Website redesign: when to refresh, when to rebuild and how to keep your Google rankings

Check first that you need a redesign

Start with what is actually wrong. If visitors arrive and nobody writes, the cause is usually a single page: an unclear offer, a button below the fold, a form that asks for too much. That is a repair, and every address stays where it is. If one offer needs one clear page, a new landing page can do the job without touching the rest of the site; we looked at the prices in our note on landing page costs.

A redesign is justified when the site is hard to change, falls apart on a phone, or no longer describes what you sell. Access is the other reason. If the freelancer who built it has vanished and nobody can even change a price, you are renting your own website.

If the only complaint is that it looks dated and the pages already bring visitors from search, think twice: new colours on the same addresses are a smaller, safer job.

Three kinds of redesign

Refreshes have a habit of turning into restructures the moment someone says "while we're at it, let's rename the services page". Every rename is one more line in your address list. If the domain changes as well, it is a bigger operation: read Google's guide to site moves with URL changes (see Sources).

The checklist for a redesign that keeps your rankings

Redesign SEO is mostly bookkeeping. Eight steps, in this order.

1. Write down every address on the current site before anyone opens a design tool. Take them from your sitemap, from a crawl of the site and from the Performance report in Google Search Console, which you can group by page and export. Keep each page's old title and main heading next to its address.
2. Mark the ten or twenty pages that bring the most visitors. On launch day, open those first and confirm each old address lands where it should.
3. Map each old address to the closest new page. Google's site-move guide calls this mapping important and asks you to decide where each old URL should redirect to. "Closest" means the page about the same thing. A visitor who clicked a result about contract review and lands on a home page has to start over, so we would not send everything there. If one old page became five, send its address to the new page that took over the main subject and link to the other four from it. Pages you really retire are fine, if you decide that one by one.
4. Set up permanent server-side redirects (status 301 or 308). Google says these codes tell it a page has moved for good, and recommends them whenever possible if the address shown in search results changes. Point each old address straight at its final destination, not through a chain.
5. Carry over titles and descriptions. Google asks for a title on every page, written to be descriptive and concise, so make sure the new template has not replaced yours with the site name on every page. Google may rewrite the title it shows, so look at how your key pages appear in results a few weeks later.
6. Test the forms, the counter and the ad pixels. Send a test request through every form and confirm it arrives where it should, whether that is WhatsApp, email or a CRM. Check that the counter and the pixels fire once per visit, and that any thank-you page your ad tracking relies on still exists. If the cookie banner changes too, our note on cookie banners for small business websites in the EU lists what to look at.
7. Keep the test copy out of Google, then let Google in. A test version should carry a no-index rule, in the HTML or in the HTTP headers, so it doesn't get indexed by accident. On launch day, remove that rule and any blanket block in the robots.txt file. A painful way to lose rankings is to publish a new site that still tells Google to go away.
8. Update the sitemap so it lists the new addresses, and run a handful of key pages through the URL Inspection tool to see that Googlebot can reach the new site. Change internal links and menus to the new addresses so they don't depend on redirects.

After launch, keep the redirects. Google's advice is to leave them in place for as long as possible, generally at least a year. Compare Search Console with the export from step 1 once a week for the first month. Google calls temporary movement in visibility during a move normal and says rankings settle over time. A page that drops and stays down points to a missing redirect or a lost heading, so go back to your list before rewriting anything.

What the list looks like for a site with many pages

Lexendo is a law practice in Berlin that advises entrepreneurs from abroad. The site is in German, with a switch to English and Polish. It has five sections: home, practice areas, articles, the practice itself and consultation booking. Each practice area has its own page with typical matters, steps and a price, and the articles come with search and tags.

Redesigning a site like this means mapping five practice pages, every article, the booking page and each language version; three languages can mean three address lists. The pages most likely to have earned rankings are the practice pages and the articles: someone searching how to set up a GmbH lands on an article, not on the home page, so that address has to survive. Say the old site had one page called Services and the new one has five. The first lines of the map could look like this (made-up addresses):

What to do today

• Open the Performance report in Search Console, switch to the pages view and export it. Save the file with today's date; you will compare against it in a month.
• Open yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and count the addresses.
• If a test copy of the new site exists, check its page source and its robots.txt file. Where you find a no-index rule or a block on everything, write "remove on launch day" at the top of the launch plan.
• Send a test request through each form on the current site and write down where it arrives.

If you'd like, we'll do it for you

What a website redesign costs depends on which of the three jobs above you have. If it turns out to be a new company website, ours is from €580 (prices exclude VAT) and takes 2–3 weeks.

In that price:

• a design built around your brand, and a call before we start
• as many pages as your business needs, with copy written by us and sent to you for review
• separate design checks for phone and laptop, and texts and pages you can edit yourself
• SEO basics: headlines and descriptions for search, fast loading, a sitemap and Google Search Console connected
• a visit counter and your ad-account pixels
• requests arriving on WhatsApp, by email, in a spreadsheet or in your CRM
• publishing on your domain, with the code, domain, hosting and access registered in your name
• free revisions until you accept the site, then free bug fixes for 6 months

We write the price and timeline down before we start; you pay half then and half after acceptance. The price stays low because experienced specialists work faster with AI tools. Redirects from an old address are not a separate line on our service page, so if your current site brings visitors from Google, say so on the first call. When you compare website redesign services, ask each studio, us included, who owns the address list and the redirects, and get the answer in writing.

See what a company website includes on our Websites page, or message us on WhatsApp.

Discuss your task

Sources

• Site moves with URL changes, Google Search Central, checked 30 October 2026
• Site moves without URL changes, Google Search Central, checked 30 October 2026
• Redirects and Google Search, Google Search Central, checked 30 October 2026
• Influencing your title links in Google Search, Google Search Central, checked 30 October 2026
• Performance report (Search), Search Console Help, checked 30 October 2026

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