Your Website Redesign Is Not the Problem

Key takeaways:

• Most website redesign briefs are built around aesthetics and competitor comparisons, not measurable commercial outcomes.
• The question “what does success look like in 12 months, measured in something other than how the site looks?” will tell you within minutes whether a project is worth doing.
• Projects with a clear outcome measure succeed far more consistently than those without one. The paradox is that asking this question sometimes reveals the redesign is the wrong solution entirely.

The Brief Arrives, and It’s Always the Same

Every redesign conversation starts somewhere around the same place. A client sends over a Figma file, a mood board, or a list of three competitor sites with notes like “something like this but more modern” or “cleaner, like what [company name] did recently.” Sometimes there’s a colour palette. Sometimes there’s a reference to the CEO’s preference for a particular font. Almost always, there’s a deadline tied to something that has nothing to do with the website’s actual performance, a trade show, a rebrand, a new financial year.

What’s almost never in that brief: a sentence explaining what the website is supposed to do differently once it’s rebuilt.

I’ve been doing this since 1998. I’ve sat in more redesign kickoff meetings than I can count, and the pattern has been consistent across two and a half decades. Clients arrive knowing what they want the site to look like. They rarely arrive having asked what they want the site to accomplish.

That’s not a criticism. It’s a structural problem with how redesign projects get commissioned. And it explains why so many of them, even the well-executed ones, don’t actually move the business forward.

What does a typical redesign brief actually contain?

The brief is almost always aesthetic. “Modernise” is probably the single word I’ve seen most often over the years. It usually means: we’re embarrassed by the current site, we think it looks dated, and we want something that doesn’t make us cringe when we send someone to it. That’s a legitimate feeling. It’s just not a project brief.

Close behind “modernise” is the competitor comparison. A client in Singapore finds out that a competitor has just launched a new site. That competitor’s site is clean, the photography is good, the homepage scrolls nicely on mobile. Suddenly the client’s own site looks worse by comparison, even if objectively nothing has changed. The redesign brief becomes, implicitly, “we want what they have.” I’ve seen this trigger six-figure projects. The competitor’s site didn’t necessarily convert better. It just looked newer.

Then there’s the internal stakeholder problem. Someone in marketing wants the site to reflect the new brand direction. Someone in sales wants the case studies more prominent. Someone in the C-suite thinks the homepage hero image should be different. The redesign becomes a vehicle for resolving those internal debates, using the agency as a referee. The brief reflects all of that tension, dressed up as a creative direction.

None of this is about what the site is supposed to do commercially. It’s about how it’s supposed to feel, and to whom.

Why don’t agencies push back on this?

Because pushing back slows down the sale. Asking a client “have you actually defined what success looks like?” before you’ve signed the contract introduces uncertainty. It risks the client thinking you’re not confident. Worse, it might lead to the conclusion that they don’t actually need a redesign right now, which means no project, which means no revenue.

I understand why agencies don’t do it. I understand it because I’ve felt that same pull. When a client is ready to spend, the temptation is to scope the work and start, not to introduce a philosophical conversation about outcomes that might derail the whole thing.

The problem is what happens six to twelve months later. The site launches. It looks great. Everyone’s happy for about three weeks. Then someone asks whether leads have increased. Nobody has a baseline. Nobody defined what “increased” would mean. The site is prettier, the bounce rate might be marginally better, but there’s no clear evidence the business moved. The client starts to feel vaguely disappointed without being able to articulate why. The agency is on to the next project. The cycle repeats.

At Chillybin, we’ve walked away from projects because this conversation revealed there was no case for a redesign. That’s a harder call than it sounds. But the alternative is building something that solves a problem nobody properly defined.

What is the one question worth asking before anything else?

“What does success look like in 12 months, measured in something other than how the site looks?”

I started asking this consistently around 2014, after watching too many projects land well on execution and badly on outcome. It takes about thirty seconds to ask. What it produces can take a lot longer to work through, and that’s exactly the point.

The answers fall into a few categories, and each one tells you something different about the project you’re actually being asked to do.

“More leads” is the best answer. It’s measurable. It implies a baseline exists, or can be established. It suggests the client is thinking commercially. The follow-up questions are straightforward: how many leads are you getting now, how many do you need, and what’s the conversion path on the current site? From there you can build a case for what the redesign actually needs to achieve. The scope becomes purposeful rather than aesthetic.

“Better user experience” is the vague answer. It’s not wrong, but it’s not a definition of success. User experience measured how? Time on site? Task completion rate? Reduction in support emails because the navigation is clearer? I press on this one. Usually it resolves into something specific: “our customers keep calling us because they can’t find the pricing page” or “we’re getting a lot of traffic but nobody fills out the form.” Those are real problems. They have real solutions. Sometimes those solutions don’t require a full redesign.

“We just need it to look better” is the honest answer that signals trouble. I respect the honesty. I take it seriously when a client says this directly, because at least they’re not pretending. But it also tells me the project is almost certainly a vanity exercise. Looking better is not a commercial outcome. It might be a brand outcome, and brand matters, but it should be named as such. If the project is about brand, run it as a brand project with brand metrics. Don’t run it as a website project and then wonder why the revenue didn’t change.

What happens when the answer is “we don’t know”?

This is the most common outcome. The blank stare. A pause. “We haven’t really thought about it that way.” Sometimes a look around the room to see if anyone else has an answer.

That pause is valuable. It tells me we’re about to save the client from a decision made on incomplete information. A redesign project without a defined outcome measure is structurally similar to a renovation you commission because you’re bored with the kitchen. It might produce something you enjoy looking at. It won’t necessarily solve the thing that’s actually bothering you.

I had a client a few years back, professional services firm in Singapore, that came in with a full brief: new visual identity, new site structure, new copy. Their main complaint was that the site didn’t reflect how good the firm had become. The site was from 2018, hadn’t been touched in years, and they felt it was losing them work with larger clients.

When I asked the success question, the room went quiet. After a few seconds, one of the partners said: “We want to be taken seriously by companies with more than 500 employees.” That was the real brief. And it turned out the site wasn’t the primary problem. Their case studies were too thin, their team page was outdated, and they had almost no content demonstrating sector expertise. A redesign without fixing those things would have produced a beautiful site that still didn’t convert the clients they actually wanted. We rebuilt it, but the redesign was the last step, not the first.

Does defining success ever kill the project?

Yes. And that’s the right outcome when it happens.

If a client can’t articulate what they want the site to do differently, and they’ve thought about it properly for two weeks and still can’t, the redesign is probably solving an internal political problem rather than a commercial one. Someone in the organisation wants to feel proud of the website. That’s understandable. It’s just not a reason to spend $50,000.

The projects that go cleanly through this question and come out the other side with a clear answer almost always succeed on the terms that matter. They might not be the most visually exciting sites we’ve built. But they hit the target they were aimed at, because there was an actual target.

The ones that go through this question and come out with no answer either get redirected into something smaller and more specific, or they don’t proceed. That sounds like lost revenue. Over 25 years, it’s been the opposite. A client who feels like you talked them out of a bad decision doesn’t go elsewhere. They come back when the decision is a good one.

The question is uncomfortable. Ask it anyway. Everything that comes after is cleaner.