Your old site is slow and you cannot edit it: repair, move or rebuild?

You have a site, but it does not seem to do anything — slow, impossible to edit, invisible in search, and still costing you every month. This article helps you decide whether to repair it, move it, or start again, and how to move without losing the rankings you have built.

1. Six signs the old site has reached its ceiling

• You cannot edit it. Even a phone number means calling someone.
• A promotion from months ago is still on the homepage. The clearest signal to a customer that nobody is minding the business.
• Mobile speed score under 50, which you can check free in PageSpeed Insights.
• Searching your own business name does not find you, or finds your Facebook page first.
• A monthly fee you cannot connect to anything you receive.
• The site describes a business you no longer run.

One or two of these can be repaired. Four or more and rebuilding usually costs less in the end.

2. What your site runs on, and what that means

A monthly website builder

You pay forever; stop paying and the site disappears. The design is limited to the available themes, SEO structure cannot be changed deeply, and leaving is hard because the content is tied to their system.

A self-hosted content system

More flexible and portable, but it needs updating. Neglected, it becomes a security risk, and it is usually slow because it carries code for features you never use.

Built by someone who has disappeared

The most common and most worrying case, because usually nobody knows where the domain is registered or who holds the password. Reclaiming ownership comes before anything else.

3. Three things you must get back

• The domain. The most important, because it is the address customers and Google know. It must sit in an account you control.
• The content. Text, photos, reviews and articles you have accumulated — export it before switching anything off.
• Email on your domain. If you use name@yourbusiness, it has to move in the same plan or it goes dark mid-migration.

4. Moving without losing rankings

This is the fear, and the thing most often done badly. Rankings do not disappear because you moved. They disappear because nobody told Google where the old pages went.

• List every page of the old site before switching it off, and map each to a page on the new one
• Set permanent redirects from every old address to its new one, so the ranking value carries over
• Keep the old addresses where you can — pages that already rank are safest left where they are
• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and watch for two to four weeks

Done properly, rankings usually return within two to four weeks, and often improve because the new site is faster and better structured.

5. Repair or rebuild — which is cheaper

Judge it on two things: the ceiling of the old site and what you are already paying.

If the structure is sound and it is slow because of images, repair wins. If the problem is the structure or the platform itself, repairing buys time on something that has already stopped growing.

On cost, multiply your monthly fee by 36. Many owners find that figure exceeds the one-time cost of a site they would own outright.

6. How long a move actually takes

Three to six weeks for most projects: gathering content and mapping the old pages, design and build, then the switch and the watching period.

The old site stays live throughout. There is no window where customers cannot find you — we switch once the new site is finished and checked.

FAQ