Websites need ongoing maintenance to perform optimally. But there comes a point when the constant stream of patches becomes more costly than investing in a complete overhaul.
Building a brand new enterprise-level website is a significant investment of both staff time and financial resources. How can you be confident that replatforming is the right move?
Our Website Replatforming ROI Calculator is an excellent starting point toward making the right decision for your organization. It will help you understand the financial implications of such a project and provide the right questions to ask during budgeting discussions.
Key features of the tool
- Quick to complete for anyone with basic knowledge of monthly expenses
- Flexible inputs to accommodate various organizational structures
- Calculates break-even point and Net Present Value/NPV
- Helps estimate potential revenue growth from improved platform capabilities
Need help or want to discuss your results? Our team of digital design and publishing experts is here to assist. Let’s explore how we can transform your online presence and drive your organization forward.
How to Use the ROI Calculator
Our Website Replatforming ROI Calculator is designed to help you make an informed decision about whether it’s time to rebuild your digital platform. This tool allows you to compare the costs of maintaining your current website against the potential benefits of a redesign and rebuild.
1. Input your current situation
- Use section one to input monthly staff and technology expenses
- Estimate cost and time to resolve existing issues
2. Estimate the potential of a new platform
- Review cost and timeline for building a new website
- Evaluate monthly expenses post-replatforming
- Anticipate revenue growth from improved capabilities
3. Review the results in sections 2 and 3
- See the break-even point for your new platform
- Compare margins between current and new platforms
- Evaluate the NPV of the upgrade project
Additional tips
- If you don’t know your staffing costs, you can get an estimate from Glassdoor.com. If your company is too small, you can look at a competitor, or at salary averages on Indeed.com. Multiply the number of team members by an estimated salary, then add 20% for benefits and other overhead.
- In a larger organization, this resource is a good starting point for developing your own understanding and asking the right questions during a budgeting process. But your finance team likely has an internal discount rate and their own standards for payback periods and other aspects of deciding how to allocate funds.
- It’s fine to estimate revenue and compensation, because even if your guess is wrong, you will still learn if the replatforming project has value based on its growth rate and NPV compared to the status quo.
Sample Scenario
The scenario shown by default in the calculator reflects a digital team of three managing a platform for a media company that earns $10 million per year. Their current platform costs $15,000 per month in technology costs (including servers, asset platforms, etc.) and has significant technical debt. New features take too long to roll out, which saturates the development team and prevents them from resolving underlying issues.
The company faces two options:
1. Upgrade current platform
- Cost: $100,000
- Time: 3 months
- Goal: Modernize and improve resilience
2. Build new platform
- Cost: $300,000
- Time: 5 months
- Potential benefits
- 5% yearly revenue growth for 2 years
- Reduced monthly tech expenses from $15,000 to $10,000
The team is struggling with slow feature rollouts and technical debt, making this decision crucial for their future operations. The projected cost to replatform their site would yield major returns on investment — not to mention significant tech cost savings.
If you’re debating between an update versus a rebuild, we’d love to help. Connect with our digital experts today to help you evaluate your options.