A website redesign that keeps the rankings you already paid for.
Most redesigns get sold as a fresh coat of paint. The part that actually decides whether the new site does better than the old one happens off screen: what you keep, what you cut, and whether every old address on the internet still lands somewhere useful the morning after launch.
Redesigns are the majority of what comes through the door here. Businesses rarely start from nothing. They start from a site that was fine in 2018, a page builder nobody can edit anymore, or a developer who stopped answering email. I audit what is there, map every URL, rebuild it by hand, and move it over without dropping the traffic. See the before and after files or the published rate card.
Nobody redesigns a website because it turned five. They redesign it because of one of these.
Age is a bad trigger. Plenty of six-year-old sites are still earning, and plenty of two-year-old page-builder sites are already a problem. Here is what actually shows up in the emails I get, in the words owners use when they write them.
It looks older than the business is. You have grown, hired, and raised your prices. The site still reads like the company that existed when you built it. Customers feel that gap first, and it costs you on exactly the jobs where you are the more expensive bid.
It is slow on a phone. Not on your office desktop with everything cached. Slow on a mid-range phone on cell data in a parking lot, which is where most of your traffic actually is. If the hero image takes four seconds to paint, people are gone before they see your name.
Nobody on staff can change a price. This one comes up more than any other. A price went up, a service got dropped, someone left, and the change means emailing a developer who bills for it and answers next week. A site your own people cannot maintain stops matching the business within a year.
The platform is at end of life. An abandoned theme, a builder that stopped getting updates, plugins nobody maintains, or a PHP version your host is about to drop. This is the one that turns urgent without warning, usually on a weekend.
Traffic slid after a platform change. Somebody moved the site, switched builders, or reorganized the pages, and search traffic never came back. Usually that is not a content problem or a penalty. It is a hundred old URLs now returning a 404, and it is fixable.
The brand moved on. New name, new logo, a merger, a partner buyout, a service line you dropped. When the site disagrees with the business card, the site is the one people believe less.
It was never built to convert. The design is fine, the photos are fine, there is just no obvious next step on any page, the form is buried, and the phone number is text instead of a tap-to-call link. Cheapest problem here to fix, and the one most often mistaken for a design problem.
If two or more describe your site, a redesign is worth pricing. If only the first one does, tell me anyway. Sometimes the honest answer is a content pass and a speed cleanup on what you already have, and I would rather say that than sell you a rebuild.
- 1Stale SignalsOld copyright years, retired staff, services you dropped two years ago.
- 2Phone SpeedBuilder bloat and uncompressed images, measured where customers actually are.
- 3Dead EndsNo visible next step, no tap-to-call, forms nobody can find.
- 4Locked OutNo logins, no source files, no way to change a price yourself.
Not sure if you need a redesign or a tune-up? Send me the URL and I will tell you straight.
Get in Touch →The job sheet for a redesign that lands cleanly.
A redesign is not one task, it is eight. Skipping any of them is how a site launches looking better and performing worse. This is the sequence I run on every rebuild, in this order, whether the site has six pages or four hundred.
Content Audit: What Stays, What Goes
Before anything gets designed, every existing page goes into a list with its traffic, its rankings, and its purpose. Some pages are earning quietly and have to survive untouched. Some are duplicates. Some have not been visited in three years. You should know which is which before you pay anyone to redesign them.
URL Mapping and 301 Redirects
This is the row that matters most, and it is where most redesigns lose their traffic. Every old address gets mapped to its new one and permanently redirected, so links from Google, from directories, from other people’s sites, and from an email you sent in 2021 all still land on a real page. Skip it and you do not lose a little traffic. You lose years of accumulated search equity in a weekend, and earning it back costs more than the redesign did.
The Design Itself
Layout, type, color, photography, and the order information appears in, drawn around what your customers are trying to do rather than around a theme demo. You see it before it gets built, you say what is wrong with it, and it changes. Nothing gets coded off a guess.
Hand-Coded Build
Written by hand, not assembled in a drag-and-drop builder. No thirty plugins holding the layout together, no theme update that breaks a page you never touched, no license that expires out from under you. What you own at the end is readable code any developer can pick up later. See how the builds work.
Speed Work
Images compressed and sized properly, fonts loaded without blocking the page, scripts kept to what the site actually needs, and the whole thing tested on a mid-range phone instead of a fast laptop. On most redesigns this is the most visible change, because the old site was carrying years of accumulated weight.
Accessibility Basics
Real alt text, headings in a sensible order, color contrast that holds up, form labels a screen reader can announce, and everything reachable with a keyboard. Not a compliance certificate, and I will not pretend otherwise, but the foundational work that keeps a site usable for people who need it and readable for search engines at the same time.
Analytics and Conversion Tracking
Analytics installed in your own account, form submissions and calls recorded as real events, and a thank-you page so you can tell an inquiry from a bounce. Surprisingly often the old site tracked nothing, which is why nobody could say whether it was working. After a redesign you should be able to answer that with a number.
Launch Checklist and 90 Days of Watching
Redirects verified line by line, forms tested from a real inbox, sitemap updated, search console resubmitted, SSL confirmed, and the old site kept intact until the new one is proven. Then ninety days of included edits, because the useful feedback always arrives in week three. After that a care plan is optional, never required.
Sometimes the honest answer is keep the bones. Sometimes starting over is cheaper.
Every quote begins with this question, and the answer moves the number a lot. Redesigning a structurally sound site is the cheaper project, because the hard thinking about pages, structure, and content is already done and already paid for. Untangling a badly built one is the expensive project, and it often costs more than replacing it outright.
Redesign what exists
- The page structure is sensible and the URLs are clean
- The copy is broadly right, it just looks and reads dated
- Pages are ranking and that traffic is worth protecting
- The platform is current and still getting security updates
- You have the logins, the files, and the ability to hand them over
- The complaint is appearance, speed, or mobile, not architecture
Rebuild from scratch
- A page-builder tangle where one edit breaks two other things
- Half the pages exist twice under slightly different addresses
- The theme or builder is abandoned and no longer patched
- Nobody has the files, and the logins left with the last developer
- The business changed enough that the page structure no longer fits
- Fixing it honestly costs more hours than building it clean
// THE RENOVATION RULE: This works the way a house does. Square foundation and sound framing, you renovate, and you get a much better result for much less money. Cracked foundation, and every hour spent renovating on top of it is an hour you will spend again. I will tell you which one you have before I quote it. For a longer walk through what drives the price either way, read how much a website actually costs.
Redesign or rebuild? I will look at the site and give you the cheaper honest answer.
Start a Quote →Three redesigns, with the before shots left in.
Screenshots of what came in and what went out. I am describing what changed on the page, not results I cannot prove to you, because you have no reason to believe a number I made up and neither would I.
Estate planning that finally sounds like the founder.
Heritage Wealth Solutions handles estate planning, trusts, wills, and legacy work, and the founder brings sixteen years of legal experience to it. The old site was a generic template that could have belonged to any firm in the country. Nothing on it told you who you would be sitting across from, and there was no clear path from reading the page to booking anything.
The rebuild put a consultation booking form in the hero and a short video introduction from the founder beside it, so the first thing a visitor meets is the person rather than a stock photo. Credentials moved up where they get read instead of down where they got skipped, and a blog section was added for the education side of the practice.
Navy and gold, serif headings, hand-coded rather than assembled in a builder, and rebuilt mobile-first because a large share of the traffic to a practice like this arrives on a phone.
A practice whose whole value was the specialty.
Dr. Samiya Hashmi is a board-certified functional medicine physician in Chicago. The trouble with the old site was that you could read the whole thing and still not know what functional medicine is or how it differs from a standard primary care visit. That is hard to sell when the site never explains it, and the credentials that would have made the case sat well below the fold.
The redesign leads with her credentials and her specialty, then answers the question people arrive with. A conditions grid covers the five things patients actually search for, including fatigue, sleep, hormone imbalances, and gut health, so a visitor can find themselves on the page in about two seconds. The consultation form carries a condition dropdown, so an inquiry shows up already sorted.
There is a proper bio section with a real photograph, plus a podcast and resources area for the teaching side of the practice. Hand-coded, mobile-first, with healthcare schema wired in during the build instead of bolted on later.
Two decades of reputation, on a site that showed none of it.
Angie Daniels is a RE/MAX Alliance agent with a long track record and a large book of happy clients. None of that was on the old site. It looked like every other agent page: a generic listing search, no personal brand, no testimonials despite having plenty available, and a mobile experience that fought back.
The rebuild put her years in the business and her client history into a stats row near the top, brought testimonials forward with their star ratings attached, and added the tools buyers reach for while they are still browsing. There is an interactive mortgage calculator that estimates a payment in real time, a video gallery for market updates and home tours, and neighborhood guides for the communities she works.
Champagne and gold with serif headings. The animation, the calculator logic, and the layout are all hand-written, which is why the calculator behaves like part of the site instead of a third-party widget dropped into a page.
// Also in the files Air Cortez is an HVAC company whose contact details were buried behind a slow page-builder layout, so the rebuild moved the service request form and the licensed-and-insured credentials into the hero and pinned a tap-to-call number to every page. Hot Dog Business Growth is a consultancy for service-business owners, rebuilt on the same three moves: state the offer, put the proof up front, leave one obvious next step. Card Imaging is the biggest of them, a family-owned ID card dealer whose seventeen thin brochure pages became a catalog of more than four hundred, with a guided printer finder, a glossary, buyer guides, and a self-serve software store, so customers stopped having to phone in for a price.
Roughly four weeks, and you know what happens in each one.
A five-page redesign moves faster than a forty-page one, and the honest variable is almost always how quickly content and photos come back from your side, not how fast I build. Here is the shape of it either way.
Audit & Map
Every existing page inventoried with its traffic and rankings, the keep and cut list agreed with you, and the full URL map drawn up before a single pixel gets designed.
Design & Build
Design goes to you first for changes, then it gets hand-coded page by page on a staging URL you can watch fill in. No reveal at the end, no surprises.
Content & Testing
Final copy in, images compressed, forms tested from a real inbox, tracking verified, redirects checked line by line, and everything reviewed on actual phones.
Launch & 90 Days
The switch happens with the old site still intact as a fallback. Then ninety days of included edits while search console settles and the real feedback arrives.
A redesign can improve everything on the screen and still be a bad month.
Four things break during redesigns, and all four break quietly. Rankings go first. Search engines have spent years learning which of your addresses answers which question, and a new site with new addresses and no map throws that away. Traffic does not fall the day you launch either. It drains over three or four weeks, which is exactly long enough for everyone to assume it was seasonal.
Redirects are the fix, and they are unglamorous manual work: a line for every old URL pointing at the closest real page on the new site, tested after launch rather than assumed. Not a blanket redirect sending everything to the homepage, which search engines read as a soft 404 and which drops a customer looking for your pricing onto a hero image.
Tracking is the one nobody notices for a month. Analytics tags get left behind in the old theme, conversion goals point at a thank-you page that no longer exists, and the ad platform quietly stops recording the leads it is generating. It gets rebuilt during the migration, in your own accounts, and verified with a real test submission before launch.
Email deliverability matters any time the domain or the host moves. Mail records live on the domain, not on the website, and a hosting change made without checking them is how a business spends a week wondering why nobody is replying. If the domain is moving, those records get documented first and confirmed after. If it is not moving, we leave them alone, which is usually the right call.
What owners ask me first.
Send me the site you already have. I will tell you what it needs.
Give me the web address, what is bothering you about it, and what you want the new one to do. You get back a straight assessment, a recommendation on redesign versus rebuild, and a flat quote in writing, usually inside a day. Prefer to talk it through? Call (331) 269-6120 and you get me, not a sales team. If your current site is better than you think it is, I will say that too.