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 what "act" actually means, because refresh and redesign get used interchangeably online and they are not the same job.
Refresh or redesign: how to tell the difference
A refresh keeps your existing structure and improves what is already there: content that has gone stale, accessibility gaps, a donation form with too many fields, a homepage that buries the one or two things a visitor needs to do. It is faster, cheaper, and often enough on its own.
A redesign replaces the structure itself: new templates, new information architecture, sometimes a new platform. It is the right call when the problem is not the content but the shape the content sits in.
A practical checklist for a refresh, the kind of thing worth doing whether or not you hire anyone:
- Your charity registration number is visible in the footer on every page. This is a legal requirement, not a nice-to-have, and it is one of the most commonly missed items on an ageing site.
- Your donation form asks for only what it needs. Our guide to how many donation forms a charity actually needs covers what to cut.
- The donation and referral journeys work cleanly on a phone, not just a desktop preview. Over half of charity website traffic is mobile.
- Headings, colour contrast, and alt text meet a basic accessibility standard. Our plain-English guide to WCAG explains what that means in practice.
- The content itself is current: staff who have left, services you no longer run, prices or opening times that changed last year.
If most of that list is a quick yes, or a quick fix, you likely need a refresh, not a redesign. If the honest answer touches the structure itself, the next section is for you.
Signs the site needs a full redesign, not just a refresh
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.
Three of the four 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 refresh 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 a refresh would solve the problem. If the honest answer is that a few targeted changes would fix it, we will say so. Our business depends on clients who trust our advice, not on selling more work than is necessary.
Frequently asked questions
How do I do a website refresh?
Start with the checklist above: registration number in the footer, a donation form with only necessary fields, a mobile-tested donation and referral journey, basic accessibility (contrast, headings, alt text), and content that is current. Most of that is a few days of focused work, not a project. If you get through it and the site still feels wrong, the problem is probably structural, and that is a redesign question.
What is the difference between a website refresh and a redesign?
A refresh improves what already exists within the current structure. A redesign replaces the structure: new templates, new navigation, sometimes a new platform. Refresh is faster and cheaper. Redesign is the right call when the shape of the site, not just its content, is the problem.
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 our current clients, most of them redesigns of an existing site.