parts were not the problem.

How much of a redesign budget should go to copy?

More than usually does. On the projects that work, the writing and structure take the largest share and the visual design is downstream of it. When design leads, you get a handsome site organised around nothing in particular.

Can we redesign in stages?

Yes, and it is underrated. Page by page, starting with the ones that matter, keeps you shipping and tells you what is working. It requires a design system that tolerates a mixed site during the transition, which is worth asking about.

Our site is five years old. Is that too old?

Age is not the metric. A five-year-old site that is fast, clear and well-evidenced outperforms a new one that is none of those. Judge it on the four checks above.

What if the real problem is that we have no traffic?

Then the work is demand, not design — search, content, outbound, or paid. Fix conversion first anyway, because it is cheaper, and because sending new traffic to a site that does not convert wastes the more expensive half of the project.

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