Do you really need to rebuild your website?
Probably not. Customers buy the product, not the bells and whistles.
"We've got to rebuild the website." In 28 years, it's the first thing I've heard from almost every new person who takes over a business. Before you spend the money, ask one question: is the website really what's stopping people buying?
The first thing everyone says
I've worked with a lot of businesses: established ones, new ones, ones that changed hands, and community organisations I've helped for free. New leader, fresh eyes, and the website is the easiest thing to point at. It's visible, it's fixable, and it feels like progress. Human nature.
The product sells
Here's what the data showed me, again and again. Some of those businesses had really, really bad websites. Clunky, dated, hard to use. And the bookings still came through, because the product was good.
Customers are looking at what they're buying, not the animation on your homepage. A great product on a plain website beats a plain product on a beautiful one, every time.
Get the basics right
A rebuild isn't the answer, but the basics still matter. Three questions, in this order:
1. Can people find you? Being found is the most important basic. If Google and AI tools can't read your site, nothing else counts.
2. Can they get to the information easily? Prices, dates, how to book, on a phone, in a few taps.
3. Does it suit your customers? Looking nice is subjective (pretty isn't a strategy). Young people may hate a design older people love. Who's your demographic? Build for them, not for you.
Fix those and you've done the work. Your website is still the one place you're the boss, so make it work, not just look good.
So what's your website's main priority: look pretty, or make sales?
Fix it before you rebuild it
The nerd bit: look at where people drop off before you touch the design. Your analytics will show you which pages people leave from, and how many start a booking and don't finish. Fix the leaks first. Most of the time, that's a few pages, not a whole new site. And with AI, those fixes take hours, not months.
Bells and whistles don't sell. The product does.
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Written October 2026.
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Every idea here is mine, sorted with Claude's help.