Website Redesign Guide: When to Rebuild and What to Keep

If your site was built five or six years ago, you are probably reading this for a reason: something stopped working. It looks bad on a phone, it is slow, or changing one line of text means calling somebody. This guide answers two questions: when should you redesign, and how do you keep your rankings, content and domain while doing it?

Signs your site needs a redesign

If two or three of these describe your site, the time has come:

• On a phone the text stays tiny, the menu breaks, buttons cannot be tapped. Most visitors arrive from a phone, so a broken mobile site is your costliest problem.
• Visitors watch a white screen for seconds before the page appears. A slow site loses visitors and Google at once.
• There is no management panel: changing one phone number means calling whoever built the site, and you may not reach them any more.
• The browser shows a "not secure" warning in the address bar.
• You cannot add a new service, product or page; the site is frozen the way it launched.
• The design does not represent your business: the impression you leave in person and the one the site leaves do not match.

None of these are cosmetic. Each is a technical gap that costs you customers.

What you keep when you redesign

A redesign does not mean throwing everything away. Four things are always kept:

1. Your domain. The address on your business card, in Google's records and in your customers' heads for years stays; only the site published at it changes.
2. Your Google rankings. The positions the old site holds are earned: moved correctly they are kept, moved badly they melt away in weeks.
3. Content that works. Well written service descriptions, blog posts and client texts move over, revised as needed.
4. Your accounts. Analytics, Search Console, your maps listing: these belong to you, not to the site, and carry on unchanged.

Redesigning without losing SEO: 301 redirects

Google knows your site page by page. If your services page lives at yoursite.com/our-services.html, that is the address Google has indexed. Move the content to yoursite.com/services, leave the old address hanging, and Google sees a 404: the value that page built over the years disappears.

The fix is simple, but it takes discipline:

• Before launch, every URL on the old site is listed; Search Console and the sitemap are enough.
• Each old address is permanently redirected to its counterpart with a 301 code, the official way of telling Google "this page moved, carry its value to the new address".
• Pages with no counterpart go to the closest related page.
• After launch, the new sitemap is submitted and the 404 report in Search Console is watched for a few weeks.

Skip these steps and losing rankings is near guaranteed; take them and Google digests the move in weeks.

Moving the content

Moving content is more than copy and paste. Old text is reflowed to fit the new layout. Images are usually low resolution and need replacing, or at least compressing. Page titles and description tags are kept exactly or improved on purpose. Blog posts move with their dates; years of writing can be your most valuable asset in Google.

The redesign process step by step

A typical project runs like this:

1. Inventory: every page, URL and most visited content is listed.
2. Plan: the new page structure is set, along with what moves and what gets rewritten.
3. Build: the new site is prepared at a separate test address. The old site stays live; visitors notice nothing.
4. Redirect map: old URLs are matched to new ones and the 301 list is prepared.
5. Testing: mobile layout, forms, speed and redirects are checked.
6. Switch: the domain is pointed at the new site.
7. Follow up: errors are watched in Search Console and small corrections made.

What launch day looks like

The question people ask most: what happens in between?

In a properly planned switch there is no downtime. The new site is already built and tested; on launch day the only thing done is pointing the domain at it. That spreads within a few hours, and in those hours some visitors see the old site and some the new one; since both work, nothing breaks.

A full backup of the old site is taken beforehand, so going back is always possible. After the switch, check that forms really work and e-mails arrive; that is the detail most often missed.

What does a redesign cost?

A redesign is usually priced like a build from scratch, because the old code is rarely reused. That is a good thing: that code is the source of your complaints. What moves is the content and what it has earned, not the code.

At Oktoks a corporate website is live within 1 week for $1,200 + VAT, and a single page site starts at $500 + VAT; prices are open on the pricing page. Every project is handed over with a management panel and the source code belongs to you, so the next redesign depends on nobody.

To start, send your web address and your complaints through the quote form; we will look at the current site and tell you concretely what stays and what changes.