Before You Redesign Your Website, Read This

# Before You Redesign Your Website, Read This A website redesign sounds exciting. New look, fresh energy, maybe finally getting rid of that stock photo you've hated for two years. But redesigns that start with aesthetics and skip the strategy tend to produce beautiful sites that don't actually perform any better than what they replaced. Here's how to approach a redesign the right way. ## Know Why You're Redesigning "It looks outdated" is a valid reason, but it's not enough to build a project around. The real question is: what do you need the new site to *do differently*? Common legitimate drivers for a redesign: - **Conversions are low** — people visit but don't call, book, or buy - **Bounce rate is high** — people land on a page and leave immediately - **The site is slow** — and it's affecting both user experience and SEO - **It's not mobile-friendly** — and most of your traffic is on phones - **Your business has changed** — new services, new audience, new positioning - **You can't update it yourself** — and that's becoming a real problem If you don't know which of these applies to you, find out before you spend money on a redesign. Google Analytics and a few minutes of honest review will tell you a lot. ## Don't Throw Away What's Working Before you redesign, audit what you have. Some pages might actually rank well in search. Some copy might convert well. Some structure might be intuitive for your users. A full redesign can inadvertently blow up things that were quietly doing their job. A good redesign strategy preserves your SEO equity — same URLs where possible, same title structure, 301 redirects where URLs change — so you don't spend months recovering traffic after launch. ## Define Success Before You Start How will you know if the redesign worked? If you don't have an answer to that question before work begins, you won't be able to evaluate the outcome after. Pick one or two concrete metrics. Contact form submissions. Time on page. Bounce rate on your services page. Whatever matters most to your business. Document where you are now. Measure again 60 and 90 days after launch. ## What to Brief Your Developer On The more context you give, the better the outcome. Before your first call with a developer, be ready to answer: - Who is your primary customer? What do they want when they land on your site? - What action do you most want visitors to take? - Which pages matter most? - What do you like and dislike about your current site? - What sites do you admire (not necessarily in your industry)? - What content do you want to keep, update, or cut entirely? A developer who doesn't ask these questions is building a site to their taste, not your goals. ## The Timeline Reality Check A proper redesign — discovery, design, build, content, QA, launch — typically takes 4–8 weeks for a small business site. Faster is possible but usually means cutting corners somewhere. Slower often means scope creep or poor project management. Plan your launch timing thoughtfully. Don't go live right before your busiest season if you can avoid it. Give yourself a buffer for post-launch fixes. --- At CTRL ALT DEFEAT, every redesign starts with a scoping conversation before any design decisions are made. If you're thinking about a redesign, let's start there.