Website redesign

Who it is for

A redesign is for a business that already has a website with some history: pages that have been indexed for years, a few that bring in steady search traffic, and links from suppliers, trade bodies and local directories. That describes most established Suffolk firms, from family engineering companies on the A14 corridor to solicitors in Bury St Edmunds and haulage firms that have been running out of Felixstowe for decades.

The site may look dated, be hard to edit, or no longer describe the business. Many manufacturers we meet have moved into new markets, added processes or changed their customer base, while the website still describes the company of ten years ago. Freeport East and the new logistics parks along the A14, such as Gateway 14 near Stowmarket, have brought new opportunities that older sites do not mention at all.

The aim of a redesign is to fix all of that without losing what the old site quietly earned.

Why redesigns go wrong

The most common thing we see after a redesign done elsewhere is a quiet fall in enquiries a few weeks after launch. The new site looks better, but:

• Old page addresses now return errors, so Google drops them and visitors from old links hit a dead end.
• Pages that ranked well were cut because they looked untidy or were thought unimportant.
• Useful detail was trimmed to fit a minimalist design.
• Page titles and headings were rewritten without checking what they ranked for.
• The new site is heavier and slower than the old one.

All of these are avoidable with an audit before design starts and a careful launch.

Step by step

1. Crawl the current site. We record every URL, title, heading, internal link, image and redirect. Sites are often bigger than their owners think: old news posts, PDF brochures and orphaned pages all turn up.
2. Find what earns traffic. With Search Console access we see which pages bring visitors, which search terms they appear for, and which pages other sites link to. Those pages are protected.
3. Talk to the people who take enquiries. Sales and office staff know which questions come up and which pages customers mention. That shapes the new page plan.
4. Write the new page plan. Keep, improve, merge or retire, decided page by page and agreed with you.
5. Map old to new. Every old address that matters gets a matching new page or a permanent 301 redirect. The map is a spreadsheet you can see.
6. Design and build. As for a new website design: mobile first, real copy, tested for speed and accessibility.
7. Staging review. You review the whole site on a private address. We run a crawl of the staging site against the old one to catch missing pages and broken links.
8. Launch. Redirects go live with the site, the sitemap is resubmitted and we request indexing of key pages.
9. Watch. For the first six to eight weeks we check Search Console for crawl errors, dropped pages and ranking changes, and fix anything that slips.

How long it takes

Most redesigns take six to ten weeks. The audit and redirect map add about a week compared with a new site, and the post-launch monitoring runs for around two months afterwards. Large sites with hundreds of products or years of news content take longer, mainly because decisions about old content take time.

What drives the cost

• Size of the existing site. More URLs means a larger audit and redirect map.
• How much content is rewritten. Keeping good copy is cheaper than rewriting everything, and often better for search.
• Platform change. Moving from one system to another, for example from an old WordPress theme to a lighter build, takes more work than a redesign on the same platform.
• Integrations. Forms, CRMs, booking or stock systems that need reconnecting.
• Brand work. A redesign does not need a rebrand. If you want one, it is quoted separately.

Common mistakes

• Treating the redesign as a fresh start. Search history is an asset. Throwing it away means starting again.
• Removing pages because they are "old". An old page that still ranks and brings enquiries should be improved, not deleted.
• Launching on a Friday. Launch early in the week so problems can be fixed while people are around.
• Forgetting email and DNS. Changing hosting can break email if DNS records are not copied properly.
• No benchmark. Without figures from before launch there is no way to tell whether the redesign helped.

What we need from you

A redesign goes faster and safer when we have the right access from the start. Before the audit we ask for:

• Admin access to the current site, or at least an export of its content.
• Google Search Console access, so we can see which pages and searches bring visitors. If it was never set up, we set it up and work from a crawl and analytics instead.
• Analytics access, if you have it, to see which pages lead to enquiries.
• Domain and hosting logins, or the name of whoever controls them. A surprising number of Suffolk firms find their domain registered to a former employee or a previous agency, and sorting that out early avoids a stressful launch day.
• A list of what annoys you about the current site, and what customers say about it.

We also ask who will approve the page plan and the copy. Redesigns stall most often when decisions about old content wait for someone who was not involved. Naming one decision maker at the start keeps the project moving, and we keep a written log of every page kept, merged or retired so nobody has to remember why.

If your business has changed since the old site was built, such as new premises, new services or a move into new markets, tell us early. Those changes usually decide the new page plan more than the design does.

How we measure it

Before launch we record a benchmark: search clicks and impressions for the last few months, top landing pages, enquiries per month and Core Web Vitals. After launch we compare like for like at four weeks, eight weeks and three months. Short-term fluctuation is normal while Google re-crawls a site. What matters is that the trend recovers quickly and then improves, and that enquiries are as good or better in quality.

Keeping your brand: a redesign rarely needs a new logo. If customers know your colours and name, we work with them and put the effort into structure, speed and clarity, which is where the enquiries come from.