Website redesign SEO: what a redesign has to do to keep the rankings you already have

I moved this site from Framer to Next.js last summer. The old article URLs were /articles/*, and I wrote the redirects before launch, which is the part everyone agrees you are supposed to do.

A month after the move, 27 percent of all impressions this site received were still landing on those old URLs. Over the 28 days from July 19 to August 16, 2026, that was about 860 impressions. Without the redirects it would have been zero.

That is the number I would want to see before hiring anyone to redesign a site that already ranks. Not a portfolio. A person who can tell you what happens to your URLs.

Why a redesign loses rankings

Google did not rank your website. It ranked individual URLs, and each one is a separate entry in the index with its own history. When a URL changes and nothing tells the index where it went, the old entry dies and the new URL starts from nothing.

Four things cause it, roughly in order of how often I see them.

The most common is that URLs changed and nobody wrote redirects. Your old /services/web-design is now /services/website-design, the old address returns a 404, and everything that address had earned over four years is gone.

Second is the redirect chain. The redirects exist, but the old URL points to a second URL that points to a third. Chains work fine for visitors and leak for crawlers. This is the quietest failure of the four, because the site looks completely healthy from the outside.

Third is content thinning. The old page had 800 words and the new one has 200, because the new design looked better with less text on it. The 800 words were what the page ranked for.

Fourth is the staging flag. A noindex left on from the staging environment ships to production. It is the rarest and the easiest to fix, and unlike the other three you find out within days.

The redirect map is a deliverable, not a task

Ask for it as an artifact: a spreadsheet with every old URL and the new URL it maps to, one row each, reviewed before launch rather than after.

This matters more than it sounds. "We'll handle redirects" is a sentence every vendor says, and it is compatible with writing three redirects for the pages someone remembered. A map is compatible with one thing only, which is having gone through the whole site.

The map also surfaces the decisions somebody has to make anyway. Nine old blog posts about a service you no longer sell: do they redirect to the new service page, or does that make the new page a dumping ground? Two old pages merging into one? A URL that should genuinely 404 because it should never have existed? Those are content decisions, not technical ones, and they are yours. A vendor who hands you the map is giving you the chance to make them. A vendor who does not is making them for you, silently, usually by pointing everything at the homepage.

Redirecting everything to the homepage is worth naming separately, because it is the single most common shortcut. It is a technical success and a content failure. The visitor lands somewhere useless and the index learns that the old page has no successor.

What a website redesign costs

I charge $3,900 per week, and a typical redesign runs three to four weeks. That puts a full redesign between $11,700 and $15,600.

For comparison, I only have one honest data point from the vendors ranking on this term: exactly one of them publishes a starting price, and it is $15,000. The rest ask you to book a call. That is the actual state of price transparency in this market, and it is why buyers arrive at these searches with no idea whether $8,000 is a bargain or a warning sign.

What moves the number for a redesign is different from what moves it for a new site. On a new build you pay for what gets made. On a redesign you also pay for what already exists.

The volume of old content matters more than the count of new pages. A thirty-page site with eight years of blog behind it is a large project even if there are only four new templates, because someone reads that archive and decides page by page whether it moves, merges, or dies.

The number of changing URLs is next, and it drives the redirect work directly. Then everything bolted onto the old site over the years: analytics, tracking scripts, forms posting somewhere, a booking or commerce integration. None of it is visible on the page and all of it breaks in a move. In my experience this is the line most often underestimated in a quote.

Last is the approval chain. A redesign always has someone with an opinion about the old site, and each additional approver spends calendar time rather than working time.

How long a redesign takes

Somewhere between a week and three months, and the honest answer depends entirely on whether the content changes.

A week is enough to put a new template over content that stays as it is, with URLs untouched. A month covers restructuring the site when the content already exists. Three months and up is what it takes when the copy is rewritten, several people approve it, and integrations are in scope.

My own model is three to four weekly sprints. It fits in that window because design and implementation come from the same person and nothing is handed off in between. There is working software to look at every Friday, so you can stop after week two if week two was enough.

Speed on its own tells you nothing. Ask what is inside the week.

If traffic already dropped

Do not fix anything until you know what broke.

Open Search Console and compare two periods page by page, before the launch and after. Find the URLs whose impressions went to zero. That list tells you what broke, and it is usually shorter than you fear.

Then run the old URLs and look at what they return. You want a 301 or 308 straight to the correct new URL. You do not want a 404, and you do not want a redirect to the homepage.

Then wait. With the redirects correct, recovery takes weeks rather than days.

That 27 percent from the opening is the useful number here. Old URLs stay in the index far longer than anyone expects, which makes redirects a permanent part of the site rather than a migration-week task. Do not clean them out a year later because the config looks untidy.

While writing this I went back through my own move and found a two-hop chain in my redirects, which is exactly the second failure I listed above. Mildly embarrassing, and it is on the fix list now. I mention it because chains happen accidentally even when you know precisely what you are doing.

What to require from whoever you hire

Three things, in writing, whoever you end up choosing.

The redirect map, as an artifact, reviewed before launch.

Named ownership of the outcome if rankings drop. A post-launch dip is a predictable risk, so it should have an owner in the contract rather than a conversation afterward.

Search Console access before the launch, not after. Without a baseline neither of you can prove anything in either direction. These and the rest of the buyer's questions are in a twelve-question checklist.

When you do not need any of this

If your site is five pages, the URLs are not changing, the copy is already written, and search is not where your customers come from, then a redesign is design work. Buy design work. The cheapest quote you get is probably the right one, and everything above is overhead you would be paying for nothing.

Call me when URLs are changing, when the site produces leads you cannot afford to drop in the move, or when a previous redesign stalled because nobody owned the whole of it.

I design and build both halves myself, at $3,900 per week.