Upgrade legacy code or rewrite?

Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 9:04 am. 0 comments

Last week we were asked to start a new SEO campaign on one of our older websites (Tanning Beauty).  This task would involve all of the usual SEO work, including rewriting URL’s, optimising text for keywords, and ensuring the meta-data was correct.

The problem I faced was that the website had been written two years ago, using a much earlier version of our Content Management System (The Slugger).  The issues I considered before allowing our SEO team to implement the SEO campaign was whether or not to upgrade the website to use the current Slugger methodologies.

Clearly, the original code behind the website was capable of supporting the SEO changes, but it seemed sensible to upgrade this code to utilise the latest features which had been developed in The Slugger.  This is, in part, due to the enormous changes and enhancements that have taken place over the last two years. (One of which is the superior design of the aspx code - which allows for better indexing by the Google Spiders)

Once it was decided to upgrade the website code, two choices were available:
   * Manually edit the existing code to incorporate the new features
   * Regenerate the site using Slugger

Manually editing the code would, at first, appear to be the simplest option - with only the relevant sections being amended.  You could potentially apply the logic that the less changes were made, then the less opportunity for any errors to occur.  However disappointed our development team may feel, my concern was that this introduces a reasonable deal of human intervention - which is where the cause of errors generally originate.

Opting to regenerate the site took away much of the opportunity for this kind of error.  With the Slugger it is possible to copy an existing website.  It does this by copying the pages, site structure, content and CSS.  But behind the scenes, all the latest aspx code is used.  This meant the only changes necessary were fairly minor and straightforward.

The result is a much improved site, which looks identical to the original, but has all the added benefits of the latest code.  Our SEO campaign can now start with all the associated advantages.