Redesign if
- Your pages are organised sensibly and visitors can find things
- The site loads quickly and works on a phone
- Your platform is current and you can edit content yourself
- The problem is mainly how it looks and feels
Rebuild if
- The site is slow and a plugin or theme is to blame
- It breaks on mobile or cannot be fixed without breaking something else
- You cannot edit key pages without a developer
- The platform is out of date, unsupported or insecure
- Your business has changed and the structure no longer fits
A quick test
Open the site on a phone, on mobile data. If it takes more than a few seconds or the layout breaks, you are likely looking at a rebuild. If it works and only looks tired, redesign.
What each costs
Redesigns usually sit within the base and elevated tiers (from S$8,000, S$15,000 to 20,000). Rebuilds of complex sites move toward the upper ranges. Full ranges in website design cost.
Protect your search traffic
Whatever you choose, list the pages that bring in enquiries, keep their URLs or redirect them, and check that titles and content carry over. Most traffic loss after a relaunch comes from missing redirects.
A worked example: our own site
Our own site was a rebuild case. It had been built with a WordPress page builder and leaned on heavy plugins, which slowed it down. It also loaded a lot of JavaScript, and the older builder-era setup made it hard to update and edit. A fresh coat of paint would not have fixed any of that, because the problem was the foundation, not the look.
So we rebuilt the whole site to current 2026 web standards, and still added more personality and visual polish than before. The result loads much faster, is cleaner, has a better update flow for our team, and speaks more directly to the people we want to reach.
Back to the full guide: Websites in Singapore. Service page: Websites.
Written by
Darren Koh, Founder & CEOAn app development and web design studio in Singapore. Since 2021 we have launched 60+ apps, platforms and websites for events, education, retail and growing businesses, and we write about what we learn along the way.