Your site looks dated, it is slow on a phone, or the business has changed and the pages no longer describe what you sell. You want a new one. The worry that stops most owners is the search traffic: the old site, for all its faults, brings in visits and calls, and nobody wants to trade that for a nicer look.
The worry is fair. Redesigns lose rankings all the time, but almost always for the same few reasons, and each one can be prevented with careful, unglamorous work done before the new design goes live.
How redesigns lose search traffic
- Old pages deleted because they looked stale. A how-to post from years ago may bring more visits than the home page. Remove it and that traffic is gone.
- New addresses with no redirects. Google, bookmarks and other sites still point at the old addresses. Without a redirect, every one of those visitors hits an error page.
- Every old page redirected to the home page. It looks tidy, but search engines usually treat that like a missing page, and the visitor lands somewhere that does not answer their question.
- Text cut for a cleaner layout. The headings and paragraphs that matched what people search for get replaced with a slogan and a large photo.
- Titles and descriptions reset to defaults. A new platform often fills in its own, and pages that had specific titles now all say the business name.
- The preview site left open, or the new site left blocked. Either search engines index a half-built copy, or the “do not index” setting from the build stays on after go-live.
- Nobody watching afterward. Broken redirects and missing pages sit for months because no one opened Search Console.
What we carry over, and what we change
- A crawl of every old address. Pages, posts, images and PDFs, combined with Search Console’s list of pages that get clicks, because a crawl alone misses pages that nothing links to anymore.
- A redirect map, one line per old address showing its new address, set up as permanent 301 redirects and tested one by one after the switch.
- The pages that earn visits, kept. They may get a new layout and better wording, but the topic and the substance stay so the page still answers the same searches.
- Titles, descriptions and headings carried over or rewritten on purpose, never left to a platform default.
- A new design built for phones first, checked at nine screen sizes and for accessibility, with images sized so pages load quickly.
- Structured data, a fresh sitemap and clean internal links, so the new site is easier for search engines to read than the old one was.
Checking the numbers before and after
Before we change anything, we save a snapshot from Search Console: the top pages by clicks, the top search terms, and how many pages are indexed. If the site has no Search Console yet, we connect it on day one so there is at least some history to compare against.
After go-live, we test every redirect in the map, submit the new sitemap to Google and to Bing Webmaster Tools, and watch the reports for pages that return errors. Over the following weeks we compare clicks page by page against the snapshot. If a page that used to bring visits drops sharply, we look at what changed on it and fix it, instead of waiting to see if it recovers. This is part of the ongoing SEO and AI visibility work many clients keep after a redesign.
How a redesign project runs
We start with a call about what is wrong with the current site and what the business needs now. Then we look at the data and send a written proposal that lists one-time and monthly costs on separate lines.
The new site is built on a preview address first. You review it there while we check each page at nine screen sizes, follow every link and send real test messages through every form. On go-live day the site moves to your domain, the redirects switch on, and Google and Bing are told about the new sitemap.
What we need from you:
- Access to Search Console and analytics, if you have them
- An admin account on the current site, or an export of its content
- Access to your domain settings, or the person who manages them
- The pages you know customers use, and any you would like gone
If you are moving off a specific platform, see WordPress migration or upgrading a Wix site. For what drives the size of a project, read the website cost guide, or tell us about your current site.
