Website redesign that keeps your rankings

Rebuilding an existing or dated site for businesses across Halifax and West Yorkshire. Your content and your existing search rankings carry over, because every old URL is mapped before anything goes live.

What a redesign should protect

Most rebuilds lose traffic, and it is rarely because the new site is worse. Nobody accounted for the old one on the way out.

Your rankings come with you

Traffic gets lost in a rebuild for one reason above all others: old URLs stop existing and nothing tells Google where they went. Every page on your current site gets mapped to its new address before launch, not after somebody notices the drop.

Your existing content is kept

The pages that already earn you visits are the ones worth protecting. They get migrated and improved rather than thrown out, because a page that has been ranking for three years is an asset you paid for in time.

Rebuilt on a faster foundation

A new theme on the same slow foundation is still a slow site. The rebuild moves you onto Next.js with pages pre-rendered at build time, which is where the jump from a mid-40s PageSpeed score to 95 plus comes from.

You see it before anyone else does

The new site is built and reviewable on a staging address while the current one carries on earning. Nothing switches over until you have been through it and signed it off.

How the rebuild runs

The first two stages are about the site you already have. Skipping them is what makes a redesign cost you visits.

  1. Find out what is already working

    Search Console and analytics first. Which pages bring visits, which terms you already rank for, and which pages nobody has ever opened. You cannot protect rankings you have not looked up, and plenty of redesigns quietly bin the one page that was earning.

  2. Map every URL on the old site

    The whole site gets crawled and every address is matched to where it will live afterwards. Anything genuinely retired gets pointed at the closest relevant page rather than a 404. This list is written down and checked, because it is the part that decides whether traffic survives.

  3. Design and build the replacement

    New design, migrated content, and the technical work that should have been there the first time: schema, meta, sitemap, internal linking and Core Web Vitals. Reviewed on staging as it goes rather than revealed at the end.

  4. Switch over, then watch it

    Launch, submit the new sitemap, and monitor Search Console through the weeks that follow. Redirects and crawl errors get checked and fixed rather than assumed fine.

What is included

Same price as a new build of the same size. The migration work is part of the job rather than a line added at the end.

  • Full crawl of your existing site
  • Search Console and analytics review
  • 301 redirect map for every URL
  • Content migration and rewriting
  • New custom design
  • Schema, meta tags and sitemap
  • Staging site for sign-off
  • Post-launch indexing checks

Questions we get asked

The first one is the question nearly everybody rings about.

Will I lose my Google rankings?
Not if the redirects are done properly, which is the whole reason they are treated as their own stage of the job. Rankings attach to URLs, so when a URL changes and nothing forwards the old one, the ranking has nowhere to land. Every address on the old site gets mapped to a new one before launch. Positions can wobble for a couple of weeks while Google recrawls, which is normal and recovers.
Can you keep my existing content?
Yes, and usually we should. Pages that already rank have earned something that is difficult to buy back. They get carried across and tightened rather than rewritten from nothing. Genuinely dead pages, the ones with no visits and no links, are the only ones worth retiring.
Do I need a full redesign or just a speed fix?
It depends what is actually wrong. If the design still represents you and the problem is that it takes six seconds to load, that is a cheaper job: speed optimisation will get you most of the way for a fraction of a rebuild. If the site looks a decade old, does not work properly on a phone, or you are embarrassed to send the link, a redesign is the honest answer.
My current provider hosts the site and I pay monthly. Can I still move?
Almost always, yes, though the details matter and it is worth reading your agreement for a notice period. The domain is the part that matters most, and if it is registered to your provider rather than to you, getting it transferred is the first thing to sort.
How much does a redesign cost?
The same as a new build, because that is what it is. Starter sites of one to five pages start at £495 and business sites of five to fifteen pages start at £850, paid 50% upfront and 50% on launch. The redirect mapping and content migration are part of the job, not an extra line.