Service verify
A redesign for a business with no search traffic is a design project. A redesign for a business that has spent years earning rankings is a migration project that happens to include design, and the failure mode is expensive.
The pattern is familiar: a business spends significantly on a new site, launches it, and watches search traffic drop by half. The design was never the problem. Nobody handled the URLs.
The migration checklist that prevents it
Inventory everything first. Every URL on the existing site, with its traffic, its rankings, and any external links pointing at it. This comes from Search Console and analytics rather than from someone’s memory of what pages exist, because old sites always contain pages nobody remembers.
Decide what moves. The safest migration changes the fewest URLs. We keep existing addresses unless the structure genuinely prevents a sensible hierarchy.
Map every change. Each old URL gets a permanent redirect to its closest genuine equivalent. Not to the homepage — Google’s guidance addresses redirects that send people somewhere other than the relevant destination, and mass redirects to the homepage are typically treated as soft 404s that pass little value.
Keep the content that earns traffic. This is where taste causes damage. A page that looks dated but brings in qualified visitors should be improved, not deleted. The data decides.
Verify after launch. Submit the new sitemap, watch indexing, check that redirects resolve in one hop, and confirm the pages that mattered are still indexed. Assuming it went fine is how problems are discovered in the following quarter.
We ran this process on our own site. The previous version had sixteen flat service URLs; every one of them has a permanent redirect to a specific replacement page rather than to the homepage.
What genuinely justifies a redesign
A rebuild is worth it when the current site cannot be edited without a developer for every change, when the platform cannot meet performance thresholds, when content is rendered in the browser so crawlers see very little, when the structure makes a sensible page hierarchy impossible, or when it is unusable on a phone.
It is not worth it because the site looks a few years old. Appearance is the least consequential of a website’s problems, and the budget usually does more good spent on the work that builds prominence over quarters.
Where the issue is genuinely just speed, that is a fix rather than a rebuild, and it costs a fraction as much.
Preserving what worked, deliberately
Old sites usually contain a few pages that quietly do most of the work — one service page that ranks well, one article that attracts steady traffic, a page an important local organisation links to.
Those pages get identified before anything is designed, and they get carried across deliberately: same URL where possible, content preserved and improved rather than rewritten into something more fashionable, links pointing at them maintained.
The rest can be rebuilt freely.
What launch week actually looks like
The new site goes live with redirects already in place, not added afterwards. The sitemap is submitted the same day. Indexing is monitored daily for the first fortnight and weekly after that.
A dip in the first two to four weeks is normal while Google recrawls and consolidates. A dip still present at six to eight weeks is a problem to investigate rather than wait out, and the usual causes are a redirect chain, a page returning the wrong status, or content that was quietly dropped.
SERVICE VERIFY
This service sits under the Website designer category and has not yet been confirmed against the live Google Business Profile service list. Confirm before treating it as verified.
Call 734-747-3922 or request a free audit, and we will tell you what your current site would risk losing before you commit to replacing it.
This sits under Website designer services beyond Website Redesign, where the rest of that category is set out.