Check two things first
No consultant needed. Ten minutes on your own settles both.
Does the current site still work on a phone
Open the home page and the contact page on your own phone. Check three things: how long it takes to load, whether you have to zoom to read, whether buttons are easy to hit. Fail two of the three and the site is effectively absent today, because that is how most customers see it.
Does it still rank on Google
On someone else’s phone and network, search your business name, then a service plus your area ("Flushing plumber"). If even your own name does not come up near the top, there is little ranking to protect. If it does, there is something to protect.
The second test decides how risky this is. Rebuilding a site with no rankings costs almost nothing; rebuilding one that ranks puts all the risk on the old URLs — and that step, done wrong, is hard to undo.
Three situations, three answers
Unusable on a phone, no rankings — just rebuild
The simplest case; there is nothing to protect. Use the rebuild to set structure properly once: which pages exist, how they link, which search each targets. The only thing worth salvaging from the old site is the text and photos — take whatever still works.
Unusable on a phone, but it ranks — rebuild, with URL migration
The case demanding care. A rebuild is fine, but every old address has to be redirected to its new page one by one; get one wrong or miss it and that page loses its ranking. Ask before signing how they plan to handle it, and do not hire anyone who cannot answer.
Works on a phone, just looks dated — do not rebuild yet
Improving beats rebuilding here by a wide margin: new colours, new type, rework the home page, make contact details obvious. Small money, real effect, and zero ranking risk. The money that matters is probably not on this site at all — it is on ranking and your business profile.
The step that most often destroys rankings
It is the old URLs. Every findable page on the old site has an address. If the new site changes those addresses and nothing redirects the old to the new, that page has vanished as far as Google is concerned — not moved, gone.
The correct handling is a permanent redirect from every old address to the closest matching new page. Not everything to the home page — Google reads that as the content disappearing, and the rankings go anyway.
This sounds technical, but you do not have to do it. You only have to ask, before signing: "How are you handling the old URLs?" Anyone answering "one-by-one 301s, and we export the full list first to check against" has done it before. Anyone answering "it sorts itself out once the new site is live", or not understanding the question, should not be hired.
What to keep before you rebuild
Whoever does the work, save these yourself before anything starts. Trying to recover them afterwards often fails.
A list of pages that are currently findable
At minimum write down the addresses of the important ones you know about. Better, have the shop export a complete list from Google — that list is the migration checklist.
The existing text and photos
Save a copy of the whole site. Old copy is usually something you wrote line by line yourself; picking the usable parts beats writing from scratch.
The domain and hosting accounts
Both must be in your name. If they currently sit with the previous shop, take this rebuild as the moment to get them back — it is the best opportunity, and possibly the last one.
Your current traffic and ranking figures
If you have analytics, export the last six months. Judging whether the rebuild helped needs a baseline; without one it is all impressions.
Questions this article gets
Do rankings always drop after a rebuild?
Small short-term movement is normal; Google needs time to get to know the new site. But a large drop that does not recover over months is almost always mishandled URLs, not a natural phase.
Some people use "rankings always dip, just wait" as a way of deflecting. When you hear it, ask exactly how the old addresses were redirected.
Can we keep the URLs and only change the appearance?
Yes, and it is the lowest-risk option. If the old structure is sound and the problem is only that it looks dated and behaves badly on phones, keeping the addresses and replacing the front end leaves rankings essentially untouched. Whether to do it depends on whether the old structure is worth keeping.
How long does a rebuild take?
It depends on page count and how ready the content is, but the real delay is usually waiting rather than building — waiting for text, for photos, for your approval. Preparing content before work starts cuts most of the calendar time.
Someone else built the old site and will not cooperate. Now what?
First establish whose name the domain is in — that is the only genuine choke point. If the domain is yours, hosting and files can all be rebuilt; it is inconvenient, not fatal.
If the domain is not yours, deal with that first and quickly. This is exactly why we keep saying to ask whose name the accounts are in before signing anything.
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