Website Redesign

There is no rule that a website lasts exactly so many years. There are signs, and they usually pile up several at once. The most common one is the phone: the site was built when most traffic came from desktops, so today you have to zoom in and drag left and right. Since Google ranks the mobile version of a page, that is not just a question of looks but of rankings.

The second sign is speed. A site that takes four seconds to load loses visitors before they have seen anything, and a slow site ranks worse. The third is not being able to change it — if you have to call somebody for every little thing, the content soon stops being updated and the site turns into a brochure gathering dust.

The fourth sign is the most expensive, because it doesn't show up in the statistics: the site no longer matches what you have become in the meantime. A customer seeing you for the first time judges you on that.

If two or more of these signs sound familiar, a redesign is worth it. If only one does, and a minor one at that, a smaller change under maintenance is often enough.

A redesign is most often asked for by companies whose business has moved on further than their site: the offering has widened, the team has grown — and the site still looks the way it did when it was built. Those clients aren't after an experiment but a tidy piece of work: done properly, once, and not thought about again for a few years.

Those clients are also the easiest to work with, because they already know what bothers them. They don't have to explain how to solve the problem; it is enough to show us where the shoe pinches. The rest is our job, and their part comes down to one design approval and a few answers along the way.

If the only reason for a redesign is that somebody said a site should be changed every two years, we will save you the money and tell you it isn't necessary. And if you expect a new look on its own to bring in more enquiries, we had better talk first — looks help, but they rarely decide it alone.

A redesign makes sense when the site fundamentally works: the content is usable, the URLs make sense, and Google already knows it. Then the look and the foundation change while everything of value stays — the copy, the images, the rankings and the addresses people are used to.

A new site is the better choice when the structure is so tangled that patching it doesn't pay, when the site was built on an outdated system that is no longer maintained, or when the business has changed so much that even the content no longer fits. In those cases a redesign works out more expensive than building from scratch.

If you are not sure which applies to you, send us the site address and we will tell you which of the two we suggest and why. That assessment is free and commits you to nothing.

This is the most common fear about a redesign, and usually a justified one — sites really do lose rankings after being rebuilt. Almost always for the same reason: the old page addresses disappear, nobody sets up redirects, and Google finds hundreds of links leading nowhere.

With us, listing the URLs and setting up redirects is a required step, not an optional extra. On top of that, before launch we check that page titles and descriptions carry over to the new site, that the sitemap is submitted, and that nothing is accidentally closed off to search engines.

A slight dip in the first few weeks is normal while Google recrawls the site. When the work is done properly, the rankings come back and usually improve, because a faster site with a proper mobile layout ranks better than the one that came before it.