Should you build a new website or relaunch the old one?

Choosing between a new website or relaunch depends on three things: whether the structure still works, whether the content still fits your offer, and whether the technology can still be maintained. A relaunch is a thorough rebuild of an existing website, where layout, content or technology change. Keep the old site when only a few pages are out of date.

Start with an inventory, not a design. Write down what the current site delivers and what it fails to deliver. Take a small electrical firm with six staff. Its website dates from 2014, shows a squeezed desktop layout on phones, uses photos from jobs that ended years ago, and sends contact form messages to an address nobody checks every day. Still, the service pages still describe the work correctly, and an older article still brings visitors from search.

Then look at the data you already have. Analytics for your site and the enquiries of the last six months show which pages visitors open and which ones they leave straight away. The result is a simple list with three columns: keep, rework, drop. That list sets the scope of the project before anyone talks about prices.

An update is enough when the structure and technology still work and only texts, photos or single pages are out of date. A relaunch pays off when the site fails on phones, its content no longer matches what you offer, or your team cannot change anything without outside help.

The table turns that test into four questions. It does not replace a conversation about your business, but it shows where the real problem sits.

If three or four answers land in the right-hand column, plan a relaunch. If only one does, check first whether a targeted update fixes that point. Writing the answers down makes the talk with an agency much shorter.

No. A new website does not need a new domain. If your name is known locally, appears in your Google Business Profile, and is printed on vans and quotes, keeping the address is the simpler route. Visitors and search engines find the same address again, and the redirect work stays small. A domain change makes sense when the old name is wrong, for example after a renaming or when it is hard to spell on the phone.

You can keep the domain and rebuild everything under it. Only the pages below the address change. For most small firms, that is the leaner route, because the redirect list stays short.

Every old address that people know, link to or find on Google needs a clear successor. Google recommends a 301 redirect from the old homepage to the new homepage, and from the most important pages of the old site to their new equivalents. A redirect is a server instruction that sends visitors and search engines from the old address to the new one.

Without it, visitors land on an error page, and the position an old subpage held on Google is lost. Build a complete list of all pages first, exported from your content system or collected with a crawler tool, so no service page is forgotten. Assign each old page a successor. Pages without one are removed on purpose, not by accident.

After the move, Google’s Change of Address tool guide in the Search Console help explains how to tell Google about it. Google says to use the tool after you have moved and redirected your site.

Do not switch everything at once. Google’s guidance on moving a site suggests splitting the move into smaller steps where that makes sense, and changing only one thing at a time. The plan below follows that logic, and each step can be checked before the next one starts. See Google Search Central’s guide to moving a site.

1. 1

   Define the structure

   Decide which pages exist after the relaunch and which ones disappear. Write that list before anyone opens a design tool.

2. 2

   Write the content

   Texts come before photos. A design built before the texts leaves gaps that someone has to fill later, under time pressure.

3. 3

   Set up redirects

   Point each old address to its successor before the old site goes offline. Test a sample of old links.

4. 4

   Switch in stages

   Move the homepage and the most important service pages first, check them on a phone, then move the rest.

5. 5

   Watch the first weeks

   Check which pages visitors open and whether enquiries arrive. Fix the problems you find before you change anything else.

Stages help your team too. Someone who knows the old site can check each new section while the rest of the site keeps running.

It can, if addresses disappear and content changes at the same time without redirects. Google says that after significant site changes you may see ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes the site. Google Search Central’s site move guide covers this effect.

Fluctuations should settle over time. After launch, check Search Console for crawl errors and broken redirects, and watch the pages that brought the most visitors before. Owners who set redirects carefully have far less reason to worry. Those who skip them often find out later, when a page that once ranked has disappeared.

Start with the three-column list from the first section. Then check your current site with our website check, and if you want to talk through the result, write to us on the contact page. We will tell you honestly whether an update is enough or whether a relaunch is the better path.