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Breitloh

Website rebuild

The site works. It is just slow, awkward to change, and held together by things nobody chose. A rebuild keeps what you have earned, the content and the rankings, and replaces what is costing you: the plugins, the licences, and the fortnightly worry that an update takes it down.

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A site built from plugins on the left, redirected page by page to a single clean build on the right, with the page weight falling

This is for you if

  • The site is slow on a phone and no amount of tuning has fixed it
  • Every change needs a developer, or worse, needs the developer who left
  • You are paying for hosting, a builder licence, and four plugins to keep it upright
  • It has been patched by three different agencies and nobody knows what is load bearing
  • You have real search traffic and cannot afford to lose it in a redesign

It is not for you if

  • The site is fine and somebody senior is simply bored of it
  • You need a new design and nothing else: that is a redesign, and cheaper
  • You want the same platform rebuilt on itself, which usually leaves you back here in two years

What is included

Every existing page mapped before anything is written
A list of what you have, what gets traffic, what gets links, and what nobody has opened in three years. Then a decision on each: keep, merge, or redirect. That list is the difference between a rebuild and a gamble.
Content brought across, not retyped
Pages, posts, images, and the metadata that goes with them, moved with their structure intact. Where the old platform will not export properly, and several will not, it comes out by hand rather than being quietly abandoned.
A redirect for every old address
Each retired address points at its replacement, checked before launch and checked again a week after. This is the single thing that decides whether a rebuild keeps your traffic or loses it.
Titles, descriptions, and structured data preserved
The work your SEO person did does not get thrown away because the platform changed. Where the old setup was wrong, it gets fixed and written down rather than copied across faithfully.
Search visibility watched for the first month
Indexing, coverage errors, and the pages that mattered, checked weekly after launch. Something always needs a nudge, and finding it in week one is a different conversation from finding it in month three.

How it runs

  1. 01

    Take stock of what is actually there

    Pages, traffic, links, forms, integrations, and the plugins doing real work. Most sites have a handful of pages carrying everything and a long tail nobody would miss. Knowing which is which shapes the whole job.

  2. 02

    Agree what survives

    Kept, merged, rewritten, or redirected, page by page, in a list you sign off. This is where a rebuild stops being frightening: nothing disappears by accident, because every address has a decision against it.

  3. 03

    Rebuild on the same content, properly

    The design either carries over or gets revisited, depending on what you want. Underneath, the pages become static and the content becomes content rather than layout, which is what makes the next redesign cheap.

  4. 04

    Launch out of hours, old site still running

    The switch is a DNS change with the old site left up until the new one is answering. If anything is wrong, going back takes minutes rather than a recovery plan.

  5. 05

    Watch it, then hand it over

    Redirects re checked, search console watched, and the editor walked through with whoever is running it. Then it is yours, in your accounts, with nothing licensed back to you.

How long it takes

A date sits beside the price from the start, and you get a note every week saying whether it still holds.

Four to six weeks for most rebuilds
Faster than a new site of the same size, because the content exists and the design has somewhere to start from.
Longer where the content has to be untangled
A site with several hundred pages, or one where the same thing is published in three places, needs the mapping stage done properly. That is time well spent and it is time.
The launch itself is an evening
Planned, rehearsed, and done when nobody is filling in forms. Nobody in your organisation needs to be awake for it.

The part of this work that goes wrong is never the design, it is the hundred small decisions about addresses, redirects, and what happens to the page nobody remembered. Ten years on enterprise platforms in FTSE 100 and government environments is ten years of migrations where losing something quietly was not an option.

Which platform are you moving from

Each of these is written up on its own page, because the traps are different: what exports cleanly, what has to come out by hand, and what stops costing you the day you leave.

Questions I get asked about this

The ones that come up on almost every first call. If yours is not here, ask it and you will get a straight answer.

Will a website rebuild hurt our SEO?

Only if the addresses change without redirects, which is the one mistake that actually costs traffic. Every retired address gets a redirect to its replacement, titles and descriptions come across, and indexing is watched for a month afterwards. Most rebuilds gain, because the new site is faster and better structured.

What is the difference between a redesign and a rebuild?

A redesign changes how it looks. A rebuild changes what it is made of. If your complaint is that the site looks dated, you may only need the first. If your complaint is that it is slow, fragile, and awkward to change, a new coat of paint on the same platform leaves all three in place.

Can we keep our current design?

Yes, and plenty of rebuilds do exactly that. I measure the type, spacing, and colour off the live site so it still feels like you, while everything underneath changes. It also makes the project easier to explain internally, because nobody has to relitigate the brand.

What happens to our blog posts?

They come across with their dates, authors, and addresses, and each one gets a redirect. Once they are structured content rather than template entries, they can be listed and reused in ways the old platform would not do, which is usually the moment somebody realises how much was stuck in there.

Do we lose our forms and integrations?

They get rebuilt, which is usually an upgrade. Form notifications start arriving properly, because they go through a mail service with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up rather than out of a web server. Anything genuinely specialist gets discussed on the call rather than promised here.

How much does a website rebuild cost?

One fixed price, agreed before anything starts, based on how many pages survive the mapping stage and what has to be moved by hand. Set it against what you are paying now, licences included: for a lot of sites the running cost drops enough to fund a good part of the rebuild.

Will our site be down during the move?

No. The new site is built alongside the old one and the switch is a DNS change made out of hours, with the old site left running until the new one is answering. The rollback is one record and takes minutes.

What if we are not sure whether to rebuild or start again?

Then say so on the call and we will work it out. If the content is good and the platform is the problem, rebuild. If the site is answering questions nobody asks any more, that is a new site, and pretending otherwise wastes your money.

The other three things I do

Tell me what you have now

Half an hour on a call, and a straight answer about whether this is the right job and whether I am the right person for it.

Book a callhello@breitloh.com