Website Redesign: 7 Signs It’s Time and How Not to Lose SEO

A website redesign isn’t just a new look. A good redesign changes what stops the site from working: structure, navigation, the mobile version, speed, the CMS. A bad one changes the visuals, loses page addresses and throws away Google rankings the site built up over years.

Below: seven signs your website is outdated, how a redesign differs from a new site, how to redesign without losing SEO, and what the process looks like.

7 signs your website is outdated

1. It’s awkward to use on a phone. Tiny text, buttons that are hard to hit, a menu that won’t open. Most visitors come from phones. How to check this in 15 minutes is in our article on responsive design.
2. It’s slow. PageSpeed Insights shows red scores on mobile, and pages take several seconds to open. What to do about it is in our article on website loading speed.
3. The site doesn’t match what the company has become. There are new services, the market or positioning has shifted, you’ve rebranded, but the site still describes the company as it was five years ago.
4. There’s nowhere to add anything new. To add a new line of business or a catalogue, you have to break the structure or bolt on yet another page “on the side”.
5. Content can’t be changed without a developer. Updating a price or adding a news item means writing to a developer and waiting.
6. The design looks older than your competitors’. People compare several sites in a minute, and a dated look reads as “this company isn’t moving forward”. To see how actively your competitors are growing in search, use the tools from our article on how to check a competitor’s website traffic.
7. It’s on its last legs technically. An old CMS version, plugins that no longer get updates, browser warnings. That’s a question of website security, not aesthetics.

One or two signs call for targeted fixes. Three or more usually mean patching costs more than updating.

First impressions: why design affects trust

A website is often the first contact with a company. Within a few seconds a person decides whether they’re in the right place and whether you look like you know what you’re doing. It isn’t “beauty” that decides it, but a few simple things:

• it’s clear what you do and for whom, from the first-screen heading, without scrolling;
• it’s obvious where to go next: the menu is logical and the enquiry button is visible;
• the design matches the company’s level: an industrial company with international supply chains on a free template feels off;
• everything is recognisably your brand: the colours, fonts, photos and tone of the copy match what people see in your presentations and on social media.

Redesign or a new website

That’s what happened with the car leasing company A-Finance: after a rebrand, the company had outgrown its old site. The new one got a broader structure with room for expansion, a design following the new brand book, a car catalogue with filters, a blog and lead collection into the CRM. For Tregora, a redesign became necessary when the company entered a new stage: the site had to present it both as a raw materials supplier and as a logistics partner, so the structure was expanded and the navigation and calls to action were rethought.

How not to lose SEO in a redesign

The most expensive redesign mistake is invisible on launch day. The old page addresses that search results, bookmarks and links from other sites pointed to start returning a 404 error after the move. Rankings and traffic disappear within a few weeks.

We learned this the hard way. After changes to our own site, some old article addresses and the old address of our tool for front-end developers started returning 404. Search Console showed that these addresses had brought most of the site’s clicks over its history: the tool alone accounted for 85% of all clicks. We gathered all such addresses and set up redirects, but it’s better to do that before launch, not after.

What to do, following Google’s recommendations on moving a site with URL changes:

1. Collect all old addresses. From the sitemap, Search Console (pages with impressions over the last year) and Google Analytics. Don’t forget files, images and addresses no longer in the menu but still linked to.
2. Build an “old address → new address” table. Every old page should lead to the closest new page by content, not to the home page.
3. Set up permanent 301 redirects in a single hop, without chains. Keep them for at least a year, ideally forever.
4. Keep what works. Pages that rank shouldn’t be rewritten from scratch or given a new topic: keep the main content and queries, improve the presentation.
5. Carry over technical SEO: page titles and descriptions, canonicals, structured data, language versions, the sitemap.
6. Check after launch. Go through the old addresses in your table and watch the indexing report and 404 errors in Search Console for the first few weeks.

Google warns that after significant changes, rankings may fluctuate for several weeks while the site is re-indexed. That’s normal. What isn’t normal is traffic that drops and doesn’t come back: that usually means lost addresses or pages that lost their content in the redesign.

How a redesign works

1. Analysis. What works on the current site and what doesn’t: analytics data, search queries, the questions customers ask your sales team.
2. Structure. A new page map that allows for the company’s growth several years ahead.
3. Prototypes and design. First the layout of blocks, then the visual design, for desktop and mobile.
4. Content. Updated copy, photos, case studies. How to prepare it is in our article on website content creation.
5. Development, plus carrying over SEO and redirects.
6. Launch and monitoring in the first weeks.

What an update costs depends on what exactly changes. A full redesign is close to a new site in scope; price guidelines are in our article on how much a website costs. And if the problem isn’t the design but the fact that the site brings few enquiries, start with a UX audit: sometimes targeted changes are enough.