When a redesign is the right answer
- The site is slow, unreadable on a phone, or built on a platform nobody will touch.
- You cannot edit it without a developer, so it has not changed in three years.
- It gets traffic and produces few enquiries, and the reason is structure and message rather than a colour scheme.
- The business changed: new services, new markets, new positioning that the current site contradicts.
- It runs old plugins and is a standing security risk.
It is the wrong answer when the real problem is traffic, in which case you need SEO or ads rather than a new design, or when a handful of pages need rewriting, in which case copywriting plus conversion rate optimization will cost a fraction as much. Redesigning a site that ranks and converts is the most common way businesses lose ground, so I will ask what evidence you have that design is the bottleneck before quoting.
What a redesign includes
- A baseline. Traffic, rankings, entry pages, conversions and backlinks recorded before anything changes, so we can prove afterwards whether the new site is better.
- A full crawl. Every existing URL listed with its traffic, rankings and links. Nothing is deleted by accident.
- A keep, merge, rewrite or drop decision for each page, made on data rather than on how tired the team is of it.
- A redirect map, old URL to new, one to one wherever a matching page exists. Nothing is bulk-redirected to the homepage; that is how a redesign loses rankings.
- Content and structure agreed before design, including the primary term and conversion action for each page.
- Design and build, usually on WordPress with a block system your team can extend.
- Speed and Core Web Vitals handled during the build, not bolted on afterwards.
- Tracking carried across. GA4, Tag Manager and every conversion event rebuilt and verified on the new templates before launch, because new selectors break old triggers silently.
- A launch and post-launch checklist, including a crawl, Search Console submission and a two-week watch on rankings and enquiries.
How a redesign runs
- Measure first (week one). Baseline, crawl, page-level performance, and the list of pages that must survive untouched in topic and URL.
- Decide the structure (weeks one to two). New sitemap, page decisions and the redirect map. This document is the safety net for the whole project.
- Content (weeks two to three). Copy for changed pages, and a careful check that rewritten pages keep the topic that earned their rankings.
- Design (weeks three to four). Homepage and one inner template first, then the rest of the system.
- Build (weeks four to six) on staging, blocked from search engines, with tracking rebuilt and tested there.
- Pre-launch checks. Redirects tested in bulk, forms tested from outside, speed compared with the baseline, and a crawl for anything missing.
- Launch and watch. Go live at a quiet hour, submit the sitemap, then monitor rankings, crawl errors and enquiries daily for two weeks. Small drops in the first fortnight are normal; a drop still present at week four is a problem to fix, and I fix it.
Six to eight weeks is typical for a business site, longer for a store.
What you receive
- The new site, with hosting, domain and admin in your name.
- The pre-launch baseline, so improvement can be proved rather than claimed.
- The full URL inventory and the redirect map as a document you keep.
- Verified tracking with a list of events and where they fire.
- A launch checklist and the two-week post-launch report.
- Training on the new block system and 30 days of post-launch fixes.
How redesigns lose rankings
- Changing every URL with no redirects, or redirecting everything to the homepage.
- Cutting text because the new design looks cleaner with less of it, and removing the content that ranked.
- Launching with the staging site still indexed, so two copies compete.
- Leaving the no-index setting on after launch. This one costs weeks and is entirely silent.
- Losing the internal links that passed authority to key pages.
- Forgetting titles, meta descriptions and schema, which the new templates do not carry over on their own.
- Rebuilding tracking last, so conversion data breaks and nobody can tell whether the redesign helped.
Where the move also changes domain or platform, the SEO side is scoped as website migration SEO. A change of host only, with no URL changes, is hosting and website migration.
Pricing pointer
Redesigns are fixed-price projects quoted after the crawl, because the number of pages and the state of the current site determine the work far more than the visual design does. The price is on request. Hosting, domain and premium licences are paid by you at cost.
Next step
Send me your current site and, if you can, view access to Search Console and GA4. I reply within 4 business hours with what is worth keeping, what is genuinely broken, and a quote. Sometimes the answer is that you do not need a redesign at all.