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Design Debt Review for Growing Websites
Your website worked when you had five pages. Now you have forty, three people editing the CMS, and every new section is a copy-paste of the last one that almost fits. That’s design debt — and like financial debt, it compounds quietly until a redesign is the only way out.
A Design Debt Review is a structured audit of what’s actually holding your site together (or not). I go through five layers:
Consistency — where your spacing, type, and color decisions have drifted apart across pages, and which rules are being silently broken by whoever added the last section.
Section reuse — how many “unique” blocks are really the same component in disguise. Every duplicate is a future edit you’ll have to make five times instead of once.
CMS scalability — whether your content model can grow without breaking layout, or whether editors are forced to fight the template every time they publish.:
CTA patterns — where your calls to action contradict each other in placement, wording, and hierarchy, quietly splitting user attention and diluting conversion.
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