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Design & Build

Redesigning a site that isn't working

Rebuilding a site that exists, without losing what it has already earned. The design is the visible part and the easy part. The part that decides whether a redesign helps or hurts is what happens to the URLs, the content that was already ranking, and the pages nobody remembered were there.

How it runs

What actually happens, in order

  1. Inventory every URL that exists

    Week 1

    Crawl the current site and pull the full list from Search Console and Analytics — the three sources disagree, and the pages missing from the crawl are usually the ones still bringing in traffic. Nothing gets deleted before it appears on this list with a decision against it.

  2. Find out which pages are actually working

    Week 1

    Which URLs have impressions, which have links pointing at them, which convert. Some of them will be pages you would never have guessed and would have cut on instinct. This list becomes the constraint the redesign is built inside.

  3. Map old to new, one row per URL

    Week 2

    Every existing URL gets a destination on the new site or an explicit decision to remove it. This is a spreadsheet, it is boring, and it is the entire difference between a redesign that holds rankings and one that does not.

  4. Design and build

    Weeks 2–5

    The new site, using the content that was working rather than rewriting it for style. Copy that ranks is often plainer than a designer would like; rewriting it to sound better is one of the commonest ways rankings are lost in a redesign.

  5. Launch, then watch

    Week 5, then a month

    Redirects go live with the site, not after. Then Search Console is checked daily for the first fortnight: coverage errors, redirect chains, pages that dropped out of the index. Most redirect problems are visible within days and fixable in minutes if anyone is looking.

Scope

What is included — and what is not

Both lists, because the second one is where projects go wrong and almost nobody publishes it.

  • Full URL inventory from crawl, Search Console and Analytics together
  • A published redirect map — one row per old URL, no exceptions
  • Preservation of the content and headings that are already ranking
  • Design and build of the new site
  • Search Console monitoring for the first month after launch, with fixes included
  • Structured data and metadata carried across or improved, never dropped
  • Recovering rankings lost in a previous redesign someone else did — that is diagnosable but it is an audit, not a redesign
  • New content for pages that did not exist before, unless we agree it in scope

Straight answers

Questions people actually ask

Will I lose my rankings?
Not if the redirect map is done properly, and yes if it is not. That is the honest answer. The traffic drop people describe after a redesign is almost never the design — it is a set of URLs that changed with nothing pointing the old address at the new one, so Google finds a page that used to rank and now returns a 404.
My traffic collapsed after my last redesign. Can it be recovered?
Usually a good part of it, and the sooner the better. The fix is to reconstruct the old URL list from Search Console and archive.org, redirect what is still being requested, and reinstate content that was cut. Recovery is slower than prevention and rarely complete, but it is real.
Can I keep my current design and just fix what is broken?
Often yes, and we will say so before quoting a redesign. If the problems are speed, metadata, structure and mobile layout, that is fixable on the site you have for a fraction of a rebuild. Run the free audit — it will tell you which situation you are in.
What about the pages I want to delete?
Deleting is fine as long as it is a decision rather than an accident. A page with no traffic and no links can go, redirected to the nearest relevant page. What causes damage is deleting the page nobody realized was bringing in a third of the organic inquiries.
How long before traffic settles after launch?
Two to six weeks for Google to recrawl and settle on the new URLs for most small sites. A brief dip in that window is normal. A sustained drop past six weeks means something is wrong and is worth investigating rather than waiting out.

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