Website redesign: a complete business guide

Website redesigns are usually started because someone is tired of the old one. That isn’t a very good reason on its own. This guide will help you decide if you need one, and then how to run it so that you end up better off than when you started.

Do you need a redesign at all?

Good reasons include:

• Your business or positioning has changed, and the site no longer describes what you do.
• It’s hard to use on phones or inaccessible to some visitors.
• The platform is out of support, insecure or very expensive to change.
• You’ve got the traffic but not the enquiries, and research suggests the site is responsible.

Weaker reasons: the new marketing director wants a change, a competitor’s site looks nicer, or it’s been a few years. If the site performs well, then targeted improvements to pages, speed and messaging can be cheaper and less risky than starting again. Look at your analytics first.

Set a goal you can measure

“Modernise the website” can’t be measured. “Increase qualified enquiries from the service pages by reducing mobile drop-off” can. Record the current numbers before you start, including traffic, enquiries, conversion by page and rankings for key terms, because you’ll want to compare them afterwards.

Audit what you have

Export every URL using a crawler, then add traffic from analytics, clicks from Search Console, and links from a backlink tool. Sort each page into one of four groups:

• Keep: pages that perform well. Be careful about changing their content and URLs.
• Improve: pages that are useful but underperforming.
• Merge: several weak pages covering the same topic.
• Remove: pages with no traffic, no links and no purpose.

This often reveals that a few dozen pages bring in most of your results. Those are the pages that you must not break.

Plan content early

Content is the most common cause of delay. It can’t be left until the design’s finished, since it affects the design. Decide early who’s writing what, and design with real content in place of placeholder text. If your website is the same words in new clothes, don’t expect different results.

Protect your search rankings

This is where redesigns do the most damage. Google says that site moves with URL changes can cause temporary fluctuations, and even well-run ones take time to settle. To reduce the risk:

1. Keep URLs where you can. If a URL doesn’t need to change, don’t change it.
2. Map every changed URL to its closest new equivalent in a spreadsheet, using 301 redirects. Don’t just send everything to the homepage.
3. Keep what’s working on well-ranking pages, including the content, headings and internal links, unless you’ve got a good reason to change them.
4. Block the staging site from search engines, and remember to remove the block on launch. Forgetting that noindex tag is a classic and painful mistake.
5. Test redirects before launch, by crawling your old URL list against staging.
6. Update internal links, XML sitemap, canonical tags and structured data.
7. Don’t change everything at once if you can avoid it. A new domain, platform, structure and content all together make it hard to diagnose any problems.

Launch day and after

• Launch at a quiet time, early in the week, and not on a Friday or just ahead of your peak season.
• Crawl the live site and check for broken links and leftover noindex tags.
• Test all your forms by actually submitting them, and check that the emails arrive.
• Check that analytics and conversion tracking still work.
• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
• Watch the Page indexing report and 404s every few days for the first month or two.

A short-term wobble in rankings is normal. A sustained fall usually has a specific cause, such as missing redirects or lost content, and it’s often fixable if you catch it quickly.

Common mistakes

• Designing by committee, without user research.
• Choosing visual effects that slow down the site.
• Removing pages that quietly brought in traffic because they looked unimportant.
• Budgeting nothing for fixes and improvements after launch.
• Letting the supplier own your domain, or keep your hosting access.

How much will it cost?

A redesign costs about the same as a new site of the same scope, and sometimes more, once you add migration work. Our guide to UK website costs sets out published ranges. If you’d like help planning it, take a look at our website redesign service.