Decisions you have to make first.

Marketplace listing vs your own website

A listing puts you in a row of competitors ordered by whoever paid the most, and the platform, not you, owns the relationship with the buyer. Your own site is the only place a buyer sees your range without an alternative sitting beside it.

Both, and in that order.Keep the listing, because it produces enquiries today. Stop paying for listing upgrades until your own site can actually convert the traffic it already gets. Most businesses have this backwards.

A platform build vs a static build

A content system earns its cost if somebody genuinely edits the site every month. If nobody has logged in for two years it is a running cost, a licence renewal and a security exposure returning nothing. A static build is faster, cheaper to host and has almost nothing to patch.

It depends entirely on who edits it.Answer that honestly before anybody quotes. If the answer is nobody, you are being sold a system you will never open. If the answer is your marketing person weekly, you need one and it is worth the money.

Agency vs freelancer vs in house

An agency gives you continuity, a contract and somebody to escalate to, at a higher rate. A freelancer costs less and disappears when they take a full time job. In house only works above a certain size, and below it usually means one person doing the website alongside their real job.

We are an agency, so read this sceptically.If your range changes weekly and you have somebody capable in the building, in house will beat us on responsiveness and cost. If your site needs to be right and then left alone for three years, that is the case for us.

Rebuild vs repair

If the current site is structurally sound and merely stale, repairing it is faster and considerably cheaper. A rebuild is the right call when the layout cannot be made to work on a phone, the content model cannot hold a real catalogue, or the platform is no longer receiving security updates.

The audit decides, and repair wins more often than a vendor will admit.This is the comparison where our incentive and your interest are furthest apart. It is also why the audit is a separate piece of work you can take and act on elsewhere.

Doing it now vs waiting until next year

Nothing about a dated site improves on its own. Search position drifts down as competitors publish, the platform accumulates unpatched vulnerabilities, and the copyright line gets another year older.

Waiting is a real option, and sometimes the right one.If you are mid way through an ERP migration or a factory expansion, do that first. A website rebuild needs somebody internally to answer questions for four weeks, and if nobody has those four weeks it will stall and cost more.

One big rebuild vs fixing the worst three things

A full rebuild takes four to six weeks and replaces everything. Fixing the three worst findings from an audit often takes a week and recovers most of the loss, particularly when the worst findings are a broken form, an untappable phone number and a nine megabyte home page.

Start with the three.If the three fixes move your numbers, you have evidence for the rebuild. If they do not, you have saved yourself a rebuild you did not need.