It’s a common scenario: your website is starting to show its age, the last rebuild was some time last decade, and your team is debating whether to tweak it or tear it down.
Websites often evolve like living systems, with incremental changes over the years and new things grafted on here and there.
In this post, we’ll look at the pros, cons, and decision factors behind retrofitting new features into an old website, versus rebuilding from scratch.
What do we mean by retrofitting?
A retrofit is simply adding something to an older site, where the scope of changes is relatively limited. It could be just one page, a section or an entire type of content.
At one point ‘responsive retrofits’ were quite common, as older desktop-only websites needed to be made accessible on mobile devices.
We recently retrofitted EIT’s subject pages and programme pages with new templates, visually in keeping with the rest of the site but freshened up with some significant new features. The pages kept their old URLs so there was minimal impact on SEO or inbound links from other sites.
Even a full site rebuild can include keeping and retrofitting some existing content.
Our recently-launched rebuild of City Gallery Wellington involved replacing most of the site’s pages with brand new templates and designs, but there were also more than 1000 historic events and exhibitions loaded into the archive, so it didn’t make sense to throw all that work away.
Instead, we were able to migrate the old event and exhibition content into a new design and jettison the old commercial plugins they relied on, without needing to reload all that content.
So where’s the line between retrofit and rebuild territory?
It’s always a subjective call, but we recommend taking the time to revisit your site at least every five years and look carefully at what’s working well, and what could be better.
When the ‘could be better’ category gets larger than the ‘still working fine’ category, it’s time to think about that rebuild.
You should weigh up factors such as:
- Technical debt – is your system still fundamentally solid, or a messy pile of add-ons and custom code written by people who have long since moved on?
- The amount of existing content which would need reloading or migrating. Sometimes it’s simply not practical to start over completely, but there’s pretty much always a path to updating what you have.
- Licensing and ongoing costs – does the current site rely too much on subscription plugins or services?
- The future direction of your business or organisation – will your current solution continue to do its job three or five years down the track?
The pros and cons of retrofitting features into your existing site
Pros:
- Generally lower upfront cost.
- Faster rollout.
- Less disruption to SEO and existing content.
- Easier stakeholder buy-in.
Cons:
- Technical debt typically remains, unless the retrofit is specifically aimed at removing it.
- Design and performance can be limited by old foundations.
- You may need a rebuild later anyway.
- Grafting new features onto an old site can lead to a more complex site overall, which can slow down future changes and make them increasingly difficult to do without affecting anything else.
In conclusion
There’s no hard and fast rule to say when you should rebuild your website; it’s a decision which will depend a lot on your business or organisation, where it is and where it’s heading.
If the cost or difficulty of a full rebuild is not something you currently want to face, there’s almost always other ways forward. And let’s be honest – sometimes the ‘do nothing’ option is the right call, at least for the moment.
At Mogul we’re experienced website builders, and although we like the cleanliness of a full rebuild, we’re also very open to renovations and additions to what you already have.
Need some help deciding? Get in touch, we’d be pleased to help.
