Skip to content

All guides

By Younes El. · Published on · 8 min read

Website redesign: when to decide it and how to run it without losing your visitors

You know your site no longer fits, and you are afraid of breaking everything by rebuilding it. The fear is reasonable: a badly prepared redesign can erase years of visits in a week. Well run, it goes by without your visitors noticing, except that things work better.

Touch up, redesign or start over

These three words cover very different jobs, and many disappointments come from mixing them up. Touching up means changing texts, photos, a button, without touching the structure. Redesigning means reworking how pages are organised, the graphics and often the technology, while keeping what works: useful content, addresses that receive visits, the domain name. Starting over is for when nothing is worth keeping.

The right question is therefore not “should I redo my site?” but “what in my current site deserves to survive?”. To find out whether the time has come, the guide “The signs it is time to redesign your business website” details the technical, content and usage signals. This one picks up from there: the decision is made, so how do you go about it?

What to record before touching anything

A redesign starts with an inventory, and that is the part people are tempted to skip. It needs no expensive tool or special skill: it means writing down what exists before it disappears. Five records are enough for most sites.

  • The list of every address (URL) on the current site, including those that are not in the menu
  • The pages that receive visits from search engines, which Google Search Console shows for free
  • The content that does your selling: service pages, answers to frequent questions, projects
  • The access details: domain name, hosting, email, analytics accounts, with the name of the holder of each
  • The legal information shown today, to be carried over to the new site

Writing down what the new site must do

France Num, the French public portal for the digital transformation of businesses, recommends taking the time to define your goals before anything else: gaining visibility, building awareness, retaining customers, getting quote requests, selling online. Depending on the goal, you would not choose the same type of site. The same portal advises writing a brief from those needs, sending it to several professionals and comparing their answers.

A brief does not need to be a large document. Two pages are enough: who the site is for, what a visitor must be able to do in under a minute (call you, book, ask for a quote), the pages to keep, the functions needed (form, appointment booking, languages), and what you want to be able to edit yourself. The precision of the answers, the readability of the quote and the questions asked back will help you, says France Num, to spot the best candidate.

The same portal insists on a point that applies to a redesign as much as to a new build: make sure you will own your site and its domain name. Ask the question in writing before you sign.

The addresses: where redesigns lose their visitors

If pages change address in the redesign, every old address must send visitors to the new one. Otherwise someone following a link from another site, a bookmark or a search result lands on an error, and the search engine eventually forgets the page. Google’s documentation on site moves asks you to prepare a mapping between old and new addresses, then to configure the server to redirect each old address to its equivalent permanently (301 or 308 codes).

The same documentation lists several traps. Do not send dozens of old pages to a single home page or an unrelated page. Keep redirect chains short. Keep redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year. Submit a new sitemap in Search Console. And when the site was built on a test version, remove the blocks: Google notes that some owners block crawling or add “noindex” tags during development, and that you must remember to lift them at launch.

What to keep, rewrite or remove

Your starting records set the rule. A page that receives visits and persuades keeps its address and most of its text: you improve it without moving it. A page that receives visits but persuades poorly is rewritten at the same address. A page nobody visits and that serves no purpose can go, as long as you do not leave an error behind it: Google recommends returning a proper error for deleted or merged pages, rather than sending them all to the home page.

It is also the right moment to rewrite in your customers’ words. A text that describes a service with trade vocabulary, when the customer searches with everyday words, costs visits that technology will not win back.

Measure before, measure after

A redesign is judged on benchmarks, not on impressions. Google and its web.dev team publish three measures of page experience, the Core Web Vitals, with recommended thresholds: the main content should appear within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to an action within 200 milliseconds, and the layout should not jump (a shift score of 0.1 or less). These thresholds are measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, meaning three visits out of four, with mobile and desktop kept separate.

Record these three values on the old site before the redesign, then on the new one after. Also note the number of contact requests received per month: it is the only indicator that really matters for a small business.

What the new site must show from day one

A redesign is the chance to fix omissions, and not to create new ones. Legal notices first: Service-Public.fr states that every professional website must display notices for public information (publisher identity, contact details, host identity), and that failing to do so is punished. The exact content depends on your status, sole trader or company.

Then cookies. The CNIL, the French data protection authority, states that audience measurement trackers can be exempt from consent under precise conditions: purpose strictly limited to audience measurement, for the publisher’s exclusive account, and producing anonymous statistical data only. If your new site embeds tools that do not meet these conditions, prior consent is required. The GDPR guide covers this point.

After launch

Launch is not the end. Check that every form reaches your inbox, that the important old addresses redirect properly, that Search Console reports no new errors, and that the site displays correctly on a real phone, not just on a shrunken desktop window.

Do not panic at fluctuations in traffic during the first weeks. Google writes that any significant change to a site can cause ranking fluctuations while its crawlers re-explore the site, and that for a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more for the new addresses to gradually replace the old ones in results. That is normal; what is not normal is a fall that lasts, or pages that vanish: that points to a forgotten redirect.

Frequently asked questions

Should I change my domain name during a redesign?

No, unless there is a serious reason. Google states that a domain change requires extra steps in Search Console (the change of address tool) and redirects on every variant of the old name. Keeping your address preserves what other sites and your customers already know.

How long should I keep the redirects?

Google recommends keeping them as long as possible, generally at least a year, which gives its systems time to transfer signals to the new addresses. From a visitor’s point of view, they can be kept indefinitely.

Does a redesign make me lose my Google ranking?

It can cause temporary variations, which Google describes as normal while it re-explores the site. According to its documentation, permanent redirects do not lose link value: the risk comes mostly from forgotten addresses, blocks left over from the test version, and content deleted without a replacement.

What should a redesign brief contain?

Your goals, the target audience, what a visitor must be able to do, the pages to keep and their addresses, the functions needed, what you want to edit yourself, and the question of who owns the site and the domain. France Num recommends sending it to several professionals and comparing their answers.

Can I redesign in stages?

Yes. Google indicates that a site can be moved in sections. For a small site, redoing the most visited pages first, then the rest, limits risk and lets you check the effects before continuing.

Sources

WhatsAppopens in a new tab