Every agency you ask will tell you to rebuild, because rebuilds pay better. Here is how to work it out yourself before you spend anything.
Fix it if the bones are sound
If the structure is right and the problem is speed, appearance or a few broken journeys, that is repair work. Slow sites are usually slow for four boring reasons — oversized images, a page builder doing too much, cheap shared hosting, and a plugin pile-up — and all four are fixable in days rather than months. A site that ranks and converts but looks dated is a design refresh, not a rebuild.
Rebuild if any of these are true
- You cannot edit it. If routine changes need a developer, the platform is working against you and no amount of patching changes that.
- The structure is wrong for the business. You now sell four things and the site was built for one. Navigation is a symptom; information architecture is the disease.
- It is not secure or not supported. An abandoned theme or a PHP version nobody updates is a risk that grows quietly.
- Mobile was an afterthought. If the mobile experience is a squeezed version of the desktop one, that is structural.
- Nobody has the code. If the original developer is gone and the build is undocumented, you are repairing something you cannot see.
The honest test
Ask what the site needs to do in two years. If today’s structure can carry that, fix it. If you would have to fight the structure every time you added something, rebuild. Cost usually follows: a repair runs a fraction of a rebuild, and if the answer is repair, an agency that says so has just told you something true at its own expense.
What we do
We audit first and give you a written state-of-the-build, then agree what to fix versus rebuild. Sometimes the answer is a week of performance work rather than a project. Our note on why sites get slow covers the repairable half. If you want the audit, send the URL — that part costs you nothing.