Website redesign for UK businesses

Why UK redesigns lose traffic, and how to avoid it

A redesign that looks better and ranks worse is common. The usual causes are dull: URLs changed without redirects, pages merged or deleted, titles rewritten, text moved into tabs, and a new theme that loads slowly on mid-range phones. For a UK business whose enquiries come from google.co.uk, a drop of a few weeks can cost a quarter's pipeline.

So we begin with the old site, not the new design. We crawl it, export the pages that earn clicks from Search Console, and mark each as keep, merge or retire. The design then works around those decisions.

The redesign process we follow

1. InventoryCrawl of every URL, with traffic, links and conversions beside each. This is the basis of the redirect map.
2. Decide what staysPages with traffic keep their address and core text. Thin or duplicate pages are merged. Nothing is deleted without a redirect.
3. Design and buildNew templates built on your chosen platform, with UK items added: company footer, consent tool, accessible forms.
4. Staging reviewA password-protected copy where you test enquiry forms, checkout if you have one, and the redirect list.
5. Launch and watchGo live, submit the sitemap, check Search Console daily for two weeks and fix errors fast.

The same steps are laid out in our website redesign checklist, and the website migration checklist covers domain and hosting moves.

What to keep, change or fix on a UK site

Consent matters for the data you will see after launch. If the old site tracked visitors without a valid opt-in and the new one does not, reported traffic will drop even if real visits stay level. We note this in the launch report so nobody misreads the numbers.

Choosing launch dates in the UK calendar

Timing a launch is part of the plan. Bank holidays close offices and cause thin cover for fixing issues. Easter, the two May bank holidays, the August bank holiday and the Christmas break all affect UK teams, and Scotland and Northern Ireland have some different bank holidays from England and Wales.

For retailers, avoid the weeks before Black Friday and the run-up to Christmas. A site that is not settled by early November is better held until January, after Boxing Day sales. For service firms, the quiet weeks vary: accountants avoid January and the tax deadline, schools suppliers avoid late summer. We ask for your busiest weeks on the first call and set the launch window around them.

Working remotely with a UK team

We work from India, and the UK is 5.5 hours behind in winter and 4.5 hours behind in summer. A call at 09:30 UK time is 15:00 or 14:00 in India, so reviews fit comfortably in your morning. Each week you receive a staging link and a short note on what changed, what is next and what we need from you.

A single project lead owns the plan. You also keep admin access to every tool: hosting, domain registrar, analytics and the platform, set up in your name during the first week.

What a UK redesign costs

Projects start at $1,500, and extra work is $30 an hour. Size of the site, number of unique templates, how much content must be rewritten, and the migration effort (a large redirect map, a platform change, a store with many products) drive the price. Our website redesign cost guide goes through each factor. The quote is fixed once we have seen the current site, and it arrives within one working day of the call.

For design detail, see the UK website design page. For the service overview, read website redesign.