Before you agree to a website rebuild

Somebody has looked at your website and told you it needs to be rebuilt. They may be right. A rebuild is sometimes the right answer. It is rarely the first one.

The number on that quote is real money. It is worth thirty minutes before you reply. Below are three questions for the person who quoted you, and checks you can run on your own site first. They are free, and every one works whatever your site is built on.

Three questions before you agree

1. What exactly is broken?

Ask for the list, in writing. A rebuild that starts without a list is a redesign, not a repair. Those are two different things to buy. Only one has a finish line. The list is also how you check the work later.

2. How much of that can be fixed on the site I already have?

Ask it item by item, not about the site as a whole. Sometimes the answer is all of it, and quickly. Sometimes it is none of it, and that is a fair answer too. What matters is whether you get an answer at all.

3. What do I own at the end, and what happens if I stop paying you?

Ask it plainly. Who holds the domain name. Who holds the hosting account. Who can publish a change next Tuesday if the two of you stop working together. The answer tells you more about the person than the quote does.

The site you already have

Question two is where the money is. The answer depends on what your site sits on. Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy's builder and Shopify update the software for you, so there is nothing there for you to install. A site on its own hosting needs somebody to apply updates, and WordPress is the common case rather than the only one. Ask who does that, and when it last happened. If you are not sure which kind you have, look at who charges you each month.

A fault about words, photos, opening hours, a price list or a booking link is a change to a page you already have. That is editing, not building, and on a hosted platform you are meant to be able to do it yourself. Ask which faults genuinely need a new site. A new site on the same platform still costs you the whole quote.

The thirty-minute check

Do these before you reply. Write down what you see. You are collecting facts, not opinions. It breaks into pieces of about five minutes, so it fits in the gaps between appointments. There is a shorter set in three checks on your own website if today has no gaps.

Your own domain. Do this one before anything else. Go to whois.auda.org.au and enter your .com.au address. The public record names the registrant and the Australian Business Number or Australian Company Number the licence is held against. Street addresses and phone numbers are not published there. If the registrant is your developer's company rather than you or your own business, that is worth a conversation today. Then sign in to your domain registrar and your hosting account. On a hosted platform those may be one account. If you cannot sign in, that is the most useful thing you will learn today. The rest of the accounts your site depends on are worth checking too.

Your site on a phone. Open it on your phone using mobile data rather than home Wi-Fi. Tap the phone number. Tap the address. If you have a booking link, book yourself an appointment and cancel it. Send yourself a message through the contact form and see whether it arrives.

Speed. Put your address into pagespeed.web.dev. Look for the Core Web Vitals panel at the top. It reports what real visitors experienced over the previous 28 days, and it is the part worth reading. On a site with few visitors the panel is missing entirely, because Google does not have enough data. That is not a fault and it is not a reason to rebuild. Leave the big score alone for a moment.

What Google holds. Search Google for site:yourbusiness.com.au. That shows a sample of your pages that Google has indexed. It is not a complete list, and the total it prints is an estimate. Use it to spot pages you did not write, not to count them.

Your listing. Open your Google Business Profile. Check that the website link loads, the hours are current, and the phone number matches the site. Set the hours for the next public holiday while you are there.

Email. If your email address uses your domain, put the domain into mxtoolbox.com and run the MX Lookup. It should name a mail company you recognise.

Search Console. Not part of the thirty minutes. If nobody has ever set up search.google.com/search-console for your site, that is worth doing on its own. It is free, it needs a one-off verification step, and it shows you what Google sees.

What a bad result actually means

A red mark is not automatically a rebuild.

• You cannot sign in to your domain or hosting. Settle this before you buy anything else. Start with a password reset on the account itself, and ask whoever set it up who else holds access.
• A page loads content you did not write. You can see that for yourself in under a minute. Change your passwords today and ask somebody to look at it this week.
• The contact form never arrives. The cause can sit in the form or in mail delivery, and those are fixed in different places. Note which page you tested and which address it was meant to reach.
• The site is hard to use on a phone. Check it yourself before you accept it as fact.
• Only one person can publish a change. That is a business problem more than a technical one, and a new site does not fix it by itself. Ask to be shown how to change your own opening hours.

What you can safely ignore

Being honest about this part is the difference between advice and a sales pitch.

• A PageSpeed score under 100. It is a lab estimate, and two runs on the same page can return two different numbers. The panel above it describes real visitors, and that is the part to read.
• "It is not built on the platform I prefer." That is a preference. Wix, Squarespace and the rest are not faults. It only matters if something specific is broken because of it.
• "It looks dated." Worth buying if it is costing you phone calls, but it is a design job, not a repair. Price it on its own line.
• A missing meta keywords tag. Google has said publicly that it does not use it. Nothing you do to that tag changes anything.
• Warnings about code you did not put there, such as your booking system or a map.
• A security report from the same person selling you the fix. Ask what they ran, on which page, and on what date. If they scanned your site without asking you first, that is its own conversation.

When a rebuild really is the answer

Some situations genuinely call for one.

• The platform is no longer supported, or the licence has lapsed, and updates cannot be applied.
• Nobody, including you, can change a word of the content without paying a developer.
• The site was built for a business you no longer run.
• The list of repairs, priced honestly, costs more than starting again.

Any of those is a real reason. "It needs a rebuild" is not a reason on its own.

Your next step

Ask for the list in writing. Run the checks above while you wait. Put the two side by side. What appears on both is the real work. The rest are questions you now know how to ask.

If you want somebody to read a quote with you before you sign it, that is work we take on.