Five mistakes teams make with rebuilding versus refreshing

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit rebuilding versus refreshing.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• A rebuild is not always the answer
• If the structure is sound, styling and content may be enough
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Rebuild when the platform blocks what you need to do. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Where to go from here

How to tell if yours is fine

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about rebuilding versus refreshing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• If the structure is sound, styling and content may be enough — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.