A website redesign loses rankings in three ways. The old URLs disappear, pages that earned traffic get cut, or the new site launches blocked from Google. Protect those three and you can change everything else.
Record what ranks. Map every old URL to a new one with a 301 redirect. Check the site the day it launches and for six weeks after.
Most redesigns that go wrong don’t go wrong on the design. They go wrong on a spreadsheet nobody made.
Should you redesign, refresh, rebuild or change platform?
These get called the same thing and they aren’t. Work out which one you need first, because the risk to your rankings differs a lot between them.
| What you’re doing | What changes | Risk to rankings | Start here if |
|---|---|---|---|
| Refresh | Colours, images, a few pages | Low | The site works but looks tired |
| Redesign | Layout, navigation and templates on the same platform | Medium, from changed URLs and removed content | Visitors can’t find things or the site doesn’t convert |
| Rebuild | Design, structure and often content, all new | High, because everything can move | The site’s structure is the problem |
| Change platform | The system underneath, for example Wix to WordPress | High, as URLs and settings usually change | The platform limits what you can do. See Wix to WordPress and Squarespace to WordPress |
When is it time to redesign?
Five signs are worth acting on.
- Your phone traffic bounces. The site is hard to use on a screen the size of a hand.
- You’re embarrassed to send people there. If you apologise for the website before you share it, customers feel the same.
- You can’t edit it. Changing a price takes a developer and a week.
- It’s slow. Page speed affects both visitors and Google’s view of your pages.
- The business has changed. You sell different things, to different people, in different places than when the site was built.
A site that looks dated but still brings in enquiries is a refresh at most. Don’t rebuild something that earns.
What does a website redesign cost in Ireland?
For a small business site of about five pages, Irish designers publish prices from roughly €400 to €1,000 on a template, €1,500 to €4,000 for a custom design from a small studio, and €6,000 and up from an established agency, all before VAT. An online shop starts at about €900 and runs to about €20,000.
How much a website costs in Ireland breaks down what each price buys. Our website cost calculator works out your own figure.
A redesign usually costs more than the headline price. The extras are moving and rewriting content, setting up redirects, testing, and the days after launch when something always needs fixing. Ask any quote whether redirects and post-launch checks are in the price.
A grant won’t cover it. The Grow Digital Voucher is a 50% grant for software, and its guidance says it doesn’t cover a website designed and built for you. The Grow Digital Voucher explains what it does cover.
What should you record before you change anything?
A snapshot of what works now. Without it, you can’t tell afterwards whether the redesign hurt.
- Your top pages by clicks. Export them from Search Console for the last 12 months. These are the pages you must not lose.
- The searches that bring people in. Export the queries too.
- Your enquiries. Note how many come from forms, calls and emails, and from which pages, in analytics.
- Pages other sites link to. A backlink report shows which old pages carry links from other websites. Those links point at specific URLs, so each one needs a redirect that lands on the closest new page.
- A crawl of the whole site. A crawler such as Screaming Frog lists every URL, title and heading you have today.
Keep the content, not just the URLs. A page that ranks for “boiler service Drogheda” because it answers that question well should arrive on the new site answering it as well. Don’t shorten it to fit a design.
How do you plan the URLs and redirects?
Keep URLs the same wherever you can. When we moved bubblehub.ie from Webflow to WordPress, we kept every URL identical, so there was nothing to redirect. That’s the safest outcome. Design for it.
Where a URL has to change, build a map. Put the old URL in one column and the new URL beside it.
Google’s guidance on site moves says to “prepare a URL mapping from the current URLs to their corresponding new format” and to use server-side permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. A 301 is the usual kind.
A few rules from the same guidance:
- Don’t send every old page to the home page. Google warns that redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant destination “can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error”. Each old page goes to its closest match.
- Avoid chains. Googlebot can follow up to 10 hops, but Google advises “redirecting to the final destination directly”.
- Keep the redirects. Google says to “keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year”, so don’t remove them when the project ends.
- Move everything at once. For small and medium sites, Google recommends moving all URLs together instead of one section at a time.
How do you build it without Google seeing it too early?
Build the new site on a staging copy that visitors and Google can’t find. The safest lock is a password, because a password stops both people and crawlers.
If you use a noindex tag instead, don’t also block the staging site in robots.txt. Google explains that if a page is blocked by robots.txt, “the crawler will never see the noindex rule”. A blocked URL can still appear in search results, without a description.
Then remove the block on launch. Google’s guidance says that if you added noindex rules to the new site, “make sure to update them”. Forget, and a good redesign launches invisible.
On WordPress, check the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box under Settings, Reading. WordPress documents that it adds a noindex meta tag to the site.
What design choices affect SEO?
- Content parity. The new page should say at least what the old one said. Cutting the text that ranked is an easy way to lose rankings.
- Headings and titles. Carry over the title tags and headings of your top pages, and change them only on purpose.
- Internal links. Menus and in-text links tell Google which pages matter. A new navigation can hide an important page.
- Speed and mobile. Heavy images and sliders slow pages down. Test on a real phone.
- Schema and image alt text. Don’t lose them when the templates change.
- Cookie consent and analytics. If your old site had a consent banner, it must come back before tracking does. Tag the new site and confirm your goals record enquiries.
- Accessibility. Check keyboard use, contrast and alt text on the new templates, especially if you sell online.
What’s your launch-day checklist?
| Check | How |
|---|---|
| The site can be indexed | View the page source for a noindex tag, check Settings, Reading on WordPress, and check robots.txt |
| Old URLs redirect | Test your top 20 old URLs and the ones with backlinks. Each should land on its match in one step |
| No chains or loops | Crawl the old URL list and look for any redirect that takes more than one hop |
| Sitemap | Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console |
| Canonicals and titles | Spot-check that each top page has its own title and a canonical pointing at itself |
| Forms, calls and checkout | Submit a real enquiry and a real order and see them arrive |
| Analytics | Confirm your goals fire |
| Listings | Update the website address on your Google Business Profile and any directories if it changed |
Launch early in the week and in the morning, not on a Friday afternoon. Something will need fixing, and you want a working day to do it.
What should you do in the first six weeks?
Google says a small or medium site “can take a few weeks for most pages to move”. So six weeks is a sensible window to watch.
- Every day for the first week. Check Search Console’s Pages report for new errors, and look for 404s on URLs that used to work.
- Weekly after that. Compare clicks and impressions with your snapshot, and check that your top pages still rank for their main searches.
- Watch enquiries, not only rankings. A dip in visits matters less than a dip in calls.
Expect some movement. A small dip in the first weeks, while Google reprocesses the pages, is normal. A steady slide after six weeks means something is wrong, often a redirect that’s pointing to the wrong page or a page that lost its content.
Can AI redesign your website?
It can draft a layout, and that’s about where it stops being useful. A tool that takes your address and returns a new design doesn’t know which of your pages earn enquiries. It doesn’t know which carry links from other sites, or what your old URLs are.
It can’t write your redirect map or test your checkout.
Use it for ideas and first drafts if you like. The records, the redirects and the launch checks still have to happen around it.
What mistakes cost people rankings?
- Changing URLs with no redirects.
- Dropping pages that ranked, because they didn’t fit the new design.
- Leaving the staging block on after launch.
- Sending every old URL to the home page.
- Launching a slower site, because of heavy images and scripts.
- Skipping the checks afterwards, so a fault runs for months before anyone looks.
If you’d rather have someone do the redirect map and the checks, that’s part of our web design work. Our guide to choosing a web designer lists what to ask any agency before you sign.
Questions people ask about website redesign
How do you redesign an existing website?
Decide whether you need a refresh or a rebuild. Record what ranks and earns enquiries. Plan the URLs and redirects, build on a staging copy, launch with the checklist above and watch Search Console for six weeks.
How much does a website redesign cost?
For a five-page business site in Ireland, about €400 to €1,000 on a template, €1,500 to €4,000 custom from a small studio and €6,000 and up from an agency, before VAT. Ask whether redirects and post-launch checks are included.
Will a website redesign hurt your SEO?
It can. The risk comes from changed URLs with no redirects, removed content and a site launched blocked from Google. Handle those, and a small dip in the first weeks is normal.
How long should you keep 301 redirects?
Google says generally at least one year, and to consider keeping them indefinitely from a user’s perspective.
Can you redesign a website without changing the URLs?
Yes, and it’s the safest way. Many redesigns can keep every page address and change only what visitors see.
Can AI redesign your website?
It can produce a layout. It can’t produce a redirect map, protect your top pages or test your forms, so a person still has to do that part.
Can ChatGPT design a website?
It can write code and copy for one. A live site still needs hosting, testing, redirects from the old pages and a check that Google can see it.
