Rebuild what is broken. Keep what is not.
For businesses that already have a site and already know it is the problem. The hard part is not the new design — it is not losing the ground the old site earned.
Which of these brought you here?
Eight reasons people start a redesign, and what is usually underneath each. Most businesses recognise three or four.
- 01
It looks like it was built a decade ago
Dated design costs you credibility before anyone reads a word. Visitors treat an old-looking site as a signal the business itself may be inactive or careless.
- 02
It takes several seconds to appear
Usually oversized images, a bloated theme, and a stack of plugins each loading their own scripts. Most visitors on a phone will not wait.
- 03
It is painful to use on a phone
Tiny tap targets, text that needs pinching, forms that fight the keyboard. This is where the majority of small business traffic actually is.
- 04
Nobody can find anything
Navigation that grew by accretion. Menus with fourteen items, important pages three levels down, and no path from a service to getting in touch.
- 05
It gets visitors but no enquiries
There is no conversion path. Pages end without a next step, or offer four competing ones, which amounts to the same thing.
- 06
You cannot change anything without help
A custom theme nobody documented, or a developer you have lost touch with. Small edits become quotes, so they never happen.
- 07
Search traffic has been sliding for years
Often technical: pages not indexed, duplicate URLs competing, no structured data, poor Core Web Vitals. Invisible from the outside, and fixable.
- 08
Every page looks like a different website
Years of additions with no design system. Three button styles, five shades of blue, and spacing that changes page to page.
Migration is the risky part
Almost every horror story about a redesign tanking search traffic is a redirect failure.
When a URL changes and nothing points the old address at the new one, everything that URL had accumulated — its ranking, its links, its history — is discarded. It is not a slow decline; it happens the day you launch.
It is also entirely preventable, with unglamorous work done before launch rather than diagnosed after.
- 05.1
Inventory every URL
A full crawl of the existing site plus Search Console and analytics data, so we know which pages exist, which earn traffic, and which have links pointing at them from elsewhere.
- 05.2
Decide the fate of each one
Keep, merge, rewrite, or retire. Merging two thin pages into one good page is usually an upgrade — provided the old URL redirects to the new one.
- 05.3
Build the redirect map
Every retired URL gets a permanent redirect to its closest equivalent. Not to the homepage — a blanket homepage redirect throws away the value you are trying to preserve.
- 05.4
Preserve what already works
If a page ranks, we do not casually rewrite its title, its heading, or its URL. A redesign is not a reason to discard the parts that are earning.
- 05.5
Verify after launch
Check for redirect chains and loops, resubmit the sitemap, watch indexation and Core Web Vitals for the first month, and fix what real traffic exposes.
When we will tell you not to redesign
A rebuild is not always the answer, and it is the most expensive way to find out it was not.
If the site is structurally sound and the real problem is that nobody can find it, a redesign is an expensive way to avoid fixing clause 03.
If the design is fine and the copy is the problem, new visuals will not make the copy clearer. If a single page is underperforming, rebuilding forty pages is not the fix.
We audit before quoting, and we will say so when the honest answer is a smaller piece of work.
- 01Web DesignNew templates and a documented system, so it stops drifting.
- 02Web DevelopmentA rebuild that is fast, accessible, and maintainable.
- 03SEO FoundationsStructure and metadata done properly, often for the first time.
Plus the migration work above, which is unique to this clause.
What you receive, and what you do not
Named artefacts on the left. On the right, the limits of this clause — printed beside the scope rather than in a later document.
- A content and URL inventory of the existing site — included
- A redirect map from every old URL to its new destination — included
- Redesigned templates built on a documented system — included
- A launch checklist covering indexation, analytics, and DNS — included
- Post-launch monitoring of indexation and Core Web Vitals — included
Everything above is handed over in your own accounts and stays yours. See when each piece arrives.
- Recovering content from a site you no longer have access to — not included
- Rewriting your existing copy, unless quoted as a line item — not included
- Ongoing maintenance of the old site during the rebuild — not included
- Negotiating with your previous developer or host on your behalf — not included
- Guaranteeing rankings will rise after the move — only that they are protected — not included
- Migrating third-party integrations we were not told about at discovery — not included
If you need one of these, say so at discovery and it gets quoted as its own line — never absorbed silently and billed later.
Clauses usually scoped alongside this one
Questions about clause 05
No references yet
Case studies are published as projects finish and clients approve what can be shown. Nothing is invented in the meantime.
Read first
- 01How much does a website cost?What actually drives the price of a business website — scope, page count, content, integrations, and custom design — and how to read a quote you have been given.
- 02What are Core Web Vitals?A plain explanation of LCP, CLS, and INP — what each one measures, what makes them bad, and why they matter to a business website beyond the score itself.
Plan a redesign.
Describe the business and what is not working. You get a straight answer on whether clause 05 is the right fit, what it involves, and what it costs.