A business website rarely fails overnight. It slips. The design starts to look dated, a few pages fall out of step with what you now sell, and enquiries slowly thin out. Because nothing actually breaks, the redesign keeps getting put off.
Then, when the work finally happens, some businesses see their search traffic drop for months afterwards. Both problems are avoidable. Here is how to tell when a redesign is due, and how to carry it out safely.
Sign 1: You apologise for it
If you find yourself saying "ignore the website, it's a bit out of date" when handing over a business card, customers have already noticed. People judge a firm by its site in the same way they judge a shop by its window.
Sign 2: It is hard to use on a phone
Open your site on a mobile. If you need to zoom to read the text, or buttons are too small to tap, you are turning away the majority of local visitors. Search engines also look at the mobile version of a site first when deciding where to rank it.
Sign 3: Simple updates need a developer
You should be able to change a price, add a photograph or post a notice without raising a support ticket. If every edit costs money or risks breaking the layout, the site was built for the builder's convenience, not yours.
Sign 4: It is slow
Speed is easy to check with free online tools. If the main content takes more than about two and a half seconds to appear on mobile, visitors start leaving. Slow sites are usually weighed down by features and plugins that were added over the years and never removed.
Sign 5: The business has moved on
New services, new areas covered, a different type of customer. If the site still describes the company you were five years ago, it is working against you.
How a redesign damages rankings
Search engines know your site as a set of page addresses, each with its own history. A redesign often changes those addresses. If the old ones simply vanish, every link and bookmark pointing to them leads to an error page, and the standing those pages had built up is lost.
The other common cause is content. In the push for a cleaner look, useful text gets cut. Pages that ranked because they answered a question in detail are replaced by a photograph and two lines.
Six steps to protect what you have
First, list every page on the current site before any work begins, along with which ones bring in the most visitors. Your analytics or your developer can provide this.
Second, keep page addresses the same wherever possible. Where an address must change, set up a permanent redirect from the old one to the new one.
Third, keep the words that work. Improve and reorganise the text on your best pages, but do not delete it for the sake of white space.
Fourth, carry over page titles and descriptions, then improve them one at a time rather than all at once.
Fifth, test the new site privately before it goes live. Click through every old address and confirm it lands somewhere sensible.
Sixth, watch closely for the first month. Check for error pages each week and fix them as they appear. A small dip in the first fortnight is normal. A steady slide is a sign that redirects have been missed.
What a good result looks like
A redesign should leave you faster and easier to manage, not just better looking. Webgenix, a web design agency in Derby, describes rebuilding a local driving school's website in this way: the load time fell from 6.8 seconds to under 1.8, and the school's own staff could update course prices and customer stories without technical help. Those are the outcomes worth asking any agency about, well before discussing colours and fonts.
Questions to ask before you start
Will my page addresses change, and how will you redirect the old ones? Which of my current pages get the most visits, and what is the plan for each? How will you test the site before launch? Who checks for errors afterwards, and for how long?
The takeaway
A redesign is a good moment to fix speed, mobile use and out-of-date content in one go. Treat it as a move rather than a makeover: know what you own, take it all with you, and leave a forwarding address for everything you leave behind.
