Website redesign: when it's time, and how to keep what you have
The signs a website needs redesigning, when a refresh is enough, how to keep old links and your email working, and what a redesign costs with me in Canada.
By Drew Palframan, Ucluelet · · 3 min read
Photo: Parksville / Qualicum Beach, my own.
The short version
- Redesign when the site is hard to use on a phone, doesn't say what you do, or can't be changed.
- If every change on your list is a photo or a sentence, a refresh is enough.
- Every old address needs a redirect to its new page, or the new site starts from nothing.
- Your email lives on your domain too, and a redesign should leave it alone.
Most people who ask me about a redesign start with how the site looks. That matters, but it’s rarely the reason a site stops working for a business. The reasons are usually that it’s hard to use on a phone, it doesn’t say what you do, or you can’t change it without paying someone or fighting a builder. A redesign is the chance to fix all of that at once, and the one thing it has to avoid is losing what the old site already had.
Signs it’s time
- It’s hard to use on a phone. Pinching to read, buttons too small to tap, a menu that covers the page. Most people looking for a local business are on their phone.
- It doesn’t say what you do, or where. If the home page opens with a slogan instead of your trade and your town, people and search engines both have to guess.
- It’s slow. Paste your address into PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result.
- You can’t change it. The person who built it is gone, the login is lost, or every change is a support ticket.
- Your business has moved on. New services, new prices, new photos, and a site that still describes the business you had three years ago.
- You’re paying rent on a builder. The monthly fee never ends, and the site can’t come with you if you leave.
A redesign or a refresh?
Not every tired site needs rebuilding. If the structure is sound and the problem is old photos and old words, a refresh is cheaper: new content in the pages you already have. If the problem is how the site is built, what’s on each page, or where it lives, that’s a redesign.
A good test: list what you’d change. If every item is a photo or a sentence, refresh. If the list includes “the menu,” “the phone version” or “I can’t get into it,” it’s a redesign.
The part that goes wrong: old addresses
Every page on your old site has an address, and some of those addresses are already out in the world: in Google’s results, on directory listings, in old emails and on other people’s sites. A new site with new page names breaks every one of them unless each old address is pointed at its new page. That pointer is called a redirect, and it’s the difference between a redesign that keeps what the old site had and one that starts again from nothing.
Builders tend to leave odd addresses behind. When I moved Salty Sea Bookkeeping off GoDaddy’s Website Builder, their old /about-1 and /contact-us pages were redirected to the new ones, so a link to either still lands somewhere real.
A redesign should change how the site looks and works, not where your customers and Google can find it.
The other thing a redesign must not touch is your email. Your domain carries your email records as well as your website, and a careless switch can take your inbox down with the old site. On the Salty Sea move, one record changed, the one that points the domain at the website, and their email was left exactly as it was.
How I run a redesign
List what's there
Every page and address on the old site, and what each one is for, before anything is changed.
Decide what stays
Your domain, the words and photos worth keeping, and your reviews. The rest is written fresh.
Build the new site
A preview you check and approve in the Acuity Hub, while the old site stays up.
Switch it over
Old addresses redirected to new pages, only the website's record changed, and your email left alone.
What a redesign costs with me
A redesign is a new site, so it’s priced as the package it matches. All four are hand-coded, in Canadian dollars before tax:
| Package | Price | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $1,000 | One custom page, for a simple online presence. |
| Foundation | $3,500 | A complete five-page small-business website. |
| Growth | from $7,000 | Five pages, plus one tool your customers use. |
| Business | from $13,000 | Five pages, plus a private area you manage yourself. |
While my founding offer is open, the first clients get Foundation for less. The founding price and its terms are on the pricing page.
If your current site is on Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy or a similar builder, I have an offer for moving off one, and Stuck on a template website? explains it along with what you can and can’t take with you. The estimate builder gives you a number for your own site in a few minutes.
Start with a call
Send me your current address and book a call. I’ll look at the site before the call and tell you plainly whether it needs a redesign, a refresh, or nothing at all.