How a web design agency can help you with a WordPress website redesign

TL;DR

• A website redesign involves redesigning and rebuilding an existing site. It is not just a fresh look, but also involves the structure, technology and copy.
• Don’t do it just because your site ‘feels outdated’. Do it if your site is slow, converts poorly, is inaccessible or no longer suits your company.
• Speed is measurable: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1, for 75 per cent of your page visits.
• Design for mobile first. 52.57 per cent of web traffic comes from a mobile phone.
• Since 28 June 2025, stricter accessibility requirements have been in force under the European Accessibility Act for, amongst other things, online shops.
• The biggest risk of a redesign is your search engine visibility. If a URL changes, a 301 redirect is required.
• Measure before you start. Without a baseline measurement, you won’t know whether things have improved or deteriorated after going live.

Introduction

A website redesign is often discussed based on gut feeling. “It looks outdated”, “the competitor has something newer”, “we want something fresher”. These may be reasons, but they are not good reasons to embark on a project lasting several weeks.

The question that should come first is: what problem are we solving? A site that looks outdated but does generate enquiries is a different project from a site that looks great but achieves nothing. In this blog, we’ll look at when a website redesign is genuinely necessary, what’s involved, what the biggest risk is, and how to measure whether it’s been a success. We’ll include relevant standards, as some of these aspects are now measurable or even legally required.

What is a website redesign?

A website redesign involves redesigning and rebuilding an existing website. You update the design, but usually also the structure, the copy and the underlying technology. The difference compared to a new site is that you’re building on something that already exists: existing pages, existing visitors and existing rankings on Google.

That starting point is precisely why a redesign is more challenging than building from scratch. With a new site, you have nothing to lose. With a redesign, you can lose rankings, traffic and conversions if you’re not careful.

There are three types that are often confused with one another:

• A rebrand. New colours, typography and visuals based on the same structure. Quick, inexpensive, and worthwhile following a new brand identity.
• A redesign. A new design and a new structure, rebuilt from scratch. This is what this blog is about.
• A rebuild. Everything from scratch, usually on a new foundation, because the old one cannot be maintained any longer.

Knowing which of the three you need determines your budget and your turnaround time. That is why every project with us begins with an analysis rather than a design. Please see our page on website redesign for more information.

When do you need a website redesign?

If your site falls short in measurable terms regarding speed, conversion, accessibility or maintainability. Four specific indicators: you do not meet the Core Web Vitals, your visitors do not make any enquiries, your site does not comply with accessibility requirements, or you can no longer make any changes to it without something else breaking.

Here’s how to tell if this applies to your situation:

• Technology. Is your site running on an outdated theme or a page builder that is no longer being updated? Is your developer unable to make changes without risk? Then you’re stuck, and that will only get more expensive.
• Speed. Are you failing to meet the Core Web Vitals? Measure this in real-world conditions, not just using a test tool.
• Conversion. Are you getting visitors but no enquiries? Then your problem isn’t visibility but persuasion. Compare your conversion rate by source and by landing page, not as an average.
• Accessibility. Can you use your site with just a keyboard? Does your text achieve a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 and your buttons and borders 3:1?
• Brand. Does your website still reflect what you do and who you’re targeting? Following a rebrand, this is almost always an issue.
• Management. Can you add a page yourself without calling us? If not, every text change will cost you money.

And when you shouldn’t do it: if your site is technically sound, fast, converts well and only feels visually dated. In that case, a redesign is sufficient and you’ll retain your established search visibility.

What does a redesign involve?

More than just design. A complete redesign covers six areas: your structure and navigation, your design, your copy, the underlying technology, your measurability and your searchability. If you skip one, you’ll notice it once the site goes live.

Here’s what happens for each component:

1. Structure. What pages are there, how are they linked, and how do you get to the contact form? This is the most important step and, at the same time, the least exciting. If you start by designing the homepage, you’ll make dozens of choices along the way that you’ll have to repeat on every other page.

2. Design. Colour, typography, imagery, components. Define your brand choices as variables so you can manage them in one place, and build your buttons, form fields and maps first before assembling your pages.

3. Copy. Almost always the part that slows the project down and delivers the most value. State what you do, for whom, the approximate cost and what the next step is. Uncertainty about price is the most common reason people do not make enquiries.

4. Technology. Hosting, speed, security, accessibility, manageability. Choose something you can build on yourself.

5. Measurability. Analytics and Search Console, with your conversions properly set up. Do this before going live, otherwise you won’t have a basis for comparison.

6. Search engine visibility. Your URLs, your redirects, your meta titles and descriptions, your heading structure. This is where the greatest risk lies, and it deserves its own section.

Why is your online visibility the biggest risk in a redesign?

Because any page whose URL changes without a redirect is a page that loses its rankings on Google. You’ve spent years building up the search visibility of existing URLs, and that value evaporates if an old URL returns an error message after going live.

What you therefore do, in this order:

• Compile a list of all existing URLs before you begin. Draw these from your sitemap, from Search Console and from a crawl of your site. This is your starting list.
• Only change what you need to change. Keep any URL that can remain the same exactly as it is. That is the cheapest way to minimise risk.
• For every changed URL, set up a 301 redirect to the new page that best covers the topic. Don’t redirect them all to your homepage; that won’t work.
• Once the site goes live, check your old list. Go through it line by line and check that every URL leads where it should.
• Keep an eye on Search Console for a few weeks. A temporary dip in your crawl frequency is normal; a sustained decline is not.

If you do this properly, a redesign is not a risk to your search engine visibility but an opportunity: you have the chance to improve your structure, your headings and your internal links all at once. If more than just your page layout is changing – for example, your domain name – then that constitutes a separate process. Please see our page on SEO website migration for further details.

How quickly do you need your new site to be up and running?

Adhere to the Core Web Vitals: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1, achieved in 75 per cent of your page visits and measured separately for mobile and desktop. If you’re using an old checklist that mentions FID, it’s out of date; INP will have replaced it by 2024.

Where speed is usually lost in a redesign:

• Images that are too large. The main cause, and the easiest to fix. Use modern formats, correct dimensions, and avoid lazy loading on your hero image.
• Too many font weights. Many themes include eight or ten options, of which you’ll use three.
• A heavy-duty page builder. Design freedom comes at a cost. If you’re not planning to make many changes yourself, you won’t need it.
• Elements without a fixed height. These cause your page to jump whilst loading, and that is precisely what CLS measures.

We are, however, honest about the SEO effect: Google itself states that there is no such thing as a ‘page experience’ signal and that good scores are no guarantee of a high ranking. Relevance carries more weight. So you optimise speed for your visitors’ sake, with SEO as an added bonus. A practical starting point can be found in our blog post on improving your website’s speed.

What do the accessibility requirements mean for your redesign?

Accessibility is not an extra but an integral part of the brief. Since 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act has imposed accessibility requirements on, amongst other things, online shops, and these are based on the WCAG guidelines. A redesign is the natural opportunity to get this right first time, as retrofitting it later costs more.

The requirements you can check for yourself most quickly:

• Contrast. Text must have a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1, and buttons, borders, icons and form fields a minimum of 3:1. That second point is the one most often overlooked.
• Zoom in to 200% without losing any information or functionality.
• Text spacing. Your page must continue to function correctly if someone adjusts line height, paragraph spacing, letter spacing or word spacing.
• Keyboard navigation. Everything is accessible using the Tab key, with a visible focus border. Try it out: put your mouse away and fill in our contact form.
• Never use colour as the sole cue. An error message that is only red does not work for everyone.

The great thing is that virtually every accessibility measure makes your site more user-friendly for everyone. Larger, calmer and clearer text doesn’t make it any worse for anyone to read. You can find out more on our page about digitally accessible websites.

How does a redesign process work?

In five phases: analysis, structure, design, build and launch. The analysis determines whether you need a restyling or a redesign and provides you with a baseline measurement. You then build from small to large: first the structure, then the components, then the pages.

What happens at each stage and what is required of you:

That first phase is most often skipped, yet it is the most important. Without a baseline measurement, you won’t know after going live whether your site is performing better or worse, and then any discussion will be about personal preference rather than results.

Record what you currently have: your traffic by source, your conversions, your conversion rate per landing page, your rankings for your key keywords and your Core Web Vitals. That takes an hour’s work and it’s the difference between knowing and guessing.

How do you measure whether a redesign has been successful?

By comparing the same metrics you recorded before the launch, and no sooner than a few months after going live. Look at your conversions and your conversion rate per source, your organic traffic, your search rankings and your Core Web Vitals. Not at how visually appealing the result has turned out to be.

What to look out for, and when:

• Weeks 1 and 2. Are all redirects working? Are you still tracking conversions? Are there any new errors in Search Console? This is a checking exercise, not an assessment.
• Month 1. A dip in your organic traffic may be normal whilst Google processes your new structure. Check whether your rankings are recovering.
• Month 3. Now you can draw some conclusions. Compare your conversion rate per source with your baseline measurement. More enquiries from the same traffic is a gain; more traffic without enquiries is not.
• Ongoing. Keep your site maintained. A new site that isn’t updated for a year will need a redesign again in two years’ time. That’s what our WordPress support and maintenance service is for.

What you mustn’t do is conclude after two weeks that it isn’t working. And what you mustn’t do either is look solely at visitor numbers, as these say nothing about whether they are the right people.

What usually goes wrong?

Four issues, listed in order of how frequently we encounter them: there is no baseline measurement; the redirects have not been checked; the project starts with the homepage rather than the site structure; and the copy is only written at the very last minute.

The rest of the list:

• Redesign as an end in itself rather than a means to an end. “We want a new website” is not a brief. “We want more enquiries from organic traffic” is.
• Just look at the competition. They have different clients and different objectives.
• Wanting everything at once. A redesign, a new brand identity, an online shop and an integration with your accounting system amounts to four separate projects.
• Copying text from the old site will simply result in your new site being a prettier version of the same problem.
• Going live on a Friday afternoon. Do it on a Tuesday morning, leaving time for checks.
• No owner once the site goes live. Without someone to maintain the site, it will fall into disrepair within a year.

Would you like to know where your site stands and whether a redesign is the answer? Our team, as a web design agency, will take a look at it, and you can view our work under ‘Projects’. You’ll know in advance what we do and what it costs, and we don’t make any promises about search engine rankings.