Website redesign: signs it's time, and how to plan it

A website ages faster than most businesses do. Your services change, your customers change, and the way people browse keeps moving toward phones. At some point, small edits stop being enough. Here is how to tell, and how to plan a redesign that keeps what already works.

Signs it's time

• It is hard to use on a phone. Text too small to read, buttons too close together, pages that scroll sideways.
• It no longer describes your business. Services you stopped offering, missing ones you now sell, old photos and prices.
• You can't update it yourself. Every small change needs a developer, or nobody remembers how.
• It is slow. Pages take a long time to appear, especially on mobile data.
• Visitors don't do what you need. People arrive but don't call, book or buy, and the next step isn't obvious.
• The software underneath is outdated. Old themes and plugins that no longer receive updates are a security risk.

One of these can often be fixed without a redesign. Several at once usually means the structure, not just the look, needs rethinking.

Refresh or redesign?

A refresh changes the surface: colors, type, photos, a few pages. A redesign rethinks the structure: what the pages are, what each one is for, how visitors move from arriving to getting in touch. If the problem is how the site looks, a refresh may do. If the problem is that visitors don't find what they need, it's a redesign.

Keep what already works

A redesign should not throw away what the current site has earned.

1. 01List your pages and their addresses. Pages that people find through search engines should keep their address, or be redirected to their new one. Changing addresses without redirects loses that traffic.
2. 02Keep the content that works. Texts customers praise, pages people visit often, answers to questions you get every week.
3. 03Note what people ask you. Questions you answer by phone or email are the content the new site is missing.

Plan it like a new project

Treat the redesign like any new build: what the site is for, who it is for, what each visitor should do, which content exists and who writes the rest. Our website brief checklist covers these points.

Then choose the scope. Many redesigns fit one of our packages, from ⁦$490⁩ for a landing page and from ⁦$1,290⁩ for a business website of up to six pages; larger sites and web applications are quoted as custom builds. See which package fits.

After the relaunch

Check every redirect, every form and every page on a phone. Then keep it current: our maintenance plans start from ⁦$49⁩ a month.

Thinking about redesigning your site? Tell us what isn't working.