Website Redesign

On this page: how to tell whether you need a redesign at all, how redesigns go wrong, our process, and what it costs.

First: Do You Actually Need One?

Not every underperforming site needs to be rebuilt, and we’d rather tell you that early than after you’ve paid for one.

A redesign is usually the right call when:

• The site is built on a platform or theme you can’t safely update or extend anymore
• Making a routine change requires a developer, every time
• Performance problems are structural rather than fixable — the theme itself is the bottleneck
• The site can’t be made accessible without rebuilding its templates
• The business has changed materially and the site describes a company that no longer exists
• Mobile experience was an afterthought in the original build and can’t be retrofitted

A redesign is usually the wrong call when:

• The real problem is a specific page or funnel step, not the whole site — that’s conversion rate optimization, and it’s faster and cheaper
• The site is slow but structurally sound — that’s site speed optimization
• Traffic is the problem, not what happens to it — that’s SEO or PPC
• Nobody can articulate what’s wrong beyond “it feels dated”

That last one deserves a straight answer: a site that feels dated to you may be performing perfectly well for the people who don’t look at it every day. We’ll look at your actual data before agreeing you need a rebuild. Sometimes the honest recommendation is a targeted refresh — new brand elements, better key pages — for a fraction of a full redesign.

How Redesigns Go Wrong

We get called in to fix these often enough that they’re worth naming:

Rankings disappear at launch. URLs changed and nothing was redirected, or page structure and content that earned rankings were rewritten by someone who didn’t know what was earning them. This is the most common and most expensive redesign failure, and it’s entirely preventable.

Conversion rate drops. The old site had a clumsy but effective path to contact. The new one is cleaner, calmer, and buries the phone number. Nobody measured before, so nobody can prove what changed — they just watch leads fall.

The new site is slower than the old one. Large hero videos, animation libraries, a dozen web fonts, unoptimized images. It looks like a modern site and it loads like a brochure being faxed.

It’s beautiful and nobody can edit it. Custom-built page by page, so every change comes back to the agency as a billable request. Sometimes that’s the business model.

Accessibility was never in the brief. A brand-new site that fails WCAG on day one, which is both a legal exposure and an expensive thing to retrofit into a build you just paid for.

Every one of these comes from the same root cause: the redesign was scoped as a visual project rather than a performance one.

Our Process

1. Measure the current site first.
Analytics, heat maps, click-stream data, search performance, Core Web Vitals. Before anything is designed, we establish what your current site does well — which pages earn traffic, which paths convert, where people abandon. This baseline is what makes it possible to prove the new site is better rather than just newer.

2. Structure and content mapping.
Every existing URL accounted for: kept, merged, or redirected. Content that’s earning rankings is identified and protected. Structure is planned for how people and AI systems both read a site — clear hierarchy, real headings, content that answers questions directly. That last part connects to our Generative Ranking Optimization work; a redesign is the cheapest moment to get it right.

3. Design against the data.
Layouts built around observed behavior — what people actually click, how far they scroll, where they hesitate. Accessibility considered from the first wireframe rather than audited in at the end, per our ADA compliance practice. A performance budget set before the first asset is chosen.

4. Build on something you can maintain.
WordPress, WooCommerce, or Shopify, depending on what you actually need — see WordPress, Shopify, and e-commerce. Built so your team can edit content without calling us. Where genuinely custom functionality is needed, that’s custom application development.

5. Launch with the boring parts done right.
Redirect map tested before launch, not after. Analytics and conversion tracking configured and verified. Search Console updated. Performance measured against the baseline. Forms tested end to end, including the part where the email actually arrives.

6. Watch it for real.
The first weeks after launch are when problems surface. We monitor rankings, conversion rate, and performance against the pre-launch baseline, and fix what moved the wrong way. After that, keeping it healthy is website maintenance.

Replatforming

If the redesign also involves changing platforms — WordPress to Shopify, a hosted builder to WordPress, an aging custom CMS to something maintainable — the same principles apply with more care around data. Products, customers, orders, content, and URLs all have to arrive intact, and the redirect map matters more, not less. We scope replatform projects separately from the design work, because the migration is its own project wearing the same coat.

What It Costs

Website redesigns typically start at $12,000+.

Three things move that number more than anything else: page count, e-commerce complexity, and custom functionality. A focused twelve-page site rebuilt on solid foundations sits near the starting figure. A store with a large catalogue, or a site with tools and integrations behind it, sits well above it.

We quote fixed scope after the assessment rather than billing hourly, so the number you approve is the number you pay.

Related Services

• Web Design — new sites, built from scratch
• Conversion Rate Optimization — when the problem is a funnel, not the whole site
• Site Speed Optimization — when the site is structurally fine but slow
• Website Maintenance — keeping the new site healthy after launch
• ADA Website Compliance — accessibility built in rather than retrofitted