Website redesign
Your current website has history: pages that rank, content people find useful and links pointing in from other sites. We redesign around that, keeping what's earning its place and replacing what isn't, so you get a modern site without throwing away years of groundwork.
01Signs it's time
Websites rarely break all at once. They drift: a bit slower each year, a bit further from what the business actually does. These are the signs we hear about most often.
Pinching to zoom, tiny buttons and menus that don't quite open.
Visitors don't wait around, and search engines notice too.
People still find the site, but fewer of them call or fill in the form.
You catch yourself telling new customers to ignore the website.
Your services have moved on and the website hasn't kept up.
Simple changes need a developer, or nobody can remember the login.
People compare, and a dated site can make a good business look behind the times.
Outdated plugins and unsupported software are a risk worth taking seriously.
Recognise three or more? It's probably worth a conversation. Get in touch
02Before and after
Calder Freight is a fictional logistics firm we use to show how we approach a redesign. Drag the slider, or use your arrow keys, to compare the original site with the new one.
Redesign concept for a fictional freight company
The old site asked visitors to download a quote form and fax it back. The redesign puts a four-field quote form at the top of the homepage.
"Welcome to our website" told nobody anything. The new headline says what the company does and why that matters to a customer.
Eight vague menu items became five clear ones, named after the services customers actually look for.
Small grey text in a fixed-width layout gave way to larger type and a design that adapts to phones.
Service descriptions were kept, rewritten and given pages of their own, with every old address redirected to its new home.
03Protecting your rankings
Most of the risk in a redesign has little to do with the design. It's about what happens to your existing pages on the day the new site goes live. This is how we handle it.
We crawl the current site and note which pages bring in visitors, which rank for useful searches and which have links from other websites.
Each existing page is kept, merged into a better page or retired properly. Nothing is simply deleted and left to return an error.
Old addresses point to their new equivalents, so visitors, bookmarks and search engines all land in the right place.
Page titles, headings and content that already perform are kept or improved, never rewritten just for the sake of it.
We test the redirects, submit an updated sitemap and keep a close eye on Google Search Console in the weeks after the switch.
04Refresh or rebuild?
Sometimes the structure is sound and the site needs a new look and better copy. Sometimes the foundations are the problem. We'll tell you which, and explain why.
05Redesign FAQs
Send us your current web address and we'll tell you honestly whether it needs a refresh, a rebuild or neither.
Ask for our viewIt can, which is why the migration matters as much as the design. By mapping old pages to new ones, setting up 301 redirects and keeping content that already performs, we keep disruption to a minimum. Some short-term movement is normal while Google re-crawls the site, and we watch Search Console after launch so any problems are caught early.
Yes. A redesign doesn't need to change your domain, and your email is usually separate from your website anyway. We check how your DNS is set up before launch so nothing gets disconnected by accident.
Yes, that describes most of the redesigns we take on. We'll need access to the current site, the hosting and the domain. If any of those logins have gone missing over the years, we'll help you track them down.
Not necessarily. We audit what's there and keep anything that's accurate and useful. Some pages usually need rewriting to suit the new structure, and we can do that for you if you'd rather not.
Yes. We build the redesign on a private staging link, so your current website carries on as normal until the new one is ready to switch over.
Not always. If your current platform is holding you back, a redesign is a sensible moment to move. If it's working well, staying put can keep things simpler. We'll weigh it up with you before anything is decided.
Related services
Start your redesign
Tell us what's not working with your current site and what you'd like it to do instead. We'll come back with honest advice on the best way forward.
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