Redesign without losing your rankings.

Good website redesign services are judged by what survives the launch as much as by what is new. Your current site has rankings, backlinks, bookmarked pages and form submissions tied to specific URLs. A redesign that ignores them can look beautiful and still cost you half your organic traffic the week it goes live. We treat the old site as an asset to inventory first and a design problem second.

Unified Marketing has been building websites since 2006, for more than 1,100 businesses. We design in a clickable prototype, then hand-code the theme on WordPress or build on Shopify, with no page builders. The work is run by one in-house team, the same people who handle SEO and Google Ads, so the new site is built for the channels that feed it.

Signs you need a redesign, not a refresh

• The platform fights you. Simple edits need a developer, the page builder has piled up years of shortcodes, or core updates break the theme.
• Mobile is an afterthought. The layout was designed for desktop and squeezed onto phones, where most of your visitors now arrive.
• Core Web Vitals are red and the cause is the theme itself, not a few heavy images.
• The business changed. New services, new locations, a new brand or a new buyer, and the site still describes the company you were five years ago.
• You cannot measure it. Calls, forms and bookings are not tracked to a source, so nobody knows which pages earn money.
• Accessibility gaps run through every template, so fixing them page by page would cost more than rebuilding them correctly.

If only one or two of those apply, you may not need a full rebuild. That decision deserves its own section, because it is where most redesign budgets are won or wasted.

Agencies that only sell website redesign services will always recommend a new site. We also run website improvement and CRO programs, so we have no reason to push a rebuild you do not need. Here is the framework we use in the first call. Match your situation to a row, and the recommendation is usually obvious.

The most expensive mistake we see is a business redesigning because a site feels old, when the real issue is a slow form or a confusing offer. Before anyone opens a design file, read our conversion leak audit and check whether the leak is the design or the path. If you do need new design, our website design process shows you the result in a prototype before a line of code is written.

Rule of thumb: redesign when the platform or the structure is the problem. Improve when the message, the offer or the path is the problem.

Google publishes clear guidance on site moves with URL changes, and it is worth reading before you sign with anyone. It recommends server-side permanent redirects such as 301s, sending each old URL straight to its final destination, avoiding redirect chains, keeping redirects for at least a year, and not dumping many old URLs onto an unrelated page like the home page. It also warns that rankings can fluctuate for a few weeks or more while Google recrawls.

Our migration checklist turns that guidance into tasks with owners, and it is part of all our website redesign services. It runs in this order, because each step depends on the one before it.

1. Crawl and export every live URL from the old site, plus URLs from the sitemap, analytics landing pages, Search Console and backlink reports. Pages that only exist in one of those lists are the ones that get lost.
2. Rank the URLs by value: organic clicks, conversions, backlinks and ad landing pages. The top of that list gets a human review, not a pattern match.
3. Write a one-to-one redirect map. Each old URL points to the closest new equivalent. Retired services go to the nearest relevant page, never to the home page in bulk.
4. Carry content forward deliberately. Pages that rank keep their core copy, headings and focus terms unless we have a reason to change them.
5. Rebuild the technical layer: titles, meta descriptions, self-referencing canonicals, schema, image alt text and hreflang if you use it.
6. Update internal links to the new URLs so the site does not lean on its own redirects.
7. Stage and crawl the new site behind a password, test every redirect from the map, and fix chains and 404s before launch.
8. Rebuild tracking: GA4, Google Ads conversions, call tracking and form events, tested end to end on staging.
9. Launch in a low-traffic window, remove any staging noindex, submit the new XML sitemap and keep the old one available while Google processes the move.
10. Use Change of Address only for a domain change. Google says it is not needed for HTTP to HTTPS moves or path changes on the same domain.
11. Monitor daily for two weeks, then weekly: coverage, 404s, rankings for the top pages, conversions and Core Web Vitals.
12. Keep the redirects. We leave them in place well past the one-year mark Google recommends.

Our technical SEO checklist covers the crawl side in more depth. The short version: a redesign that keeps its URLs, content and links mapped is a ranking opportunity, because a faster, clearer site gives Google better pages to show.

Timelines depend on page count, content readiness and how fast decisions get made. This is the shape of our website redesign services for a service business with roughly 20 to 80 pages. Larger catalogs and multi-location sites add time to content and migration, not to design.

The quality bar every redesign must clear

• Core Web Vitals in the good range. Google's web.dev guidance defines good as Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. Our Core Web Vitals guide explains each one.
• Accessibility built in. We design and code toward WCAG 2.2 Level AA. The Department of Justice states that the ADA applies to the web content of businesses open to the public and points to WCAG as helpful guidance, per ADA.gov.
• Every conversion tracked. Calls, forms and bookings attributed to their source through UnifiedIQ and call tracking, so the results of website redesign services can be judged on leads, not opinions.
• Easy to edit. Your team can update text, images and new pages without breaking the layout.

Most proposals look alike: a sitemap, a few mockups, a launch date. The difference shows up in the details nobody asks about until something breaks. These are the questions we would ask if we were hiring an agency ourselves.

Questions to ask about any website redesign services

1. Who builds the redirect map, how is it checked, and will I get a copy?
2. Will my top 20 organic pages keep their URLs and core content? If not, why?
3. Is the site hand-coded or built in a page builder, and who owns the theme code after launch?
4. What Core Web Vitals and accessibility level do you commit to, and how will you prove it?
5. How do you rebuild tracking, and how will we know if leads rise or fall after launch?
6. What happens in the first 30 days after launch if rankings or conversions dip?
7. Can I edit pages myself, and what training is included?

Red flags

• No mention of redirects, Search Console or URL mapping in the proposal.
• A plan to redirect old pages to the home page because the new site has fewer pages.
• Design shown only as static images, with no prototype and no mobile view.
• A template theme stacked with plugins sold as custom design.
• Launch scheduled with no staging review and no tracking tests.
• Nobody owns the site after go-live, or care and updates are an afterthought.

Our work is public. Aces Airboat Tours launched 334 pages and recorded 369 booking-button clicks in its first two months. The Center for Spiritual Living moved 732 events onto a custom AI-assisted events platform across a 753-page site and ranks #1 on Google and Maps in Fort Lauderdale. Joe Sale Photography has 50 SEO landing pages, every one scoring 99 to 100.

After launch, website care keeps the new build patched, backed up and fast. If you need deeper functionality than a marketing site, such as portals or booking systems, see website development and web application development. Browse the rest of the Websites practice, or tell us about your site and we will give you a straight redesign-or-improve answer.