New site or maintenance: how to decide without rebuilding everything

Some people put the site off for years. Some people commission a full rebuild because one photo is crooked. Both get expensive, for different reasons. The useful question is whether the base can hold the fixes the business needs this month.

Maintenance is enough when

Maintenance & Growth, from €79 a month, is for a site you can still understand:

• the services on the site are the services the company does;
• a piece of text can be edited without breaking the layout;
• the problem is speed, a form, the hours, a missing page;
• you do not want the site offline while a large project is decided.

A month includes a fix and one small improvement. A new site does not fit in that.

A new site pays for itself when

The Business Website, from €900, is for when patching costs more than starting again:

• the menu does not match what the company sells;
• it cannot be read on a phone, and the old theme has no fix;
• changing a sentence depends on whoever built the site five years ago, and they no longer answer;
• enquiries have nowhere to go: there is no form, or the one that exists reaches nobody.

Four cases

It looks old and the text is still right. I update what people see, the contact details, and the weight of the images. Maintenance.

It opens slowly and everything is on the home page. If the builder lets you create pages and compress images, maintenance. If every new page is an incident, a new site.

It looks presentable and nobody asks to get in touch. Often the text and the button are what fail, not the design. I read the site with the owner before I propose a rebuild.

The company changed and the site stayed on the old service. Pages about what you no longer do get in the way more than missing pages do. A new site is the short path.

Four questions

1. Does the site still describe the company as it is today?
2. Do the pages match the services?
3. Can someone at the company change a piece of text?
4. Is there an obvious way to call or ask for a quote?

If the answer is yes most of the time, stay on maintenance. If it is no, the cost of a new site includes the months you would otherwise spend fixing the same breakage.

If you want a reading of the site you have, send the link with what is failing. I will say which of the two packages fits before I write the proposal.