Most redesigns lose the rankings the old site spent years earning.

Genuinely worth asking, because sometimes the answer is no. A redesign is justified when:

• The site is slow enough to be costing you rankings — anything above four seconds to first meaningful paint on mobile.
• It doesn't work properly on a phone, which is where most of your traffic is.
• You can't update it without paying someone, so it's drifted out of date.
• It misrepresents the business you've become — different services, different positioning, different price point.
• It's on abandoned technology: unmaintained plugins, an old PHP version, a builder that no longer gets updates.

A redesign is not justified because you're bored of it. If the current site converts, loads fast and ranks, changing it is a risk with no obvious upside. We'll say so on the call rather than take the work.

This is the part that separates a competent redesign from an expensive mistake. In order:

1. Crawl and baseline the current site first

Every existing URL, its title, its headings, and — critically — which pages currently bring in traffic. You cannot preserve what you never measured. Search Console data is the source of truth here.

2. Map every old URL to a new one

Every URL that changes needs a 301 redirect to its closest equivalent. Not to the homepage — a mass redirect to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 and passes nothing. Pages with no equivalent should keep their URL and content rather than being deleted for tidiness.

3. Keep the content that's working

Redesigns routinely cut text because the new layout looks cleaner with less of it. If that text is what the page ranks for, the ranking goes with it. Trim presentation, not substance.

4. Launch, then watch

Submit the new sitemap, request re-indexing, and monitor Search Console coverage and position for at least four weeks. Some fluctuation is normal. A sustained drop means a redirect was missed, and it's fixable if you catch it early.