The risk nobody mentions
The most common way a redesign goes wrong is not the design. It is the launch day when every old page address stops working. Visitors from Google land on error pages, links from other sites go nowhere, and enquiries quietly drop off. It can take months to recover, and some businesses never notice why.
When we audited the website of MML Law, a Dundee firm of solicitors, we found that a large share of its search traffic was already landing on pages that no longer existed, such as sold property listings and old home reports. We redirected more than 170 of those retired addresses to the right live pages. For Tannadice Motors we rebuilt the whole site and kept every existing page at exactly the same address.
How we run a redesign
- Inventory. We list every page your current site has, and every address Google and other sites send people to, including ones that already return errors.
- Decide what stays. Pages that bring in visits or enquiries are kept or improved. Thin or duplicate pages are merged.
- Design and build on a private staging copy you can click through before anything changes.
- Redirect map. Every old address that changes is pointed at its new home with a permanent redirect.
- Launch and check. We switch over, test the redirects, submit the new sitemap to Google and Bing and watch Search Console for the following weeks.
Redesign or repair?
Not every tired site needs rebuilding. Sometimes new photos, faster hosting and a few rewritten pages do more for less. If that is the case, we will tell you. Our website launch checklist is a good read either way.