A redesign changes how your website looks, how it is organised and how easily visitors can act on it, while keeping the parts that already earn their keep: the pages Google ranks, the addresses other sites link to and the forms that bring in enquiries. When a redesign goes badly, it is rarely the design that failed. It is usually one of those three things being lost along the way, so I plan for them before anyone opens a design tool.
The result should be a site that says plainly what you do and who it is for, works properly on a phone, loads quickly and makes the next step obvious, with the search visibility you have already built carried across rather than started again.
Who a redesign suits, and who it does not
A redesign is the right job when the business has moved on and the website has not. These are the signs I look for:
- The services, prices or areas on the site no longer match what you actually sell, and years of patching individual pages have made the menu hard to follow.
- Most of your visitors arrive on a phone, and the site was laid out for a desktop monitor.
- Changing a heading or adding a page means paying a developer, because the site is locked into an old theme or page builder.
- People visit but few get in touch, and the reasons to choose you are buried under generic copy.
It is the wrong job if the site looks fine but simply does not appear in Google. That is normally a crawling, indexing or content problem, and technical SEO on the existing site costs less and risks less than replacing it. At the other end, if the code underneath is beyond rescue, a full rebuild is the more honest answer. My article on how to decide between fixing, redesigning and rebuilding a website walks through that choice.
What the redesign covers
An audit of what the current site already earns
Before any design work starts, I use Google Search Console, your analytics and a full crawl of the site to record which pages bring in search traffic, which ones other websites link to, which lead to enquiries and which searches each one appears for. That record becomes the list of things the new site must not lose. Pages that bring in nothing become candidates to merge or remove, which is often where a cleaner design comes from.
Structure and page plan
Next comes the new site architecture: which pages exist, how they group together, what each one is for and which search it is meant to answer. Each page gets one main purpose, so two pages are never competing for the same query. The menu is drawn from this plan rather than from whatever fits the design.
Page briefs and content
Every important page gets a short brief covering who it is for, the question it has to answer, its headings, the evidence it needs and the action it should lead to. Copy that already ranks is kept and improved, not rewritten for the sake of novelty. Copy that is not doing its job is rewritten in plain British English for a UK reader.
Design that starts at phone width
Layouts are planned for a small screen first and then widened, so the key content and the way to contact you survive on a phone. The design brief also builds in accessibility to the WCAG guidelines: readable colour contrast, keyboard navigation, labelled form fields and text alternatives for images. Under the Equality Act 2010, businesses that provide services must make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and that duty is generally understood to extend to their websites.
Speed and technical foundations
Images, fonts, scripts and hosting are set up so the new site meets the Core Web Vitals thresholds on ordinary phones, not just on a fast office connection. Page titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, internal links and structured data are built into the templates, so they do not rely on someone remembering them every time a page is added.
Tracking, cookie consent and legal details
Enquiry forms, phone taps and email clicks are recorded as events in GA4 and tested before launch. Analytics and advertising tags are configured to respect each visitor’s cookie choices, in line with PECR and the ICO’s guidance, and the privacy and cookie policies are updated to describe what the new site really collects. If you trade as a limited company, your registered name, company number, registered office address and the part of the UK you are registered in must appear on the site. They are easy to lose when a footer is redesigned, so they are on my checklist.
Redirects from every changed address
Each old address that changes gets a 301 redirect to its closest match on the new site, one page at a time rather than everything sent to the home page. If you want to see how that part works, my free redirect map builder turns an old-to-new list into server rules and flags any chains or loops.
How I run a redesign
- A scoping conversation. What the business sells, who buys, what is wrong with the current site and what the new one has to do. If working together makes sense, you get a written proposal with the scope, the order of work and the fee in pounds.
- Audit and baseline. The crawl, the current traffic and enquiry figures, and the list of pages and links to protect.
- Structure, briefs and copy. The page plan and briefs are agreed with you before design starts, then the content is written against them.
- Design and build on a staging site. The new site takes shape on a private staging site that search engines cannot see. Who carries out the build is agreed in the proposal, and your existing developer or agency can stay involved.
- Testing before launch. Every redirect, form, tracking event and page template is checked, on a real phone as well as a laptop, along with a final check that nothing will block search engines once the site is live.
- Launch and the weeks after. I watch Search Console, analytics and the enquiry count against the baseline, and fix whatever slipped through. Where a page that your Google Business Profile or directory listings point to has moved, those links are updated too.
Where redesigns usually lose traffic and enquiries
When a redesigned site loses ground, the cause is nearly always on a short list, and none of it has much to do with how the site looks:
- Addresses change without redirects. Google and anyone who linked to you land on an error page, and whatever those old pages had built up is not passed on.
- Pages that ranked are cut to tidy the menu. A slimmer site can feel cleaner while removing the very pages people were finding you through.
- Staging settings go live. A noindex tag, or the WordPress setting that discourages search engines, is correct on the private copy and then left switched on at launch.
- Tracking breaks without anyone noticing. The forms are rebuilt, the old event stops firing, and enquiries appear to fall when only the measurement has.
- Copy shrinks to suit the layout. Explanations are trimmed into short slogans, and pages stop saying clearly what you offer and where.
If the redesign also changes your domain, platform or most of your URLs, the move itself needs the dedicated planning that website migration SEO provides. For launch day, the website launch SEO checklist lists every check in the order I run them, and after any change to your forms it pays to follow the steps for checking that conversion tracking still works.
What you receive
- The audit of the current site, listing the pages, links and searches the new one has to keep.
- The site structure and a brief for each important page.
- The redirect map, as a spreadsheet you keep for future changes.
- A tracking plan naming each event and what it measures.
- The pre-launch test results, then a short report comparing search traffic and enquiries with the baseline once the site has settled.
- The new site live on your domain, with brief notes on editing pages and adding new ones. Your domain, hosting, analytics and Search Console accounts stay in your name throughout.
What a redesign costs
Redesigns are quoted per project, because the range is too wide for a single figure to help you. The things that move the price most are the number of pages and templates, how much copy needs rewriting, whether the platform changes, how many forms, booking tools or integrations must keep working, and whether you also need new photography or brand work. You see the full fee in pounds, in writing, before anything starts.
Next step
Send me your website address and a few lines about what is not working through my contact page. I look at the site and the searches you compete in before we speak, so the first conversation is about your website rather than redesigns in general.