Why You Don’t Need a New Website in 2023
So, you’re getting pretty fed up with your website. But that doesn’t mean you should just throw it in the bin! We might be a bit biased, but we believe refreshing an existing site is the better option more often than not.
New websites are expensive! A typical high quality lead generation website on something like WordPress these days starts around $10k, and depending on the customisation, you’re looking at $20k – $80k. When it comes to eCommerce, you’re likely to start around $15k but a larger enterprise ecommerce site (think something like Petbarn) could put you out for $200k+.
Depending on the website it can take between 3 months to 2 years to go through discovery, design, development, testing and QA, data migration, deployment, and tracking setup. Refreshing a site can be as short as a couple months, depending on what is needed.
If your entire reason for building a new site was to achieve high performance, you may not end up getting what you’re looking for. In fact, you’re likely going to need to spend on ongoing improvements after the launch to increase your SEO and conversion rate.
That’s because; remember months ago when you went through your discovery? Well, a lot of assumptions were made based on data at the time and it’s very likely that design had to compromise due to stakeholder wishes, which maybe aren’t the best for performance (it happens). It’s not until your website hits the market that we can start to measure the real impact. And usually, the most impact comes from split testing and post-website development improvements, which can only be done on existing websites. It’s hard for stakeholders to argue with split testing data.
Migrations make SEOs shake in their boots. So much can go wrong. And that’s not even considering any databases, products, and other software that you plug into your website just to keep your business running. If something goes wrong during a migration, then you’re likely to wear the cost of that in dollar form. It’ll be caused by lost traffic, lost leads, and lost sales.
It’s only fair that we talk about the other side of things. After all, two of our sister agencies design and build new websites all the time!
Tech can age. And sometimes aged or broken code is much more time consuming to fix than it is to build new. Generally, very old websites which are not maintained can be a nightmare to repair and we’ll let you know as soon as we start to think that you’ll get more bang for your buck by building fresh.
This is probably the best reason for building a new website. Sometimes your business grows, and what worked for you back then, doesn’t work now. Wix, Squarespace, and Bigcommerce are all great places to start. They’re affordable and you can do a lot with them without needing help from a designer or a developer. But if you’re looking at working with an agency, then odds are you’ve got more money to play with and your company has grown. If you need to completely re-platform, then a new website is 100% the way to go.
These changes usually come with major website updates. This is a similar case to your website being too old – it’ll take more time to rework your code to fit the new structure and branding than it would to start fresh and take a whole new approach to your website.
Did you get your website done on the cheap and then realise afterwards that there was a reason why it was cheap in the first place? Getting your website developed on Fivver seems like a great idea at the time, until you spend more on the upkeep and fixing bugs than on the build in the first place.
However, it’s not just outsourced developers on Fivver and Upwork that give offshore developers a bad name. We’ve seen our fair share of websites built by other development agencies with less-than-quality code (we won’t name names). Recently, we’ve had some new clients ask for references from existing clients and we think this is a great way to vet your agency before signing up for thousands of dollars.
Whether you need a new website, or simply a website renovation, feel free to reach out. We’ll run through your reasons for and against and help you get to a decision that works best for your budget and business needs.
