It never becomes a project again.
Should we fix the site we have or rebuild it?
Fix it if the foundation is sound and the problems are content: wrong words, missing pages, thin locations. Rebuild if the foundation is the problem: a slow, fragile page builder, a platform that can't do what you now need, or a site so patched that every change breaks something. A free audit tells you which in days, and I'll say so either way.
Rebuilding is expensive and disruptive, and some developers recommend it too readily. Fixing can be throwing money at a site that will never be right. Here’s how I decide.
Fix, when
The site is fast and stable on a phone. It’s on hosting and a platform you can keep. The problems are things like: service pages that don’t say enough, locations that are copies, no structured data, old content, poor titles, few internal links. These are editorial and configuration work on a sound base. A few weeks of focused changes and the monthly work from there.
Rebuild, when
It’s built on a drag-and-drop builder and loads slowly or breaks on updates. It’s on a closed platform (Wix, Squarespace, an old proprietary CMS) that can’t do per-location pages properly or connect to your systems. It’s been patched by three different developers and nobody knows what’s safe to touch. The design actively loses trust on a phone. Or the cost of fixing the list above approaches the cost of starting clean, which happens more often than people expect once the list is honest.
The middle case
A decent site with one deep problem, usually speed or structure. Sometimes that’s fixable in place; sometimes it’s a rebuild of the template with the content kept. The audit shows which.
What a rebuild keeps
Your content, moved into clean fields rather than retyped. Your addresses, with redirects for anything that changes, so rankings and links survive. Your reviews and profiles, untouched. What goes is the code and the dependence.
How I’ll tell you
The audit looks at where you show up and where you don’t, what visitors do, and what the site is built on. If fixing is the answer, I say so and quote for that; it’s less work for me, and it’s the right answer more often than you’d think. If rebuilding is the answer, I show you why in the numbers, not in adjectives.
How I estimate: a free audit to see where you stand now, back within three working days. Then a quick chat, then a fixed quote.