Website redesign
A redesign should not cost you the rankings you already have.
The riskiest website a business ever builds is its second one. Everything the first one earned is sitting there waiting to be thrown away by accident.
Werehouse Media provides website redesign and migration services for established UK businesses, from £1,495. A website redesign differs from a new build because the site already has traffic, rankings, links and habits attached to it, and the main risk is not that the new site looks wrong but that it quietly loses the search visibility the old one had earned. A redesign is worth doing when the site cannot be extended, cannot be made fast, blocks the pages the business needs, or is actively losing enquiries it already receives. It is not worth doing because the business is bored of it.
Every Werehouse Media redesign starts with a baseline: current rankings, top landing pages, conversion paths and the full URL list are recorded before anything changes. URLs are kept wherever they can be, and where a URL must change it gets a permanent 301 redirect mapped one to one rather than to the home page. Copy that already ranks is kept and improved rather than replaced for the sake of newness, and the new site is checked to be faster than the old one on Core Web Vitals before launch, not after.
First question
Fix list, redesign or rebuild: which do you need?
A website that is losing enquiries needs one of three things: a fix list, a redesign or a platform rebuild. They differ in cost and, more importantly, in how much of the ranking the site has already earned they put at risk.
| Option | Right when | Cost | Risk to rankings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fix list | The site is structurally sound and reasonably fast, but pages, titles, the Business Profile or the enquiry route are letting it down. | The free SEO audit writes the list (normally £495). The fixes are quoted, or done by your own developer. | Lowest. URLs and the content that ranks stay where they are. |
| Redesign | The site works underneath but looks dated or converts badly. | From £1,495. | Moderate, and managed: baseline recorded, URLs kept or mapped one to one, ranking copy carried across. |
| Platform rebuild | The platform itself blocks indexing, cannot be made fast, cannot carry the pages the business needs, or cannot be edited without an agency. | Quoted in writing after the audit, because it depends on how many URLs and how much content move. | Highest, because almost every URL changes. Every old URL gets a permanent 301 redirect to its closest new page. |
Symptoms, and what each one usually needs
A lot of redesigns are bought to solve problems a redesign does not solve. If the site is not ranking, a new one that makes the same mistakes will not rank either. If enquiries are low, the cause is as likely to be the form, the phone number or the absence of a price as it is the visual design.
| Symptom | Usually needs |
|---|---|
| Looks dated but works, ranks and converts | A visual refresh, or nothing at all. Dated is not the same as ineffective. |
| Not appearing on Google | An SEO audit first. A rebuild that repeats the same errors changes nothing. |
| Slow, and every fix hits the same wall | A rebuild. Some platforms cannot be made fast, and no amount of tuning changes that. |
| Cannot add the pages the business now needs | A rebuild. Structure is the one thing you cannot patch around. |
| Traffic arrives, enquiries do not | Conversion work on the existing site first. Cheaper, faster, and it tells you what the new one should do. |
| Nobody can update it without ringing an agency | A rebuild, usually. That is an ownership problem, and it is expensive in ways that do not show up on an invoice. |
We would rather hand you a free audit that concludes "keep this site and fix six things" than sell you a £4,000 rebuild you did not need. If the audit does conclude that a rebuild is right, it says so, and the redesign is quoted from its findings.
How the rankings survive
Four things that lose traffic, and what stops each one.
Changed URLs with no redirect map
The commonest and the most damaging. Every existing URL is listed before the build starts. Wherever a URL can stay the same it stays the same, and where it genuinely has to change it gets a permanent 301 to the single most equivalent new page. Not to the home page. Redirecting everything to the home page is the same as deleting it, with extra steps.
Content rewritten for the sake of newness
The pages that bring in traffic get identified first, and what they say is treated as an asset rather than as old copy. They get improved, restructured and made faster. They do not get replaced with something shorter because it fits the new layout better.
A new site that is slower than the old one
Measured before and after, on Core Web Vitals, on a real connection rather than a fast laptop. A redesign that is prettier and slower is a downgrade, and it will show up in both rankings and enquiries. There is a fuller explanation on why site speed costs you customers.
Launching with the staging settings still on
A noindex tag left in place, a robots file blocking the whole site, analytics pointed at the old property, forms posting nowhere. Every one of these has happened to somebody this year. They are caught by a launch checklist rather than by good intentions, and this site runs its own set of automated pre-flight checks for exactly that reason.
A dip is normal, a crash is not. Google's own documentation on site moves with URL changes tells site owners to "Expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move", and to keep redirects in place for "generally at least 1 year". A wobble for a couple of weeks while Google recrawls the site is normal, and we will tell you what one looks like so you are not panicking at it. A crash that does not recover usually means missing redirects or a staging setting left on, which is what the checks above exist to prevent.
Search belongs at the start of a redesign, not the end. Google's own guide to hiring an SEO says a great time to bring one in "is when you're considering a site redesign (the earlier, the better)" (Google Search Central). On a redesign here, the search work and the build are done by the same people from the first day.
The long version of all of this, written for people doing it themselves or briefing somebody else, is how to redesign a website without losing your rankings.
Pricing
Website redesign, from £1,495.
| What | Price | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| SEO audit first | Free for a limited time, normally £495 | What is wrong now and whether a rebuild is the right answer. |
| Website redesign | From £1,495 | Existing site rebuilt: baseline recorded, URLs preserved or mapped, ranking content carried across, faster than before, launch checks run. |
| Larger sites and e-commerce | Quoted in writing | Hundreds of URLs, product catalogues, or a migration between platforms. |
| Care afterwards | From £49/month | Hosting, updates, backups, monitoring and small changes. Never a condition of the build. |
A redesign starts higher than a new build for a real reason rather than an arbitrary one: a new site has no history to protect, and a redesign has a baseline to record, a URL map to build, redirects to write and test, and existing content to carry across without breaking what it earned. That work is most of the risk in the project and it is where the price goes.
Every published price, from care plans to local SEO, is on the price list.
Related: bespoke web design for a first site, web development for the build detail, and website care for what happens after launch.
Straight answers
Common questions.
Will a redesign lose my Google rankings?
A redesign can lose rankings, and that is the single most common way a redesign destroys value. Rankings are lost when URLs change without redirects, when the content that earned the ranking is rewritten out, when the new site is slower, or when a staging site is launched with its noindex tag still on. All four are avoidable and all four are checked here before launch. The baseline is recorded first so there is something to compare against, which is also the only way to know whether anything went wrong.
How much does a website redesign cost in the UK?
Werehouse Media redesigns start at £1,495, which covers a small existing site rebuilt properly with its content, URLs and rankings carried across. Larger sites, e-commerce, and sites with hundreds of URLs to map cost more and are quoted in writing after a look at the existing site. In our own reading of published UK prices, a freelance redesign runs roughly £800 to £3,000 and a mid-sized agency £8,000 to £25,000, mostly reflecting how many people are involved rather than how much is built.
Do I actually need a redesign, or just fixes?
Very often just fixes, and that is worth establishing before spending anything. If the site is structurally sound and reasonably fast, extending and improving it is cheaper and lower risk than rebuilding it. A rebuild is genuinely necessary when the platform blocks indexation, the structure cannot support the pages the business needs, performance cannot be recovered, or the design actively costs enquiries. An SEO audit, normally £495 and free for a limited time, answers this properly.
Can you redesign a Wix, Squarespace or WordPress site?
Yes. A redesign can stay on the same platform or move to a new one, and the audit says which makes sense. Staying suits a business that needs to keep editing the site itself, on WordPress or Shopify for example. Moving makes sense when the platform is what limits speed or structure, which is a common reason Wix and Squarespace sites get rebuilt. Either way, every old URL is listed first, and anything that changes gets a permanent 301 redirect to its closest new page.
Do you handle website migrations?
Yes. A website migration is any change that moves where the pages live: a new platform, a new domain, a move from one CMS to another, or a restructure that changes URLs. It carries the same risk as a redesign, concentrated into launch day, and it is handled the same way.
Every old URL is listed and mapped one to one with a permanent 301 redirect, the new site is checked for broken links and leftover noindex tags before it goes live, and a domain change is also registered with the Change of Address tool in Google Search Console. Rankings are then compared against the baseline for the weeks after launch. A migration is priced with the redesign, from £1,495; a migration with no redesign is quoted after a look at the site.
Can you keep my content and just change the design?
Yes, and on a site with existing rankings that is often the correct approach. The pages that already bring in traffic get kept, with their URLs and their substance intact, and improved rather than replaced. Wholesale rewriting of a page that ranks is one of the more expensive mistakes in this work, because the thing that made it rank is usually not obvious from looking at it.
How long does a redesign take?
Two to five weeks for most small business sites once content decisions are made, which is normally the part that sets the pace rather than the build. Larger sites with a lot of URL mapping take longer. We keep the book deliberately short, so a start date typically sits two to three weeks out, and that is said at quote stage rather than discovered later.
Next step
Send us the address.
We will look at the current site properly and tell you whether it needs rebuilding or repairing, before either of us talks about money.