Website redesign in Newcastle, NSW: new site, same rankings.

A rebuild is worth paying for when the site is costing you work. It loads too slowly on a phone, it has no page for half of what you sell, or it never gives anybody a way to get in touch. Looking dated does not cost you jobs on its own.

Most owners get here because the site looks old to them. That is a fair reaction and it is rarely the expensive problem. The reasons worth spending money on are the ones you can count.

The reasons that hold up

• It is slow on a phone.

  People leave before the page opens, so you lose the enquiry before anybody has read a word of it.

• Half of what you sell has no page.

  Customers searching for those jobs never see you, which is how a good business stays invisible for most of its own work.

• Nobody can work out how to contact you.

  The phone number is buried, the form goes nowhere, and every page finishes without telling anybody what to do next.

• Changing anything means booking somebody.

  You pay a person every time a price or a photograph needs updating, and that cost never arrives as one invoice you can look at.

• The site is not in your name.

  Somebody else holds the domain, the hosting or the code, so you cannot take the site with you if you leave them.

If none of those are true and the site only looks dated, then better photographs, better type and more space around it will fix that. It is a much smaller job and it costs a fraction of a rebuild.

Some of your pages bring you calls from Google today. If a rebuild replaces them and nothing tells Google where they went, those pages drop out of Google and the calls go with them.

This is what separates a rebuild from a first website. A first website has nothing to lose. Yours is already earning, and most of the earning happens on pages nobody inside the business thinks about.

When the calls stop, they do not stop on the day. They fade over a few weeks, and by the time you notice the quiet, the change that caused it is two months behind you. That gap is why this keeps happening to businesses that did everything else properly.

Getting it right is neither difficult nor expensive, and it has to happen before the new site goes live rather than after. After is when you have already lost the customers. Google sets out what it expects when a site moves in its guidance on site moves.

The pages that already bring you customers, the words on them that are working, and anything a customer has saved. A rebuild starts from that list rather than from a blank page.

The instinct is to start again from nothing. The better start is a list of what your site already does for you, because parts of it are earning and usually nobody has ever looked.

What goes on the list first

• The pages that bring you customers.

  Your own figures say which ones they are, and they are very often not the pages anybody in the business would have guessed.

• The searches you already come up for.

  The words on those pages are doing the work, and rewriting them to sound better can quietly stop them working.

• Anything a customer uses.

  A price list, a booking form, a document people download. Somebody out there has it saved and still opens it.

• Everywhere else your site is linked from.

  Suppliers, associations, directories and old advertising all point at your site, and every one of those has to keep working.

Putting that list together takes a morning. It is the difference between a rebuild that keeps the customers you already have and one that starts you from nothing.

Pages that used to be found stop being found, a page that was earning gets deleted in the tidy up, the contact form quietly stops working, or the new site goes live still hidden from Google. All four are common and all four are avoidable.

These are the ones that turn up when a business asks why its enquiries fell away after a new site went live.

What goes wrong

• Pages that used to be found stop being found.

  The big one. Anybody clicking your old link from Google, a supplier's website or an old advertisement lands on an error page and goes back.

• A page that was earning gets deleted.

  A service page quietly bringing you customers, removed during the tidy up because nobody knew it was doing anything.

• The contact form stops working.

  Rebuilt, never tested from a real phone with a real address, and quietly sending enquiries nowhere ever since.

• The site goes live hidden from Google.

  The setting that keeps a site private while it is being built, left switched on after launch day.

Each one of those takes minutes to check and weeks to show up in your enquiries. Somebody checking is the answer, and it is why the fortnight after launch matters as much as launch day.

Your site gets listed, what is actually wrong gets decided, and the new one gets built beside the live one. Every page that was earning is carried across before launch day.

The launch is the smallest part of it. Everything that protects the customers you already have happened weeks earlier.

1. Everything you already have goes on a list

Every page, the ones bringing you customers, the searches you come up for, and anything customers use. It takes a morning, and nothing has been designed at this point.

2. What is actually wrong gets decided

Speed, missing pages, no way to get in touch, too hard to change. It gets written down, because it decides what the new site has to fix.

3. The new site gets built out of sight

Beside the live one and hidden from Google, so half a website never turns up in search results while it is still being made.

4. Every earning page gets carried across

One line per page. That document is what protects the customers your current site brings you, and it is finished before launch rather than after it.

5. It goes live on a quiet morning

Never a Friday afternoon. Your old site stays reachable until the new one is proven to be working properly.

6. Somebody watches it for a fortnight

Errors, forms arriving, and the pages that used to bring you customers still bringing them. This is when anything missed shows itself.

Listing what you have and carrying it across are the careful parts. Building the site takes about as long as any site, and writing the words is what stretches it out.

The order it happens in

• Everything you have goes on a list first.

  Your pages, the ones earning, the searches you come up for. Nothing has been designed at this stage.

• Then it gets built out of sight.

  Beside the live one and hidden from Google, with the carry-across list written as the build goes.

• Then it goes live and somebody watches it.

  A quiet morning, then a fortnight watching errors, forms, and the pages that used to bring you customers.

Where you come up in Google moves around for a few weeks after any rebuild, including one done properly. On a rebuild that carried everything across, it settles back.

Ask what happens to the pages that bring you customers now, who owns the new site, and what a change costs you afterwards. The first question is the one protecting your money.

These are worth asking of any agency, including this one, so the answers given here sit under each question.

• What happens to the pages that bring me customers now?

  Every one of them gets carried across to the page replacing it. It is written down here and finished before launch day.

• Which of my pages bring me customers today?

  Anybody rebuilding your site should be able to tell you that before they change a single thing on it.

• Who owns the new site?

  You do. The code, the domain and the hosting, all in accounts in your own name from the start.

• What does a change cost me afterwards?

  A rate and a rough time. This is the cost turning up quietly in the second year of owning a site.

A tidy up is often the answer instead of a rebuild, and it is a much smaller piece of work. It is worth asking for by name.

A rebuild is also the cheapest moment to fix the faults that make a site hard to read, because the same change applies to every page.