Do you need a new website, or just a good tidy-up?

Few people redesign a website for fun. It usually starts with a small, annoying moment. A customer mentions your contact form didn't work. Your opening times are wrong again. Or you try to change a price and discover the only person who knew how has moved on, taking the password with them.

At that point there are two honest answers. Either the website needs a good tidy-up, or it needs rebuilding. The expensive mistake is paying for the wrong one: a fresh coat of paint on a site that's broken underneath, or a full rebuild when a few new pages would have done the job.

Here's how to tell which you've got, check it yourself in an afternoon, and know what a redesign should change if you go ahead.

Paintwork or foundations?

Think of your website as a shop. Faded signs, old price tickets and a cluttered window are paintwork. You can sort them without closing. A door that sticks, wiring that trips every time someone boils the kettle, or a lease that won't let you change anything are foundations. New paint won't fix those, however lovely the colour.

Websites split the same way. Problems with the words, the photos and one or two confusing pages are paintwork. Problems with how the site is built, where it lives and what it can connect to are foundations.

Signs a tidy-up is enough

A tidy-up is usually enough when all of these are true:

• The site loads quickly on a phone and reads properly without pinching and zooming.
• You, or someone you trust, can change words, prices and photos without a fight.
• Enquiries arrive reliably, and you know where they go.
• It doesn't need to connect to anything it can't connect to today.
• You own the domain and have the logins.

If that's your site, the problems are paintwork: out-of-date prices or services, tired photos, a contact page buried three clicks deep, or words that describe the business the way you talk about it inside rather than the way customers search for it. Fix those and the site can carry on doing its job.

Five signs you need a new website

When the trouble is in the foundations, a tidy-up just makes a broken site look nicer.

1. Nobody can update it without a fight

Changing a price takes a phone call, a wait and an invoice. A new page means finding a developer. Or you made a change yourself and something else fell over. When every small job is a project, the site drifts out of date, and an out-of-date site quietly tells customers nobody is minding the shop.

2. It's slow or awkward on a phone

Plenty of your customers meet your business on a phone first, and so does Google. It uses the mobile version of a site's content for indexing and ranking, which it calls mobile-first indexing. If your site was designed for a big screen and squeezed onto a small one afterwards, the squeezed version is the one being judged. Tiny text, buttons crammed together and pages that take an age to appear are often hard to fix without rebuilding, because they come from how the site was made.

3. Enquiries aren't arriving

Sometimes it's a simple fault: the form sends to an old email address, or messages land in spam. That's a fix, not a rebuild, so test it first.

But if the form works, people visit, and they still don't get in touch, the site was probably never built to turn visitors into enquiries. There's no clear next step, the phone number is hiding at the bottom of one page, or the form asks visitors for everything short of their blood group. That's a structure problem, and structure lives in the foundations.

4. It can't connect to your booking or customer tools

If someone copies website enquiries into a diary, a spreadsheet or your customer records, whether that's a salon's appointments, a builder's quote requests or a pub's table bookings, the site is doing half a job. The same goes for a booking button that sends people to a separate page that looks nothing like yours, or an online shop you can't add because the platform won't allow it. If the platform can't make those connections, adding them is often the strongest reason to start again.

5. It's built on something nobody can maintain

This one hides well. The site looks fine, but it runs on an old version of WordPress with plugins nobody has updated in years, or on a custom system that only the person who built it understood. WordPress's own documentation says you should always update to the latest version. A site that can't be updated without something breaking is a security problem waiting for a date.

Website builders have their own version of this, so ask what you can take with you if you leave. Squarespace, for example, exports some of a site's content as a file in WordPress format, and its help page lists style settings and custom CSS among the things that don't come with it. Fine while you're happy there; it matters the day you want to move.

What to check yourself in an afternoon

You don't need anyone technical for this. A phone, a laptop and a cup of tea will cover it.

1. Use it like a stranger. On your phone, away from the office wifi, find your phone number, your prices and how to book or enquire. Note anything that took more than a couple of taps.
2. Run a speed check. On a laptop, put your web address into Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile results. It reports how the page performs on mobile and desktop and suggests what to improve. Don't chase a perfect score; look for the red. Then open your site in Chrome: an "Info" or "Not secure" symbol to the left of the web address means the site doesn't use a private connection.
3. Send yourself an enquiry. Fill in every form on the site, from your phone. Did each one arrive? Where did it land, and who else saw it? If you take bookings online, make one.
4. Make one small change. Change a price or your opening times, or ask whoever usually does it. Note how long it took and what it cost.
5. Check what you own. Is the domain registered in your business's name? Do you have the logins for the domain, the hosting and the site itself? Do you know who hosts it?
6. See what Google already sends you. Google Search Console is free, and it shows which searches your site appears for and how often people click through. Note the pages that bring visits. Whatever happens next, those are the ones to protect.
7. List what it should connect to. Booking, payments, customer records, your email list, reviews. Tick the ones it connects to today.

Then sort your notes into two piles. Words, photos and the odd confusing page go on the paintwork pile. Slow pages on a phone, painful updates, missing enquiries, missing connections and missing logins go on the foundations pile. If the foundations pile is the taller one, you have your answer.

What a redesign should change, beyond the look

A new look is the easy part, and on its own it rarely changes much for the business. A redesign worth paying for should also change:

• The route to getting in touch. Every page should make the next step obvious: call, book, enquire or buy.
• The words. Written for the way customers search and ask, not the way the business describes itself internally.
• How it works on a phone. Designed for the small screen first, and quick to load on it.
• What it connects to. Enquiries and bookings landing with the person who handles them, without anyone retyping them.
• Who can change what. You should be able to update prices, times and news yourself, or have someone do it properly as part of an agreement.
• What you own. The domain in your business's name, the logins in your hands, and your words and photos yours to keep.
• What you can measure. How many enquiries the site brings in, and where they came from.

There's also one thing it should keep. If some of your pages already bring visits from Google, a redesign should protect them. When page addresses change, Google's guidance on moving a site is to map each old address to its new one, use permanent redirects, keep those redirects for as long as possible (generally at least a year), and expect some temporary movement in rankings while Google catches up. Dropping your best pages without redirects is like repainting the shop and taking the sign down.

What it costs, honestly

A tidy-up is often something you, or whoever looks after your site now, can do. If the foundations are sound, that's the right route and the cheaper one.

A rebuild is a bigger investment, so weigh it against what the current site costs you: the time spent working around it, and the enquiries that never arrive. You won't get an exact figure for the second one, because a lost enquiry leaves no trace, but the afternoon checks will show whether it's likely.

Our own prices are published. Builds start from £1,500, every website we host then needs Care from £60 a month or a growth plan from £350 a month, both on 12-month agreements, and anything else is £62.50 an hour, all plus VAT. Every build starts with a written quote setting out exactly what you get. The full list, and what each build and plan includes, is on our pricing page.

What we'd say about yours

We're happy to take a look at the website you have now and tell you honestly what we think. If a tidy-up is all it needs, we'll say so.

We don't take over looking after websites someone else built. In most cases we recommend a rebuild, so the site can be improved quickly and kept up to date properly from then on. If that's where your afternoon has landed you, here's how our website redesigns work.

If the site is sound and the real problem is that not enough people find it, that's a different job: search growth for local businesses.

If you're near Staines

Orange Jelly is based in Stanwell Moor, Staines, and works with businesses across Surrey, Berkshire and beyond. The first chat is by phone or video call. Once we have agreed to work together, we will happily come to you anywhere within about 40 miles of Staines. Further than that, we ask you to cover the travel. Here's how we work with local businesses.

The short version

• Words, photos and the odd confusing page are paintwork: tidy it up.
• Updating, phones, enquiries, connections and maintenance are foundations: rebuild.
• Check it yourself in an afternoon: the seven checks above need a phone and a laptop, nothing more.
• A redesign should change how the site works, not just how it looks, and protect the pages Google already sends visitors to.
• Not sure which pile is taller? Let's chat. The first chat is free.