Website redesign

Reasons to redesign a website

• It displays badly on a phone. Text you have to pinch to read, a menu that cannot be used, a form running off the edge of the screen. More than half your visitors arrive from a phone: they leave before reading the first line.
• It takes more than three seconds to load. That is a ranking factor for Google, and — more to the point — the moment the visitor hits the back button.
• It was badly built in the first place. A previous provider left you with a site that is unattractive, poorly structured, perhaps buggy. This is not a matter of taste: a visitor who cannot find what they came for, or who hits an error, closes the tab and calls your competitor.
• It no longer converts. Traffic, but no calls and no enquiries. The problem is rarely the design at that point: it is a journey that leads nowhere.
• It is more than five years old. Habits, screen sizes and Google's criteria have each changed twice in the meantime.

How we go about it

• Diagnosis. We look at what exists: what works, what holds it back, what is worth keeping. Free, with no obligation.
• Redirect plan. Drawn up before any development, page by page: every address on the old site is 301-redirected to its equivalent, and not one ends on an error page. We record your existing positions beforehand and identify the content that earns them, so that it is carried over rather than started from a blank page. This is the invisible part of the work, and the part that makes the difference.
• Rebuild. The new site is developed while the old one stays online: your business does not stop for the duration of the works. And it is built with you:
  • from the start of the project you get an address where the site in progress can be viewed;
  • every change is published there as it happens: you browse and test the site whenever you want, with nothing to install;
  • you send us your feedback on it, and we make the corrections;
  • you see the changes online, and you sign them off — or not.
  Working this closely saves time on both sides, and nothing is discovered on switch-over day.
• Switch-over and monitoring. Going live, submitting the sitemap, checking indexing and positions in the weeks that follow.

Maintenance optional

A redesign needs watching differently from a new site, and for longer. The redirects have to keep answering, old addresses must not reappear as errors, and rankings take a few weeks to carry over to the new URLs: that is where earned search visibility is won or lost. We follow those three things in Search Console, alongside routine upkeep — security, backups, certificate. It is an option, never a compulsory subscription: the site is yours from the day it goes live.

Frequently asked