Two very different situations arrive on this page. They need different first moves.
It ranks, it brings in some business, and you do not want to lose either. The job is a rebuild that keeps everything the old site earned. Same URLs, same content that brings traffic, new design, better speed, and room to grow.
Leads stopped, rankings dropped, and the agency that built it is telling you to wait. Do not wait. The first step is finding out exactly what broke, so you can decide whether it needs a fix or a rebuild.
It is almost never the design. It is a short, predictable list of decisions made during the rebuild, and every one
of them is avoidable if someone looks before they build.
Every one of these is something we have been called in to fix after someone else’s launch.
We don’t take your website offline and rebuild it in place. The new site is built on a separate server while your existing one keeps running, keeps ranking and keeps taking leads. Nothing changes for your customers until the day we switch.
Still up. Still ranking. Still taking calls and form fills. You keep publishing to it if you want to.
Built in parallel, reviewed on a staging link, tested against the URL map. Invisible to the public.
Any content you added to the old site during the build gets carried across, so nothing published mid-project is lost.
Every URL checked against the architecture sheet before anything points anywhere new.
The domain switches to the new server. That’s the whole cutover. We launch on a Monday, never a Friday.
The fastest way to lose traffic in a redesign is changing your URL structure. A page that ranked for ten years at one address becomes a 404 at a new one, and the rankings go with it. We keep as many URLs unchanged as possible and avoid unnecessary redirects, because every redirect loses a little authority.
We crawl your site and map every URL to its new version, one to one. Pages that stay keep their exact address. Pages that get merged are redirected to the page that replaced them.
When old posts have leftover code from a previous theme, we clean it up programmatically and restyle them all at once, so a blog with a thousand posts does not have to be fixed one post at a time.
A rebrand or a domain change forces new URLs. In that case we map all the redirects first, tell you what kind of dip to expect, and time the launch to keep the impact as small as possible.
Moving off a platform you’ve outgrown, or one that was chosen for you, is the highest-risk thing you can do to a website that ranks. It’s also the work we’re called in for most often.
WordPress
WordPress
WordPress
WordPress
Locked out of your own site by a builder you can’t edit, or a CMS only one agency understands? That’s the usual reason people call.
Shopify
Shopify
WooCommerce
Your own store
WooCommerce
Products, variants, categories, reviews and feeds all have to land intact, and the category URLs are usually where the traffic lives.
A little. The mapping takes longer because the old platform’s structure has to be understood before it can be carried across, but not dramatically, since we build that architecture spreadsheet on every project anyway. You’ll get the number before any work starts.
If your site dropped after a launch, the honest answer is that nobody knows yet whether it needs rebuilding or repairing, including us. So we look before we quote.
The audit finds what actually broke and how deep it goes. Sometimes the fix is a handful of redirects and a week of work. Sometimes there are so many hidden errors layered on top of each other that cleaning them up costs more than building it properly from scratch. Both answers are real, and we’ll tell you which one you’re looking at.
The goal is the same either way: your site back up, without errors, as fast as possible.
If a full redesign isn’t what you need, we’ll say so. We’ve talked plenty of people out of one.
Get your site auditedEvery URL, its status code, what it ranks for and what it’s worth. This is where we find out whether you need a rebuild or a repair.
Old URL to new URL, one to one, with keep / merge / redirect marked on every row. You sign off before anything is designed.
Greyscale layouts, no colour or imagery. The page has to tell its story as boxes and text before anyone argues about a photograph.
Full colour, your content, your photography. Homepage first, then templates. Revision rounds are in the schedule, not pretended away.
Built on a separate server while your current site stays live. Content and blog archives migrated in bulk, then read page by page.
Anything added to the old site mid-build is carried over, every URL is checked against the map, then the domain points at the new server. Thirty days of support after.
Redesigns slip waiting on content, photos, approvals, and access, not development. You get a Gantt chart at kickoff with every deadline on it, ours and yours, and we ask for feedback within five business days.
Start your redesignSites that were already working when we got them, and still were the day after launch.
Moved a national injury firm off a proprietary platform onto WordPress, with CRM integration and lead automation.
WordPress and WooCommerce handling live music scheduling, inventory integration and high-traffic ecommerce.
A 300-course catalog rebuilt into an SEO-structured ecommerce platform with LMS checkout.
20-40% more organic traffic, typically, once the technical issues and internal linking are fixed.
That’s the pattern we see, not a promise. It depends on what’s wrong to begin with. A site with deep structural problems has more to gain than one that’s already clean. We’ll tell you which one yours is before you commit to anything.
A redesign doesn’t have to come with a hosting contract. We’ll migrate onto your existing infrastructure if that’s what you want, and if you’d rather hand it over, we host too.
We build, migrate and launch onto your own hosting. No transfer of control, no new invoice, no dependency on us afterwards. We’ll still hand over the documentation.
Hosting, daily backups, security, updates and support in one monthly plan. You still get FTP access to your files and full administrator access to your CMS, and you can leave whenever you want.
Not if the URLs are mapped first. We crawl every existing page, map each one to its replacement, and redirect only what genuinely has to move. Rankings drop in a redesign when addresses change without redirects and content that was working gets thrown out. Both are avoidable, and both are planned for before design starts.
No. Your current site stays live on its own server the entire time while the new one gets built on a separate server. On launch day we copy over anything you published during the build, verify every URL against the map, and point the domain at the new server. That switch is the only moment anything changes.
That is what the audit is for. Sometimes it is a handful of redirects and a week of work. Sometimes there are so many errors stacked on each other that fixing them costs more than rebuilding from scratch. We find out which before either of us commits.
Three to four months for a standard redesign, from kickoff to launch. A facelift runs 2 to 3 weeks, and a targeted repair can be done in days. The timeline mostly depends on how fast content, photos, approvals, and access come back to us.
Slightly. The mapping takes longer because the old platform’s structure has to be understood before it can be carried across, but not dramatically, since we build the architecture spreadsheet on every project regardless. You get the number before any work starts.
Both. We redesign in place on platforms we support, and we migrate off ones that are holding you back, most often to WordPress for content sites and to Shopify or WooCommerce for stores. If your current setup is fine, we will say so.
Yes. We will build, migrate, and launch on your existing servers. Hosting with us exists for people who would rather not manage it, and it is optional and month to month.
Constantly. We’re the build partner for a number of SEO and marketing agencies, so we’re used to taking architecture and keyword targets from someone else and building to them. We don’t sell SEO retainers in competition with your agency.
The migration cost answer had an em dash before “but not dramatically”, so I swapped it for a comma.
Send us the site. We will tell you whether it needs a facelift, a rebuild, or a repair, what each one costs, and which one we would choose if it were our site.
