When not to rebuild, and what to do instead

We sell rebuilds, so treat this with appropriate suspicion. It’s also true, and saying it costs us less than taking on projects that shouldn’t happen.

When the problem is three specific things

If the audit finds a broken enquiry form, an untappable phone number and a nine megabyte home page, that’s a week of repair. A rebuild would fix them too, at forty times the cost and six weeks of disruption.

Fix the three. Measure what changes. Decide about the rebuild afterwards with actual evidence.

When the site is under three years old

A site built in 2024 on a current platform is usually structurally fine. What’s wrong is normally content, and content can be fixed inside any reasonable build.

The exception is a site built without any mobile consideration, which does still happen.

When nobody can own the content work

A rebuild needs somebody inside the company to answer questions about products for a few weeks. If that person doesn’t exist or has no time, the project stalls at the content stage and you’ve paid for a design nobody can fill.

We’d rather say this before starting. Wait until somebody can own it.

When the business is about to change

A new product line, a merger, a rebrand, a move. Build the site around what the business will be, not what it currently is. Six months of waiting saves a rebuild of the rebuild.

When the real problem isn’t the website

Sometimes enquiries dropped because a competitor cut prices, or a major customer moved, or the person who answered the phone left. A new website won’t fix any of those and it’ll absorb the budget that might have.

The audit is partly there to catch this. It measures the site, and if the site is broadly fine, that’s a useful finding too.

How to tell which situation you’re in

Measure before deciding. Load the site on a phone on mobile data. Submit your own enquiry form. Count how many of your products exist as pages. Search for what you sell and see who comes up.

Four checks, an afternoon. They’ll tell you whether you have a repair job or a rebuild, and either answer saves you money.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.