Website Redesign.

Most redesigns lose the rankings the old site had spent years earning.

This is the part nobody warns you about. A new site goes live, it looks far better, everyone is pleased, and six weeks later the enquiries have dried up. The design was never the problem. The problem was that every URL changed, nothing was mapped across, and Google quietly started again from nothing.

We’re a family-run agency in Heathfield and we’ve been building websites since 1997. Website redesign services are the one job where what you protect matters as much as what you build, so this page is mostly about the protecting.

What actually breaks, in the order it usually happens.

The URLs change and nobody maps them. Your old /services/web-design/ becomes /what-we-do/websites/, the old address returns a 404, and every link and every year of accumulated signal pointing at it goes nowhere.

Pages quietly vanish. A rebuild that goes from forty pages to twelve usually means twenty-eight pages that were ranking for something have gone, and nobody checked which ones earned anything first.

The 404s get sent to the homepage. It feels tidy and it is worse than a 404, because Google treats a homepage redirect from an unrelated URL as a soft 404 and gives it nothing.

The titles get rewritten for looks. A page titled ‘Web Design in Sussex’ becomes ‘Our Work’, and the term it was ranking for is no longer on the page.

How we do it instead.

Before anything is designed, we pull the existing pages and find out which ones actually earn. Not which ones look important, or which ones the last agency was proudest of. Which ones bring in traffic and enquiries, from Search Console rather than guesswork. That list decides what survives.

Then every old URL gets an explicit destination. Not a rule that sweeps everything to the homepage: a one-to-one map, old address to the closest equivalent, checked afterwards to confirm each one resolves in a single hop. Internal links get repointed to the new addresses too, so nothing on the site is quietly bouncing through a redirect.

We do this on our own site as well as client sites, which is how we know how easily it goes wrong. Auditing our own redirects recently turned up a whole family of retired blog URLs still returning 404s, with live links pointing at them from our two most important pages. If it can accumulate on an agency’s own site, it can accumulate on anyone’s.

A redesign is the best chance you will get to fix the structure.

Most sites are organised the way the business is organised, which is not how anyone searches. One page called Services listing eight things cannot rank for any of them. A rebuild is when that gets fixed cheaply, because you are rewriting the pages anyway.

So we use it to split the pages that should always have been separate, give each service and each sector its own address, and make the navigation match how people actually arrive rather than how the org chart looks.

What it costs, honestly.

A visual refresh on the existing structure is the cheapest version and the least useful, because it changes how the site looks without changing what it can rank for. A full rebuild with the content restructured and the redirects mapped costs more and is the one that moves anything. An e-commerce rebuild costs more again, because the product structure and the feed have to survive the move too.

We will not put a number on your project on a web page without seeing the site, and neither should anyone else. What we will tell you on a first call is which of those three you actually need, and it is quite often the cheapest one.