How to tell whether your existing site is worth fixing or worth rebuilding, and what it costs either way.
The honest test is this: if the bones of your site are sound and only the surface is dated, fix it. If the structure no longer matches what your business does, rebuilding is usually cheaper than renovating.
Signs your site is worth keeping
The pages you need already exist and are organized sensibly. It loads reasonably fast and works on a phone. The platform is one you can actually update. The problem is mostly visual, or the writing has gone stale. In these cases, new copy, better photography, and a design refresh will get you most of the way for a fraction of a rebuild.
Signs you're better off rebuilding
Your site describes a business you no longer run. You've added services by bolting pages onto a structure that wasn't built for them. It was assembled on a builder you can't edit without breaking something. It doesn't work properly on a phone. Or you've been paying someone monthly for years and still can't change your own phone number. Patching any of these costs more in aggregate than starting clean.
The DIY site isn't a failure
Most business owners who call us built their first site themselves, because that's what the budget allowed and the business needed to exist. That site did its job. Outgrowing it is what success looks like. The problem isn't that you built it, it's that it's now representing a more serious company than the one you had when you made it.
What each path costs
A refresh on a sound site is usually a matter of hours, billed as work performed. A rebuild starts at $1,500 for a one-page site and $3,200 for five pages. Part of deciding is knowing which one you're actually looking at, which is hard to judge from inside your own business.
Get an outside read first
Firelight does free website reviews. No commitment, no proposal attached, just an honest assessment of what you have and whether it's worth keeping. Sometimes the answer is that your site is fine and your problem is somewhere else. That's a useful answer too. Book a call and we'll take a look.