113: How to Tell When It’s Time to Rebuild Your Website (and When It Isn’t)

In this episode, Jules White unpacks a common misconception among beauty, health, and wellness business owners: the idea that if your website is not performing, you must need a brand new one. Jules explains why a rebuild is not always the answer and how rushing into one can create more stress, more work, and no extra revenue.

Jules shares the three genuine signs you might need a rebuild, including outdated tech, a completely new brand direction, or a platform that can no longer support your business goals. She also breaks down the many situations where optimisation is a far better and faster path to more visibility, better user experience, and more enquiries.

Key Takeaways:

• Why a rebuild does not automatically improve visibility or SEO
• Three clear signs you genuinely need a rebuild, and three signs you simply need better optimisation
• How outdated tech, platform limits, and neglected websites impact your results
• The hidden costs of rebuilding that many business owners are never told about
• Why visuals alone do not fix conversions
• Simple ways to sense check your homepage and identify quick wins
• How to approach your website like a garden that needs nurturing, not uprooting
• Why your website is always more important than the platform it sits on

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Listen to Episode 10: Website Migration Mistakes that Can Sabotage Your SEO
• Watch Choosing the Right Website Platform and Why It Matters for Your Success (Episode 71)
• Learn why Jules recommends FEA Create to many small business owners in Episode 73
• Explore the strategy behind website overwhelm and decision making in Episode 108: Why Your Website Feels Overwhelming and How to Make It Easier

If you are not sure whether your website needs a full rebuild or whether focused optimisation would get you better results, book a free 20 minute discovery call using the link in the show notes. Jules will help you work out the smartest next step for your beauty, health, or wellness business.

Transcript

Jules White: 0:20

Before you rip up your whole website and start again, here's how to know if you actually need a rebuild or if you're just about to waste a lot of money. Hi, it is Jules here. Welcome back to the Website Success Show. With my content and programs I help solve four core problems that hold many business owners back. Today's episode relates to the fourth problem, which is clarity and focus. What to do, what to prioritize so you can stop wasting time and money. there's a common misconception. People think that if my website's not working or I absolutely hate it, I must need a brand new one. I have this conversation time and time again with people. And a rebuild doesn't automatically fix visibility if the strategy, the messaging, or the SEO foundations are missing. Many web designers focus on visuals, not on the structure or the search intent, and. a lot of people I've spoken to have lost their search visibility entirely. By rebuilding their website completely without a clear plan of how to actually preserve the SEO that they've got there. I talked about this back in episode 10 on, uh, website migration Mistakes that can sabotage your SEO. So if you're thinking about a migration, if you're thinking about website rebuild, have a listen to that one. it's a really important episode. Most beauty, health and wellness business owners who've got a website that's not working for them. Focus on the visuals and the, the look of the site. This is often a problem that people will put much more attention on that than is actually needed. But what they actually have is a platform problem or a structure problem or a strategy problem. And if they rebuild too early, it can often create more work, more stress, or, and then it just results in, in no extra revenue anyway. So. Think of your website like a garden, instead of ripping every everything up, that's what, like a rebuild. If you're rebuilding your website, it's like literally going scorched earth, getting rid of everything, starting all over again, and you rip up the whole garden. If you think about how long it would then take to get back to the point where you've got a garden that's working for you in a garden, that not only looks beautiful, but it also does the job it you want it to do, whereas if you have got an existing garden, so you've got your existing website and you optimize it. That's the equivalent of just pruning, feeding, shaping what you've already got there. Sometimes you'll need to replant and sometimes you just have to nurture what's already there. People often dig up the whole garden when all it really needed was a bit of pruning. I get asked this question all the time of whether or not to rebuild or whether to stay with the existing website that they've already got. I was doing some training with some beauty businesses yesterday and this question literally came up again. So before you even think about a rebuild, I want to help you to approach this decision in the right way for your unique business. So that's what today's episode is gonna help with. So the three signs you genuinely need a rebuild are that you've got outdated tech. So either your platform, your theme, your builder, whatever you're using for to build your website is so old or so limited that fixing or updating it becomes harder than actually just rebuilding things, break, update, stop working, and you reach a point where your website can't actually support the business that you are and what your business needs next. And this is quite common as well. Something that people. Are just not able to make updates to their website because it's so out, old and outdated. And this is often the case case when websites have been neglected for years, that you go back in and you just, it's just not fixable. Basically, the second sign that you need a rebuild is if your business has gone in a completely different brand direction or if it's a completely new business. This is something that I, I again see quite often, especially within the beauty industry, where salons have maybe started doing training Academy Days or started have built a training academy or even online courses, and they immediately think then that they need a brand new website. For that part of the business. But if it's even slightly related, what you're doing in the new part of your business is, is even slightly related to what you were doing before then actually they can support each other. So if you think about that with a Beauty Academy example, if you have a salon. So you already know what you're doing. You've got clients, you've got a successful salon, and then you are then teaching people how to do something, like how to learn something in relation to what you do in the salon that can support both ways. So you having the salon there shows the people who are coming to learn from you that you are to be trusted that you know what you're doing, that you've got a successful business. And it also shows the people who are then clients coming into the business. It shows them that people want to learn from you, which shows them as well that you are an authority, that you do know what you're doing as well. So very often people think, oh, I need to have a separate website. In that kind of example, having a separate website is, well, any kind of example, having a separate website means double the work, double the SEO, double the optimization, double the copywriting. So if you can get, combine that all into one website and it does support each other, it itself, you know, support each other, then it's much better to do that really. So if you have got a completely different business, then yes, that is a sign that you might need to have a rebuild and have a new website. But otherwise, seriously consider if there's overlap and if, if actually it could support each other. And then the third sign that you might need a, a new BET website and a complete rebuild is that the platform you are on no longer supports your business goals. So before you decide whether to rebuild. Check out, like make sure that you know whether, whether you are on the right platform. This is again, something that comes up a lot where platform choice is something that a lot of business owners have a lot of sleepless, oh, well, I dunno mate, whether sleepless nights, but certainly they have a lot of concerns that they've made the wrong platform choice. And I definitely have had these in, in my own business when I switched from WordPress to FEA Creates. I knew at that point that that WordPress wasn't the platform for me anymore. I knew I'd outgrown it. I knew that it was too difficult for when clients were using it, and I just didn't wanna recommend it anymore. But some platforms definitely make it easier in terms of things like SEO. In terms of flexibility, in terms of actually future proof in your business, and I think this is quite an individual thing for each businesses in terms of whether it's actually the right platform for you. I'll link my full platform breakdown video, but for now, here's a few things that you can actually check. So firstly, can you use it? And this isn't necessarily an indication to move if you can't use it right now, if you. Have never been shown how to use a platform. And if there are, there's, there are ways you can learn how to use it yourself and you, and, and that doesn't necessarily mean that you are then the person that does all the cha all the changes and makes every edit to your, to your website. But if you can use it basically yourself, you can go in and change a few words and change images and make some, make the changes that you want to, that's gonna put you in a much stronger position in terms of actually being able to work on your website moving forward. And in terms of actually being able to optimize to get more traffic and sales through your website, if you can't use your website at all, that's a strong indication that something needs to change. And. I think it just puts you in a much, much weaker position. If you can't make any edits to, to your website as a business owner yourself, whether that's you or or somebody within your team that can do that for you. If you can use it and you absolutely hate using it, that's another consideration. Because if you hate it, if you know how to use it and you hate it, then you've gotta think about how often are you actually gonna go in and do those things? How often are you actually going to be. Wanting to even consider your website if you absolutely hate the platform that you're using. And sometimes people hate their website builder because they've just not learned how to use it. And I definitely, think that that's, that can be, that can be solved, that that problem can be solved. Whereas actually, if it's something that you absolutely know how to use it, you don't have any problems with actually using it, you just hate it. And I have this quite a lot because I'm techie, so I. Can go in and confidently use most platforms, but there are definitely some that are harder to use and more fiddly, and even once you know how to use them, that you just don't enjoy using them. So I definitely would consider that. And then think about what does your website need? Moving forward, what things could your website do to support your business? And you may not even know some of the possibilities of how your website could support your business, but what do you actually want your website to do for you moving forward in your business? Not just what it needs to do right now, but actually in the next year, in the next five years. What do you want your website to do to help you with your business, to help make things easier, to help make sales easier in your business? Does it integrate with your. Existing tech, your other tech, there's definitely worth thinking about that. Does it require a developer for every change? I think this is one of the probably strongest indications that maybe a website should be moved. If you need a developer to make every small change, or if your site is coded from hand, then. Unless you've got a really great site that's got lots of traffic coming through it, and you are already, it's already doing really well, then that's a strong indicator that maybe a platform change could be a good thing. And again, there's always nuances on this. There's always definitely a. It depends answer with this as well, but I talked about this back in episode 71 on choosing the right, the choosing the right website platform and why that's crucial to your website success, and I completely get this. I understand why people hesitate about moving platforms. It feels really overwhelming. It feels expensive. It feels like starting again, but sometimes staying on a platform that can't grow with your business ends up actually costing you more money. In the, in the long, in the long run, really, it costs you more time, more energy, more opportunities. So in the long run, it is better to actually make that decision to change. Sometimes you're on the right platform and you need to move. Sometimes you're on the right platform and you just need to optimize. And I do definitely see this from the other side of what as well of where people feel like they need to move platforms and they feel like they need to move website builders. But actually when we have a conversation about it, it turns out you, they just need to learn a bit more about their site and they can, they can stay with what they've got right now, the platform. Always less important, like whichever platform you're on, whichever decision you make about platforms, the platform is always less important than the strategy that's underneath it. So I think that's the thing. The, the big key takeaway from that section is actually whatever platform you you are on, you can make the most of it. And whichever platform you're on, you're still going to need to do work anyway, regardless of whether you move websites or not. So three signs you that you need to optimize your website instead of needing a rebuild. Firstly, unclear messaging. I talk about this a lot in all sorts of different episodes of the podcast around messaging, about how we need to be really, really clear on how we help people, who it's for what problems we solve for them in plain language that they would use. How to get it, what the benefits are of what we are actually selling, making sure that we are really, really clear on that throughout our website and throw everywhere online really is one of the signs that actually if you, if you haven't done that, you're gonna need to do that anyway, regardless of whether you get a new website or you actually then optimize the one you've got. The second one is weak structure. So if your page hierarchy is bad, so I've again talk about this almost every episode about, we want our page pages on our website to be like an English essay. So we have one heading, some subheadings within that, and it follows a natural hierarchy down the page. That helps Google's bots and AI bots who are calling through our website, helps them to actually understand the content on the pages better. So if that's, if you haven't got that in place, then is a sign that optimization is more important than rebuilding. If you've got thin content on your website, so if you've got lots of pages that have got less than 350 words or lots of pages that have got very little words on them, especially your homepage. If your homepage is very thin on content, then that. Is not gonna be helpful for your business, and that can be optimized quite easily. If your website is slow or is not mobile responsive, that might be a sign that is a platform issue and it might be something that you can't actually fix that. But there will be things that you can do that will help with that. So if your platform, if your website is slow, then check in that you haven't uploaded loads of images that are massive file sizes, ideally. We want all of our image file sizes to be under a hundred kilobytes, and I quite regularly see websites where they're a megabyte, which is a thousand kilobytes, that kind of stuff. We can do the things that are within our control even if we can't control absolutely everything with that. Then the third reason or the third sign that you just need to optimize your website is if you've got confusing navigation. So if your website is, feels very difficult to use. If you've got too many pages that are just not doing anything, they're not actually performing, they're not getting any visitors, they're not actually doing anything to support your messaging and to to help Google and people. Understand why you are the solution to their problem, then that's something that you can optimize there if you've got no clear pathway as well. If you've never thought about the user journey that people take through your website and the different stages of awareness that they might be when they're actually visiting your website and coming into your website, and if you've never thought and looked seriously at how you can make that better. How you can make your website clearer, how you can make everything feel a much nicer user experience, then that's another sign that you need to optimize rather than rebuild. So a rebuild should be a strategic choice for your business. It shouldn't be something that's based on like an emotional reaction or fomo or frustration. Moving platforms is only helpful if the platform you're on is actually limiting your business and limiting what you'll want to achieve long term really. And when people come to me who've have actually had expensive rebuilds of websites, they haven't realized that the hidden costs behind it. So you might price up a website if somebody, you get a quote for a website and you think that is the cost of doing it. But what a lot of people don't realize when they're signing up for a new website is that a rebuild still needs. Messaging. You still need new messaging on your website. You still need structure. You still need SEO optimized. You still need wire framing, and designers and developers don't automatically include some of these things in in a website build. It's not, it's not that they're doing anything wrong, it's just that they, it's not part of what they do. It's not part of the scope of their work. And that's fine if they tell you that. But I speak to a lot of people who were never told that from their designers. They were never told that if actually if you move websites or if we start rebuilding your website, if we, even if you don't move platforms, but you just start with a new website. We change everything. We change all of the copy, all of the images, change it all at once, change all your page structure and everything that they're never told, that that can have an effect on your SEO and that can can actually be really, really harmful. I'm thinking of one particular friend of mine who had a brand new website built and it's completely dropped her traffic off a cliff and she was doing quite well in local searches and actually now she's at a point where she's, she's got to. To then rebuild her SEO from scratch really. So that's, you know, one of the hidden costs. But a new look of your website doesn't fix things like. Conversions as well. So have, just having a new website isn't gonna suddenly make people take the action that you want them to take. If you've not thought about that user journey and the messaging and the things that are actually built into the pages, not just to make them look pretty, but to actually get them, get them working for your business, really. Other hidden tasks that are also, there are image sourcing and optimization images are a big part of a new website build, and if you haven't considered that and considered what images you need and how to, how you can optimize those for SEO. So making sure they're images that are relevant to what you're actually talking about in the copy on your pages. Then. That's another thing to consider. That's another task that has to be done when you are creating a new website, rewriting copy, making sure that's SEO optimized, and you're actually talking about the problems that you solve for people as well. Integrating tools, so working out whether they will actually integrate with your existing other tools for your business, and creating a strategy for that website that actually gets traffic and sales happening. This is the, the core problem that I help to solve for my clients. So a lot of people have never really thought about that, never thought about. Great. You've created a website or you've just paid for this brand new website and not really thought about how you can actually get it working for you, get it. Bringing money into your business and being your hardest working team member, and all of these things that have to happen. All of the strategy, all of the rewriting copy, all of the sourcing images, all of the thinking about the client's user journey through your website. All take time, all take mental bandwidth, and they're not a 10 minute task. And that's why optimization is often a quicker and easier route to getting more inquiries through your website because you've got to do these things behind it anyway. You've got to do these tasks that need to happen. Uh, any way to get your website working and sometimes like getting a rebuild is not the thing that then is, is the, the key to the success really. So it's not about making the website look pretty, it's about getting it working as a tool that brings clients into your business so that you can focus on running your business and doing the things that you enjoy doing really. So if you're not sure which category you fall into, here is the quickest way to check. Number one, run a simple sense check. So think about your website, try and look at it with fresh eyes if you can, or maybe ask somebody else to do this for you, especially somebody who doesn't know your business inside and out. Show them your website or try and take a fresh look yourself and just think, is it immediately clear as soon as you land on your website, maybe check your homepage or your most profitable product or service page. Run a sense check and just think, is it clear what you do, who it's for, how you're gonna make their life better and what they need to do to get it. If that's not clear there, as soon as you immediately land on the page, then that's a clear indication that you need to start working on your messaging and need to start thinking about how you can actually make that information more clear. Because without that being clear, no rebuild is gonna make a blind bit of difference realistically. Number two, check your platform limitations. So does it allow easy SEO setup? Does it allow you flexible page layouts? Did it, does it integrate with your booking system or your CRM? Do you already have a booking system or CRM that you absolutely hate and you'd quite like to move that as well? Will it will integrate with email, with your email marketing even better if it will allow you to automate your email marketing as well. And. Do it with flexibility as well. So it's not too rigid. It's not something that's gonna then make things harder for you in your business. Fundamentally, will your platform support you and support your business and for the growth that you want to achieve over time? number three is Commit to making a decision within the next 30 days, whether you stick with your existing platform or you decide to move. I love FEA, create and I talked about why. It's my favorite platform back in episode 73. The reason that we're with all of this, the reason that it's important is because our websites are so critical for our businesses. They are content that we own and no algorithm can take them, take that away. And by optimizing your website and getting actually bringing clients or. Steady stream of clients and customers into your business. It means that you can escape that social media overwhelm and you can market your business in a more sustainable way for you really. So take some time to make this important decision so that you can know with confidence what your website needs. I speak to so many people who. Have spent thousands on a brand new website, and a few months later they realized that it's still not bringing them any new inquiries. And it's not because the website looks bad, but it's because the foundations weren't there, weren't there and weren't in place. By the time they come to me, they're frustrated, tired, and confused about why their shiny new website didn't bring more customers and clients into their business. And I know it feels like a big decision. I talked about this, back in episode 1 0 8 of why your website feels so overwhelming and how to make it easier. And I talked about the different brain modes that we need and we use in relation to building out our websites. So. The first part is strategy. This is the part that you as a business owner need to be involved in. Then we have creative brain mode, which is where you're writing your copy, you're sourcing your images, those kind of things, which again, most likely you as the business owner are gonna be very involved in that. Even if you're using something like a copywriter or somebody like a copywriter or using AI to help you with this. And then the third brain mode is implementation. So this is where we're actually going into our website builder and building out our websites. So go back and have a listen to that if, if everything feels a bit overwhelming with your website. That was episode 1 0 8 and that's a really helpful one, and just helping you to break down and understand which bits are the bits that you need to do as a business owner Really. So if you're listening to this and you're not quite sure whether your website needs a full rebuild or whether some focused optimization would actually give you better results. This is exactly the kind of thing we can talk about together on a website, potential discovery call. You can tell me what's going on with your website, what feels frustrating, and what you're hoping it could do for your health, beauty, and wellness business. I'll help you work out the simplest, smartest next step, whether that's a rebuild. Optimization or something in between and you can book a free 20 minute discovery call. I'll pop the link to that in the show notes. So I really hope this episode has will help you to avoid expensive, time consuming website builds that just end up leaving you frustrated and overwhelmed. And I hope it saves you a lot of stress if you're considering any kind of website rebuild. So that's all for today. And remember, take care and social media is optional.