Most redesigns lose rankings. Not because the new site is worse — because nobody mapped the old URLs, and everything you’d earned pointed at 404s. We do that work first, then rebuild.
Four failure modes, all preventable, all common.
Your old /services/roof-repair became /what-we-do. Every link pointing at the old address now hits a 404, and years of accumulated authority evaporates. This is the single biggest cause of post-redesign traffic loss.
A blog post from 2021 quietly brought in a third of your organic traffic. Nobody checked before the rebuild cut it for looking dated. You can’t protect what you never measured.
Big hero videos, five webfonts, a slider nobody uses. It looks better in a screenshot and loses visitors on mobile data. Speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor.
Traffic drops after launch. Was it the redesign, seasonality, or an algorithm update? Without before-numbers, nobody can tell — so nobody can fix it.
The first week of a redesign shouldn’t involve any design.
Every page currently on the site, from the sitemap, Search Console and a crawl. You cannot redirect what you haven’t found, and there are always more pages than anyone expects.
Each old URL mapped to its closest equivalent — one permanent redirect, no chains, no blanket redirect to the homepage. Pages with no real equivalent get an honest 404 rather than a misleading hop.
Traffic, rankings, indexed pages and load speed captured before anything changes, so the effect of the redesign is measurable instead of arguable.
Which pages earn traffic, which convert, which are dead weight. Winners carry across. The rest get merged or dropped deliberately, not by accident.
Hand-coded, fast, security-hardened, mobile-first — the same build standard as any custom web design project.
We check the redirects resolved, coverage held, and speed improved — then compare against the baseline. If something slipped, we find it while it’s still fixable.
This is the same process we ran on our own site — URL inventory, redirect map, baseline, rebuild, re-measure. Mobile load time went from 4.1 seconds to 1.5. We didn’t guess at that; we measured it before and after.
It can — that’s the most common failure. It happens when URLs change without redirects, ranking content gets cut, or the new site is slower. All three are avoidable, and avoiding them is most of what we do first.
Same as a new build: $2,500–$4,500. A redesign isn’t cheaper — migrating content and preserving search equity is real work, and skipping it is what causes the drop.
Yes, and usually you should. Pages that already earn traffic are assets. We find which ones work and carry them across instead of rewriting for the sake of it.
No. Keeping your domain is strongly preferred — that’s where your search history lives. If your current platform holds the registration, sorting that out is step one.
About six weeks, plus a week up front for the URL inventory and redirect map. Sites with hundreds of pages take longer, mostly in the mapping.
Check the term, the notice period, and who holds the domain. We can build in parallel and cut over when you’re free. For law firms specifically, see for law firms.
The free audit checks speed, mobile, and technical SEO in about 60 seconds. Then we’ll tell you honestly whether you need a rebuild or just a few fixes.