It's dated. It's slow. Their staff can't update it without submitting a request to someone. And it doesn't look like the business they've become since it was built.
That's the majority of my work, and nearly all of it is migration off WordPress.
sound familiar?
What I hear before every redesign
“Every update is a battle.”
Peace Church Middleville is one of the fastest-growing churches in the country, serving over 2,600 people across two locations. Their staff needed to post sermons and events constantly. Their WordPress site turned every one of those into a project.
“It doesn't reflect what we do now.”
Village Custom Interiors started as Village Flooring in 2004 and grew into a full cabinets, countertops, and tile showroom in Byron Center. Their site, running on a flooring-industry platform built on WordPress, still told the old story.
“It's slow and we don't rank.”
Age Management of West Michigan had a sluggish WordPress site that wasn't performing in search despite a strong reputation and a loyal patient base.
“It doesn't match what customers see in person.”
West Michigan Kitchen Studio has three showrooms and a design team clients rave about. Their old site didn't come close to representing that.
the risky part
Migrating without losing what you've earned
This is the part most people get wrong, and it's the part that can genuinely hurt you.
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Your existing site has ranking history. Pages that Google trusts, links pointing at specific URLs, years of accumulated signal. Move to a new site carelessly and you throw all of it away, and the traffic drop shows up weeks later, when it's hard to trace back.
Map every existing URL before anything moves
301-redirect old URLs to their new equivalents, one to one where possible
Preserve page titles and meta descriptions that are already working, rewrite the ones that aren't
Keep content that ranks, even when it's ugly, and fix it after the move rather than during
Verify every redirect after launch and monitor Search Console for the first month
That last step matters more than it sounds. A redirect that returns the wrong status code looks fine to a human and is invisible to you until rankings slide.
honest scoping
Is it a redesign or a rebuild?
Worth being honest about, because the answer affects what it costs you.
A redesign
Makes sense when your content is decent, your structure roughly works, and the problem is presentation and platform.
A rebuild
Makes sense when the site's structure itself is the problem: pages that shouldn't exist, no clear path to contacting you, or content written for a business you no longer are.
Most projects are somewhere between. I'll tell you which one you're actually looking at rather than quoting the bigger one by default.