22 Sept 25 
Before you burn six months and a big budget on a redesign, check this list. Most 'our website isn't working' problems are conversion leaks: findable, fixable, and far cheaper than starting over.
“We need a new website.”
We hear this weekly. And here’s an awkward thing for a design agency to admit: about half the time, no, you don’t. You need to find out why the current one isn’t converting, because a redesign without that diagnosis just gives the same leaks a nicer paint job. We’ve seen companies spend six months and serious money to relaunch… into lower conversion rates, because the redesign quietly deleted the three things that were actually working.
So before you brief anyone (including us), check yourself against this list.
The 12 Signs
1. You get traffic but no enquiries. Visitors are arriving and leaving unmoved. That’s not a design problem. It’s a message, offer, or friction problem, and an audit finds which.
2. You can’t say where your leads come from. If analytics can’t tell you which page or channel produces enquiries, fix measurement first. Redesigning without data is redecorating in the dark.
3. Your ads convert worse every month with the same spend. The page is usually the culprit, not the campaign. Especially if ad clicks land on a homepage that speaks to everyone and persuades no one.
4. People add to cart (or start the form) and vanish. Late-stage abandonment is the most profitable leak to fix and almost never requires a redesign. It’s fields, anxiety, and page speed.
5. Mobile converts dramatically worse than desktop. A gap bigger than about 2x usually means broken mobile UX, not broken brand. Check it in GA4. It takes two minutes.
6. The site is slow. If PageSpeed Insights shows a mobile LCP over 4 seconds, fixing that alone can lift conversions more than any visual refresh. Speed is a feature, and redesigns often make it worse.
7. Nobody scrolls past the hero. Session recordings showing 70 percent of visitors never reaching your proof and pricing means your first screen is failing. That’s one section to fix, not fifty.
8. Your contact form has more than five fields. We had to say it. It’s the cheapest fix in this entire list.
9. Visitors keep asking questions the site already answers. If sales calls open with “so what exactly do you do?”, your information exists but isn’t landing. That’s hierarchy and clarity: audit territory.
10. You changed things and don’t know if they helped. If updates ship on instinct and nobody measures the before/after, an audit-and-test process will compound forever. A redesign resets the experiment.
11. Your conversion rate is “fine” but hasn’t moved in a year. Plateaus feel safe and cost fortunes. Steady, tested improvements beat periodic dramatic reinventions. This is the entire logic of CRO.
12. The only person who hates your website is… you. Founders get bored of their sites years before customers do. Boredom is not data. If the numbers are healthy and only your enthusiasm has dipped, save the money.
When You Really DO Need the Redesign
To be fair to redesigns, sometimes the answer is yes: your positioning has genuinely changed, the brand actively repels the market you now serve, or the site’s foundations are too brittle to iterate on (we wrote about what that looks like). The honest sequence, though, is always the same: diagnose first, then decide. Sometimes the audit’s conclusion is “rebuild.” But now you rebuild knowing exactly what must survive the move.
Counted more than four signs that felt personal? That’s an audit, not a redesign, and we do exactly those: a prioritised fix list instead of a proposal for a shiny new site you might not need.