A website redesign is worth doing when your current site is costing you enquiries, and the biggest risk in one is rarely the design. It’s losing the Google rankings the old site spent years earning. Most rankings lost in a redesign go for avoidable reasons: pages renamed without redirects, a dated-looking page deleted even though it was quietly bringing in half the traffic, a test setting left switched on at launch.
I run Future Faced, a brand and web design studio in Southampton, and I build the website and run the SEO on it. A redesign is the point where those two jobs meet. This guide covers when a redesign is worth it, what it costs, and the method I use to move a site without losing what it has earned.
Should you redesign your website?
Redesign when the website is holding the business back, not when you’re tired of looking at it. These are the signs that usually mean it’s time:
- People visit but don’t get in touch. Traffic without enquiries is the most expensive problem a website can have, because you’re paying to attract people and then losing them. I’ve written a separate piece on why a website gets visitors but no enquiries.
- You can’t change it yourself. Every new price, photo or team member means emailing someone and waiting for an invoice.
- It’s slow on a phone. Plenty of people will judge you on a phone before they ever see the desktop version.
- The business has moved on and the site hasn’t. You sell different things now, to different people, and the website still describes the business you were three years ago.
If only one of these applies, you may not need a full redesign. That’s worth working out before you spend anything.
How often should you redesign a website?
Redesign when one of the signs above shows up, not on a fixed schedule. You’ll see “every two to three years” quoted a lot, and it’s a reasonable prompt to take a hard look at the site. Treat it as a check rather than a rule. A site built well five years ago can still be doing its job perfectly, and one built badly last year might need replacing already.
Redesign, refresh or rebuild: which do you need?
A refresh changes how the site looks, a redesign changes how it works, and a rebuild replaces what it’s built on.
| What changes | SEO risk | |
|---|---|---|
| Refresh | Colours, fonts, images, some copy. Same pages, same URLs | Low |
| Redesign | Layout, page structure, navigation, often the content | Medium. URLs and content usually change |
| Rebuild | The platform underneath, for example Wix to WordPress | Highest. Almost every URL changes |
The risk column is the one people skip. A refresh almost never hurts rankings because nothing Google relies on moves. A rebuild moves nearly everything, so it needs the most care. If you’re weighing up a platform change, my Wix vs WordPress comparison covers what moving actually involves.
How much does a website redesign cost in the UK?
A website redesign costs about the same as a new website, because most of the work is the same: planning, design, build and content. At Future Faced, websites start from £2,000, with the price fixed before anything starts so there’s no meter running.
The things that push the price up are mostly predictable:
- How many pages need designing and building
- Whether the content is being rewritten or moved across as it is
- Functionality such as booking, a shop or a members area
- How much the old site ranks for. More ranking pages means more mapping and more redirects to get right
For a full breakdown of UK prices by who builds the site, see how much a website costs in the UK.
Will a redesign affect my SEO?
Yes. A redesign can affect your SEO in either direction, and done carelessly it’s one of the fastest ways to lose rankings. The usual causes:
- URLs change with no redirects. Google’s record of your old pages now points at nothing, and whatever those pages had built up goes with them.
- Content that ranked gets cut. The page looked dated, so it went. It was also the page answering the question half your visitors were searching.
- The test site stays hidden after launch. Sites are built with a setting that tells Google to stay away. If nobody switches it off, the new site disappears from search.
- Internal links break. Menus and in-text links still point at old addresses.
Done properly, a redesign usually holds rankings through a short period of movement while Google recrawls, and often improves them, because the new site is faster and better organised.
How to redesign a website without losing SEO
This is the method I follow, in this order. Steps 1 to 3 happen before any design work starts.
- Record where you are now. Export the last twelve months from Google Search Console: the pages that get clicks and impressions, and the searches they appear for. This is your baseline and your list of pages that must survive.
- List every URL on the old site. Not just the ones in the menu. Old blog posts, PDFs and forgotten landing pages often carry links from other sites. A crawler like Screaming Frog will list them, and the free version covers up to 500 URLs.
- Decide what happens to each URL. Keep the same address where you can. Where a page moves, it gets a 301 redirect to its new home. Where pages merge, redirect each one to the closest match. Don’t redirect everything to the homepage: Google tends to treat that as a dead page anyway.
- Keep the content that ranks. Rewrite it if it needs it, but keep the topic, the questions it answers and the words people actually search.
- Build on a hidden test site, then unhide it at launch. In WordPress that’s the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box under Settings, then Reading. It needs to be ticked during the build and unticked on launch day.
- Set up and test every redirect before go-live. Click through the old URLs and check each one lands where it should.
- Check the basics on launch day. Page titles and meta descriptions carried across, sitemap submitted in Search Console, internal links pointing at new addresses rather than through redirects, and your Google Business Profile linking to the right page.
- Watch Search Console weekly for two months. Look for pages Google can’t find, compare clicks and impressions with your baseline, and fix anything that’s dropped out.
A real example: when I rebuilt the Future Faced homepage this autumn, the page went from 20.4 MB to 2.69 MB and desktop PageSpeed went from 51 to 96. Impressions dipped for about five days while Google recrawled, then recovered past where they started. That dip is normal. A drop that’s still there after a month is not, and means something in the list above was missed.
Website redesign checklist
Before
– Search Console export saved as a baseline
– Full list of old URLs
– Decision recorded for every URL: keep, redirect or merge
– Ranking pages identified and protected
During
– Test site hidden from search
– Content that ranks kept, rewritten carefully if at all
– Redirects built and tested
Launch day
– Search visibility switched back on
– Sitemap submitted
– Titles and meta descriptions in place
– Internal links and Google Business Profile updated
After
– Search Console checked weekly for eight weeks
– Missing pages and errors fixed as they appear
How long does a website redesign take?
A typical small business redesign takes six to eight weeks, and content is almost always what sets the pace rather than design or build. The SEO steps above add very little time if they’re planned from the start, and a lot of cleanup if they’re left until after launch.
If you’re planning a redesign and want the rankings to come through it intact, that’s exactly the work I do: web design in Southampton, with the SEO built in from the first page rather than added afterwards. If your current site was built by someone else, the £75 takeover audit is a sensible first step. I go through what’s there, what ranks and what would need protecting, and the fee is credited against your first three months if you move to a care plan.
