Most charities already have a website. It was built a few years ago, worked well enough at the time, and has slowly stopped doing its job. The organisation has grown, the services have changed, and the site has not kept up.
The question is not whether to act. It is how to tell when the moment has come, and what acting on it actually involves.
Signs the site is working against you
Not all of these will apply to your situation. If more than two do, the site needs attention.
- Funders cannot easily see the scale of your work. Your impact numbers are buried, or absent entirely.
- Service users struggle to find the right phone number or referral form quickly. On mobile, it is harder still.
- Your team cannot update it without calling someone. The last news post is from two years ago.
- The design no longer reflects the organisation. You cringed the last time you shared the link in a trustee meeting.
- It is not appearing when people search for what you do in your area.
- The site was built on a platform your previous agency controlled and you cannot get back into.
Any one of these is a problem. Several of them together means the site is actively working against you: with funders, with the people you serve, and in search results.
Redesign versus new build: is there a difference?
For practical purposes, no. Whether you come to us with an existing site or no site at all, the process is the same. So is the price.
What changes is the starting point. A redesign means there is more to work with: your existing content, your current structure, evidence of what visitors are actually looking for. That is not a disadvantage. In most cases it makes the project faster and the result more accurate, because you are not building on assumptions.
All three of the sites in our current portfolio were redesigns. Berkshire Women's Aid, Support for All CIC, and Project Salama all had existing websites that no longer reflected the work behind them. None of the three clients had to start from a blank page, and none paid a premium for the fact that they already had something.
What you bring to a redesign
You do not need to have prepared anything before we speak. But the more you have, the more we can use:
- Your existing site, even if you dislike it. It contains useful information about your structure and your content.
- Annual reports, impact summaries, or leaflets from the last two years.
- Your logo in a proper file format: SVG or AI, not a screenshot of a PDF.
- A rough sense of what is not working and who the new site needs to serve.
We do not hand you a 20-page content brief and wait. We work through what you have, identify what is missing, and help fill the gaps. The discovery call takes 60 minutes. By the end of it, we both know what we are dealing with.
What stays and what goes
Not everything about your existing site is worth keeping. Not everything needs to go. Part of the discovery process is working out which is which.
Things that typically stay: your domain, your existing content (restructured and edited where needed), your analytics history if you have it, relationships with funders or commissioners who link to your existing pages.
Things that typically go: the old template, outdated page structures, broken or inaccessible functionality, content that no longer reflects what your charity does, and anything that requires a specific agency to update.
The goal is a site your team can manage after handover, with a training session included so nobody is left guessing.
The free Charity Safety Content Audit checks whether critical content is visible without scrolling, whether contact details are easy to find on mobile, and whether your key services are clear from the homepage. Seven questions, under three minutes.
Take the free audit →When a quick fix is enough
Not every ageing website needs a full rebuild. Sometimes the structure is sound but the content is stale, or the design is fine but one critical page is buried. A 20-minute call will tell you quickly which situation you are in.
We will not recommend a full redesign if you do not need one. If the honest answer is that a few targeted changes would solve the problem, we will say so. Our business depends on clients who trust our advice, not on selling more work than is necessary.
The practical question
If your website makes you hesitate before sharing the link, that is worth paying attention to. If funders cannot find your impact data without asking, that is worth fixing. If your team cannot update the site themselves, that is worth resolving before it becomes urgent.
A 20-minute call is enough to work out which of those problems is fixable without a full redesign and which ones are not. You will leave the call knowing what you are dealing with and what it would take to address it. No pitch, no pressure.
If you want to see what a redesign looks like in practice before deciding, the portfolio covers all three of our current clients, each of them a redesign of an existing site.
