Three myths about rebuilding versus refreshing

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few things about rebuilding versus refreshing that get repeated more often than they get checked.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

“It only matters for big sites”

A rebuild is not always the answer. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

“Our platform handles it”

Rebuild when the platform blocks what you need to do. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

In practice

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.