When to redesign your website, and how to do it without losing your Google rankings

A website redesign should leave you with a better site and the search visibility you had before, or more of it. Most of the rankings lost in a redesign come from avoidable mistakes: old pages that go missing, redirects that were never set up, and a new site that nobody checked properly before it went live.

This guide covers both halves of the job. The first part helps you decide whether it's time to redesign at all. The second is a website redesign checklist for the planning, redirects, launch and the weeks after, so the new site keeps the Google rankings the old one earned.

When to redesign your website

Not every tired website needs a full rebuild, but these are the signs that patching it has stopped being worth the money.

• It's slow. If pages take a long time to load, particularly on a phone, visitors leave before they see what you offer. Our guide to website speed and conversion rates explains how much that costs.
• It's awkward on a phone. Tiny text, buttons you can't tap and forms that are a struggle on a touchscreen all push people back to the search results.
• You can't update it yourself. Stratmore Entertainment had a wrong phone number in its website footer for six months because nobody on the team knew how to change it. Their new site lets them fix things like that themselves.
• It gets visitors but no enquiries. If traffic is steady and the phone isn't ringing, read our guide on why a website is not generating leads before deciding a redesign is the answer.
• It no longer describes your business. New services, a new market or a new brand all need a website that says so.
• It runs on software nobody supports. An out-of-date content management system, abandoned plugins or a page builder that's no longer updated are security problems waiting to happen.
• Your competitors' websites are clearly better. Open theirs next to yours and ask yourself which business you'd contact.
• You'd rather not send people to it. If you hesitate to put the address on a quote or a business card, that tells you most of what you need to know.

Website redesign or refresh: which do you need?

A refresh changes the look while keeping the same platform, structure and page addresses. It's quicker, cheaper and carries far less risk to your rankings, so it suits a site that's fast, works well on phones and just looks dated.

A full redesign makes sense when you're dealing with several of the signs above, especially an unsupported platform, a poor mobile experience or a site you can't edit. Google's own advice on site moves is to change one thing at a time where you can. If the design, platform and domain all need changing, think about whether they have to happen in the same launch.

Website redesign checklist: before you start

1. Crawl the current site. Use a crawler such as Screaming Frog to list every page, including blog posts, PDFs and old landing pages that still get visits. You can't redirect a page you don't know exists.
2. Find the pages that matter most. In Google Search Console and your analytics, note the pages that bring in the most search traffic, the most enquiries and the most links from other websites.
3. Record where you rank now. Save the search terms each important page ranks for, so you have something to compare against after launch.
4. Set clear goals. Decide what the new website has to do better, such as more enquiries or fewer calls asking for basic information, and how you'll measure it.
5. Plan the content before the design. Map every page, write or refine the copy, and decide what each page should ask the visitor to do next.
6. Set a realistic budget. Our guide to what a website costs in Ireland covers typical market prices, and it's worth allowing for ongoing maintenance costs from the start.

Website migration SEO: mapping and redirects

The redirect map is the most important document in a redesign. It lists every old address alongside the new page that replaces it, and it's what stops years of search visibility disappearing on launch day.

• Map page by page. Every page worth keeping needs its closest match on the new site. Don't send dozens of unrelated pages to the homepage because it's quicker.
• Use permanent redirects. Google recommends permanent server-side redirects such as 301 and 308, which tell it the new page should replace the old one. A temporary 302 redirect tells it the opposite.
• Point each old address straight to its final page. A chain of redirects, from the old page to an interim one and then to the new one, is slower for visitors and easy to break.
• Keep what made a page rank. If a page ranks well, keep its topic, its main headings and its useful content, even if the design changes completely. Carry over or improve its title tag and meta description too.
• Update your internal links. Google advises changing the links on the new site to point at the new addresses, rather than relying on redirects.
• Leave the redirects in place. Google's guidance is to keep them for as long as possible, and generally for at least a year.

Launch day checklist

• Test a sample of old addresses, starting with your most important pages, and check each one lands on the right new page.
• Make sure the new site isn't blocking search engines, which means checking robots.txt and removing any "noindex" tags left over from the staging site.
• Check that canonical tags point to the live addresses, not the staging ones.
• Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console. Google suggests submitting the old and new sitemaps while the move settles, then removing the old one.
• Test every enquiry form, phone link, booking tool and checkout on a phone and a desktop.
• Confirm your analytics and conversion tracking are recording visits and enquiries on the new site.

What to check in the weeks after launch

Google says to expect ranking fluctuations while it recrawls a moved site. On a medium-sized website, it can take a few weeks or more before Google starts showing the new addresses in place of the old ones. Some movement is normal, so compare against the numbers you saved before launch rather than reacting to every change.

• Check Search Console for pages returning "not found" errors, and redirect any old address you missed.
• Watch the search terms and pages you recorded before launch, and look closely at any that drop and stay down.
• Keep an eye on enquiries as well as rankings, because a site that ranks but has a broken form has still failed.

Common website redesign mistakes

• Leaving SEO until after launch. Redirects and content decisions have to be made while the site is being planned, not once traffic has already dropped.
• Choosing a platform because it's fashionable. Pick the one that suits how your team will edit the site and what it needs to do.
• Designing for looks alone. A site that looks good but doesn't bring in enquiries hasn't solved the problem.
• Adding features halfway through. Launch with what you need and add the rest once the site is live.
• Using stock photos for everything. Real photos of your team and your projects do far more for trust.

How we've handled redesigns for clients

We've rebuilt the website for Precise Events International twice, the second time on a platform the team can edit confidently themselves, and overhauled the SEO along the way. Enquiries through the site are now, conservatively, five to ten times what the original site brought in.

Crispy Green came to us after their previous agency locked them out of their own website. We recovered the site and kept the business trading, then moved the store to Shopify and carried across products, collections, customer records, past orders and images. You can see more examples of our website projects on our work page.

Planning a redesign?

Our team plans the web design and the SEO for a redesign together, so the redirect map is part of the project from the start. If you're not sure whether your site needs a redesign or a refresh, book a free website audit, delivered on a free 20-minute call, and we'll tell you which we'd do first.