A redesign is cheaper than a build, with one extra risk
Most of the expensive thinking already happened. You know who your customers
are, what you sell, and which pages matter — that discovery is what made the
first site cost what it did. A redesign starts from a business that has already
answered those questions.
What a redesign has that a new build does not is something to lose. Your site
ranks for things. People link to it. Pages have addresses that appear in emails,
in directories, and in Google. Change those carelessly and you spend six months
recovering ground you already held.
Decide which of the three you actually need
A refresh keeps the structure and changes the appearance. Same pages, same
addresses, better presentation. Right when the site works and simply looks
dated. Cheapest and lowest risk by a distance.
A redesign changes how the site is organised as well as how it looks.
Usually the honest answer when a business has added services over five years and
bolted each onto navigation designed for a smaller company. Nobody can find
anything, including you.
A rebuild moves to a different platform. Right when what you are on is
unsupported, insecure, or makes every change disproportionately expensive.
Ask each developer which they think you need before they quote. A firm that says
you need a refresh rather than a rebuild has just reduced their own invoice,
which tells you something.
The one deliverable to insist on
A redirect map. Every existing URL, mapped to where it now lives, signed off
before launch.
This is the single largest avoidable risk in a redesign and it is skipped
constantly. A site with a few dozen pages can lose most of its search traffic
overnight if the new structure quietly abandons the old addresses, and the
recovery takes months.
What good looks like:
- A crawl of the current site, kept as the record of what existed.
- Every URL mapped to its new home, or to the closest relevant page.
- Permanent redirects — 301, not 302 — so search engines transfer the value.
- Search Console watched daily for the first fortnight after launch.
- A named person responsible for fixing what appears in week two.
Ask each developer how they handled this on a site of your size. Experienced
ones start talking about it before you finish the question.
What people forget to ask about
Content migration. Does the quote include moving your existing pages, or are
you expected to re-enter them? On a site with sixty pages that is a real
difference and it is frequently unstated.
The things that were working. Your analytics, your tracking, your contact
forms, your booking widget, your newsletter signup. Each has to be reconnected,
and each is a small job that adds up. Write a list of everything currently
plugged into the site and hand it over with the brief.
Speed. A redesign is the cheapest opportunity you will get to fix
performance, because someone is already rebuilding the front end. If your
current site is slow, say so — it should be a requirement rather than a
surprise.
What is not changing. Being explicit about what stays saves money. If the
booking system works, say it stays. If the blog does not matter, say so.
Redesigning without a reason is expensive
Before spending anything, be able to answer: what is the site failing to do?
Good reasons:
- Enquiries have fallen, or were never good.
- Customers say they cannot find things, or your own staff cannot.
- It does not work properly on a phone, which is most of your traffic.
- The platform is out of support and cannot be secured.
- You have changed what you sell and the site describes the old business.
Not reasons on their own: a new person dislikes it, or a competitor launched
something. Redesigns driven by taste tend to move things without improving
anything, and the numbers afterwards say so.
Measure it, before and after
Agree the measures during quoting, not after launch:
- Enquiries per month.
- Organic search sessions, by page group.
- Rankings for the handful of terms that matter to you.
- Core Web Vitals on real user data.
- Bounce and time on the pages you care about.
Field data updates over a month, so the real verdict arrives four weeks after
launch. Knowing the before numbers is what makes that conversation possible.
Getting five quotes
Describe the current site, say what it is failing to do, and list what is
plugged into it. Up to five developers can respond. It is free and there is no
obligation.
The proposals that mention redirects, content migration and measurement without
being prompted are the ones worth reading twice.