Give your website a fresh start.

Answer "why" before you spend anything

"It looks dated" is a real feeling but a weak brief. Dig underneath it and the answer is usually one of a few things: the enquiries have dried up, you can't update it yourself, it's awkward on a phone, or you're slightly embarrassed to send people the link.

Those need different work. One of them might be fixed by a new photo and a rewritten homepage for a fraction of a redesign. Another means the whole structure is wrong. It's worth being honest about which one you've got, because the cheapest redesign is the one you didn't need.

The redesign that quietly costs you traffic

The common disaster goes like this: lovely new site, every page at a new address, nobody set up redirects. Google had a list of pages that worked and now they all return an error. The traffic doesn't vanish on launch day either — it drains over the following weeks, by which point nobody connects the two things.

What has to carry across is the addresses, the page titles, the content that was already ranking, and the tracking. That's not glamorous work and it's the difference between a redesign that grows the business and one that sets it back a year.

Keep the pages that are already doing the work

Search Console will tell you which pages people actually arrive on. It is very often not the ones you're proudest of — an old blog post or a service page you'd half forgotten quietly brings in most of the visitors.

Those pages get improved at the same address rather than replaced. Old URLs are not automatically bad URLs; they're usually the most valuable thing the site owns.

What actually makes a site look old

Rarely the colours. It's buttons too small to hit with a thumb, a phone number that isn't tappable, stock photos of people who don't work there, no reviews anywhere, pages that take a few seconds to appear, and a copyright line stuck three years in the past.

That last one does more damage than people realise. A visitor reads an old date as "possibly not trading any more" and goes back to the search results.

Redesign or rebuild?

If the foundations are sound, a redesign on top of what you've got is cheaper and faster, and it keeps everything Google already knows about you.

If it's a decade of accumulated plugins sat on a theme nobody maintains any more, patching it is false economy — you pay repeatedly for a thing that keeps breaking. I'll tell you which of the two you're looking at, including when the answer is "leave it, it's fine".

What it's like while it's happening

The new site is built on a staging address, so your existing website stays up and working the whole time. You see it, click around it and tell me what's wrong before anything goes live.

Launch day is a switch rather than an event, with the redirects, forms, tracking and mobile layouts checked before and after.