Onkar Kailas Shankarpelli · Founder, Growth Sequences
A website is built backwards when the visual design is decided before the business decides what the site must produce, for whom, and how that will be measured. It's the default way websites get made, and it's why most of them represent a company without working for it. The fix isn't a better designer or a bigger budget. It's changing the order: decide what the site is for, research who it's for and what they need, design the content and the journeys, and only then decide how it looks.
How does a website get built backwards?
Nobody sets out to do this. It happens one reasonable step at a time.
A business needs a website, or needs to replace the one it has. Someone is put in charge, usually someone with other responsibilities. They look at a few competitor sites, form a view about what it should look like, and brief a web company or freelancer.
The web company asks sensible questions: which pages do you need, do you have a logo, do you have content, what's the budget. They produce a proposal listing pages and features. The business approves it. Design starts.
At no point in that sequence did anyone ask what the site should produce. How many enquiries, from whom, at what stage of their buying process. What visitors need to see before they'll trust the business. What questions they'll arrive with. What should happen in the first minute after someone fills in a form.
Those questions don't get asked because they're not the web company's job, and the business assumed they were somebody's. So the site is designed around the org chart (Services, Industries, About, Contact) rather than the buyer, and the homepage opens with a slogan because nobody wrote down the one sentence that explains what the business does and for whom.
Then the site launches, the enquiries don't come, and a marketing agency is hired to "drive traffic." Their first recommendation is usually a redesign.
What does it cost?
Three things, and the invoices are the smallest of them.
The rebuild. Most SME websites are replaced within two to three years. Some of that is the business changing. A lot of it is the first site never having been designed to do anything, so the second one has to be.
The marketing that can't work. When the people responsible for traffic and conversion inherit a site that wasn't built around buyer questions, they spend their budget working around it: ads landing on the homepage because there's nowhere better, content that the site structure can't support, SEO recommendations that amount to "rebuild the information architecture."
The invisible pipeline. This one is newer. Half of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% a year earlier (G2, 2026 Buyer Behavior Report). Those systems assemble their answers partly from what they can read on your site. A site built around slogans and org charts is hard for them to read, so the business is absent from conversations it doesn't know are happening.
What's the right order?
The order that works puts every decision before the one that depends on it.
| Stage | Decision | Who should be involved |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Purpose | What must the site produce? For whom? How is it measured? | Leadership, whoever owns growth |
| 2. Research | Who are the buyers? What do they search for and ask AI? What do they need to see before they trust you? What do they compare you with? | Marketing, sales, a few real customers |
| 3. Content architecture | Which pages exist, what question each answers, what action each prompts, how they relate | Marketing, content, whoever understands the buyer |
| 4. Journeys | How each buyer type moves from arrival to action; where trust is built; what happens after a form | Marketing, sales, technology |
| 5. Technology | Platform, CRM connection, analytics, integrations, AI readability | Technology, marketing |
| 6. Design | How it looks, on top of everything above | Design |
| 7. Build | Implementation of decided things | Development |
| 8. Measure and improve | What's converting, what isn't, what to change | Everyone who was at stage 1 |
Design is stage six. In most projects it's stage one.
Doesn't this take longer?
Yes, at the front. Stages one to four typically add four to six weeks before anything is designed. In our experience it takes less time overall, because the build implements decisions instead of inventing them, there are fewer rounds of "can we change this," and the site doesn't need rebuilding in eighteen months.
It also changes what the site costs, sometimes downward. A site designed around six buyer questions often needs fewer pages than one designed around a sitemap somebody guessed at.
What should you do?
If you're about to build or rebuild a website:
- Write down what it must produce before you brief anyone. One page. Number of enquiries, from whom, at what stage, and how you'll know.
- Talk to five customers about how they found you and what they needed to see. Their words, not yours, become the site's language.
- Ask an AI assistant what your business does and who it's for. If the answer is vague or wrong, the new site needs to fix that, and the brief should say so.
- List the questions buyers ask before they buy. In order. That list is your content architecture.
- Decide what happens in the first sixty seconds after a form is submitted. Who's notified, what's recorded, what's sent. Wire the CRM before launch, not after.
- Brief for outcomes, not pages. If the first question a vendor asks is "what pages do you need?", keep looking.
If you already have a site that was built backwards, the Understand stage of our method audits it honestly. Often the brand and some content can stay; the structure usually can't.
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