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Starting again

Website redesign and migration

The dangerous part of a redesign is not the design. It is everything the old site had earned that a careless launch throws away.

old site301links keptnew site

We know this one from the inside. The site you are reading replaced our own, which ran on jQuery and Bootstrap and had not been touched in years. It still worked. It was slow, it was hard to change, and its certificate had lapsed.

The common way a redesign goes wrong is traffic. The new site launches, URLs change, nothing redirects, and three months of rankings evaporate. This is recoverable but it is a miserable quarter, and it is entirely avoidable.

So we map every existing URL to its new address before launch, keep the ones that earn traffic, and watch Search Console closely for the first few weeks.

What the work covers

Included in every redesign & migration project.

  • Audit of what you have

    Which pages get traffic, which rank, which have links pointing at them. That list decides what must survive the move.

  • URL mapping and redirects

    Every old address mapped to a new one and served as a permanent redirect. Nothing left to a guess or a generic homepage bounce.

  • Content migration

    Text, images and documents brought across, with the images re optimised on the way through.

  • Design brought up to date

    Modern layout and typography without discarding the recognition you have built. Familiar, not frozen.

  • Staged launch

    The new site reviewed on a preview URL that search engines cannot index, then switched over at a quiet hour with the old version ready to restore.

  • Watched after launch

    Crawl errors, index coverage and rankings monitored for the first weeks, when problems are still cheap to fix.

Questions

Asked often enough to answer here.

If yours is not here, the general questions page covers how we work, or you can just ask.

Will a redesign hurt my Google rankings?

It does when redirects are skipped. Done properly, with every old URL pointing at its new home and the content intact, rankings usually hold and often improve once the site gets faster. There is normally a small dip for two to four weeks while Google recrawls.

Can we keep some of the old site?

Yes. Pages that rank well are worth keeping almost as they are, at the same address, with only the layout updated. There is no reason to rewrite something that is already working.

How long is the changeover?

The switch itself takes minutes, since it is a DNS or deployment change. The preparation is the project. For a typical business site, plan on four to eight weeks from start to launch.