REDESIGN GUIDE
By Joshua Jackai, Founder and Lead Designer · Updated September 2026
Plenty of sites that feel dated are working fine, and plenty of attractive sites are quietly losing money. These are the signals that actually predict whether rebuilding will pay for itself.
Conversions are falling while traffic holds. The clearest signal there is. The site is still being found and is no longer persuading.
The mobile experience is an afterthought. If most of your traffic is mobile and the mobile site is the compromised version, you are optimising for the minority.
Pages take more than about three seconds to load. Speed is both a ranking input and a conversion input, and it compounds.
You cannot update content without help. If publishing requires a developer, publishing stops happening.
Analytics are broken or absent. If nobody can say which pages produce leads, every decision after that is a guess.
The site no longer matches the business. Positioning moved, pricing moved, the audience moved, and the site is still describing the company you used to be.
Search traffic is in steady decline. Not a single algorithm dip, a trend. Usually structural: thin content, weak internal linking, poor speed.
Adding anything feels like surgery. When a new service page means fighting the template, the structure has run out.
If only one or two of those are true, you probably need targeted fixes rather than a rebuild: a faster host, a rewritten hero, analytics wired properly. A redesign earns its cost when the problems are structural and interlocking. If you are unsure which situation you are in, the redesign checklist will tell you quickly, and the cost guide puts a number against the decision.
The cost of a failing site is not the redesign you are deferring. It is the leads it does not capture every month while you defer it. A site converting at 1% that should convert at 3% is losing two thirds of its potential pipeline continuously, which is almost always larger than the build price.
How do I know if it is the site or the traffic?
Segment by source and look at conversion rate rather than volume. If quality traffic is arriving and not converting, it is the site.
My site looks fine. Can it still need a redesign?
Yes. Looking fine and working are different tests. Structure, speed, and conversion paths are invisible in a screenshot.
How long do websites last?
Four to six years for well-built sites. Sites built on visual trends age faster because the trend, not the structure, was the point.
Can I fix it without a full redesign?
Often, if the problems are isolated. Speed, copy, and tracking can all be fixed in place. Structural problems cannot.
Send the URL. If the answer is three fixes rather than a redesign, that is what you will hear.
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