How to Redesign a Website

A redesign is supposed to make a site better. Often it makes it disappear from search for months. The usual cause is not the new design itself but everything that changed alongside it: pages renamed, content cut, sections reorganized, all in the same launch. This guide explains how to redesign a site and keep what it has earned. It is part of our guide to website maintenance.

Decide what kind of change this is

Before anything else, be honest about the scope. There are three different projects that often get called a redesign:

• A visual redesign: new colors, type, layout and images. Same pages, same addresses, same content.
• A restructure: pages grouped differently, menus changed, addresses changed. See our guide to site architecture.
• A rewrite: content replaced or substantially changed.

Google’s guidance on site moves puts the principle plainly: “Change only one thing at a time.” Its own example is moving to a new domain, changing content management system and updating the layout, which it says should be done one at a time. The same logic applies here. If you change the design, the structure and the content in one launch and traffic falls, you cannot tell which change caused it, so you cannot fix it.

The rest of this guide assumes a visual redesign. If you need all three, do them in sequence, with a few weeks between each.

Step 1: Inventory every address

Make a list of every page on the current site, with its address, its title, its traffic and the number of links pointing to it from other sites. Your XML sitemap, Search Console and a site crawler between them will give you this. The inventory is the most important document in the project, because it is how you will check, after launch, that nothing went missing.

Mark the pages that matter most: the ones with the most visits, the most links and the most conversions. These get checked first and most carefully.

Step 2: Keep the addresses

The safest redesign is one in which every address stays exactly the same. That is entirely possible for a visual redesign: the design changes, the pages do not move.

If some addresses must change, map each old address to its new one, one by one. Google’s guidance is to use server-side permanent redirects, such as 301 or 308, and to keep them “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year”, so that signals transfer to the new addresses. Redirect each page to its true equivalent, never everything to the home page.

Step 3: Keep the content

Carry every page’s content across intact: text, headings, images, alt text, titles, meta descriptions and structured data. Redesigns lose content in quiet ways, such as a section dropped because it did not fit the new layout, or headings flattened into styled text. Search engines notice those changes even when people do not.

Step 4: Build on a staging copy

Build the new design on a private copy of the site, not on the live one, and keep that copy out of search engines while you work on it. Test it on real phones, not just a resized browser window.

Step 5: Check speed before launch

A new design is a new set of images, fonts and scripts, and it can easily be slower than the old one. Check your main page types against Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds: a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured for most visitors rather than on your own connection.

Step 6: Check every page, then launch

Go through the inventory before launch and confirm, for each address:

• the page exists and looks right on a phone and a large screen;
• the content, headings and images are all there;
• the title, description and structured data came across;
• internal links point to the right pages;
• if the address changed, the old one redirects to it.

Then launch, ideally at a quiet time for your site, and run the same check on the live site.

Step 7: Watch, and keep the old version

For the weeks after launch, watch Search Console for errors, pages dropping out of the index and changes in clicks. Google notes that for medium-sized sites, it can take a few weeks or more for changes to settle after a move, and longer for large ones. Some movement is normal; a steady decline is a sign that something was missed. Keep a full backup of the old site until you are sure.

Common mistakes

• Redesigning, restructuring and rewriting in one launch.
• Redirecting every old page to the home page.
• Dropping content that “did not fit the design”.
• Forgetting the archive: a new design applied to the home page and a few templates, while hundreds of older articles keep the old look.
• Leaving the staging site open to search engines.
• Launching on a Friday afternoon.

Where our product fits

We make SiteRenewer, which carries out a visual renewal across an entire site, including large archives, without touching addresses or content. That is exactly the kind of change this guide recommends making on its own. It is our product, so weigh this mention accordingly; the steps above work with any approach.