Website redesign: when it's worth it and how to keep rankings

An outdated website loses customers quietly: it's hard to read on a phone, slow to open, and the information on it is no longer current. At the same time, many businesses put off a redesign because they're afraid of losing what they've built up on Google. Here's how to decide whether it's worth it and how to make the switch without losing traffic.

When a redesign is worth it

• The site is hard to use on a phone. Google finished moving to mobile-first indexing in 2023: it reads and evaluates sites by their mobile version. A site designed for desktop and simply shrunk on a phone starts at a disadvantage.
• It's slow. Google's thresholds for a good experience are the main content showing within 2.5 seconds, the page responding to a tap in under 200 milliseconds, and content not jumping around as it loads (a CLS below 0.1). How to measure them is in why is my website slow.
• You can't update it. The company that built it is gone, the theme no longer gets updates, or every price change needs a developer.
• It no longer says what the business does. New services, old prices, photos of premises that have since changed.
• It doesn't bring enquiries. Visitors come, but they don't call, write or book. Some causes can be fixed without a redesign: Why is my website not getting leads.

If the only problem is that it looks dated, a refresh may be enough: new colours, fonts and photos on the same structure and the same URLs.

Why sites lose rankings in a redesign

Google doesn't penalise a site for changing. Rankings are lost because of specific mistakes:

How to redesign, step by step

1. List the old URLs. Start with the sitemap, then add pages that get clicks in Search Console and the most visited pages in your analytics. No page that brings traffic should be missing.
2. Keep URLs where you can. The safest redirect is the one you don't need.
3. Map every old URL to a new one. Each old page points to the new page on the same topic, not to the home page.
4. Keep the content that works. You can rewrite and reorganise, but the answers people were searching for must stay.
5. Copy the titles and descriptions of important pages, then improve them if needed.
6. Test the new site on a staging address, blocked from Google, and check every redirect.
7. At launch, remove the block. Take out "noindex" and the robots.txt rules used during the build.
8. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.

What to check after launch

In the first weeks, look at Search Console for:

• 404 or "not found" pages, coming from old URLs missed in the list.
• Pages excluded from the index and the reason they were excluded.
• Clicks and impressions for important pages, compared with the same period before.
• Page speed, in the page experience report.

Google says most pages of a small to medium site move within a few weeks and that rankings can fluctuate temporarily. A small dip in the first days is normal; a large, lasting drop usually points to one of the mistakes in the table above.

If the domain changes too

A domain change adds a step: in Search Console, for the old domain, you use the Change of Address tool, for all its variants (with and without www). Google notes the tool is only needed when moving from one domain or subdomain to another. If you can, change the design first and the domain later, so you know what caused any change in traffic.

What a redesign costs

A redesign costs about as much as a new site of the same size, since the design and code are done again; the ranges are in how much does a website cost. The URL list and redirects add a little work, while existing copy and photos save time.

Redesigns are part of our web design work: we start from the site you have and keep page URLs or redirect them to the new ones, so the new site keeps what the old one built up on Google.