A business website redesign is proposed for two reasons, and only one of them is good. The good reason is that the current site is losing enquiries: it loads slowly on a phone, the prices and the contact details are hard to find, the pages say nothing about what the business actually does now, or the features it needs cannot be added to it. The poor reason is that it looks dated to the people who see it every day, who are not the customers. This page sets out how to tell which you have, what to decide before asking anyone for a quote, and how to run the redesign so it does not cost the enquiries it was meant to win.
Deciding whether the redesign is needed
Look at three things before anything else. Whether the site works on a phone, because most visitors are on one and a site that does not is losing them. Whether the phone number, the address, the prices and the booking or enquiry route are visible without scrolling, because that is what a visitor came for. Whether the pages describe the services you sell today and the places you serve, because a site that describes the business of three years ago is aimed at nothing. If all three are fine, a redesign is a preference and can wait; if any is not, the redesign has a job to do and a return to measure.
Deciding the scope before the quote
Go through every page and mark it kept, restyled or rewritten, and list every feature and whether it survives a change of platform. Decide whether the platform changes at all; staying on the same platform is a smaller, cheaper redesign, and moving is a migration with its own plan. Decide who is writing the rewritten pages and who is taking the new photographs. Those decisions are the scope, and a quote given against a written scope can be compared with another; a quote given against a conversation cannot.
Keeping what the old site earned
An established site has earned search rankings and inbound links to specific pages, and a redesign that changes page addresses without redirecting the old ones loses both. The redesign needs a page map: every old address, where it goes on the new site, and a redirect for each one that changes. It needs the same titles and headings on the pages that kept their subject, and it needs a launch checklist that verifies the redirects on the day. The migration plan on this site is the shape of that record, and the redesign is not finished until it has been worked through.
Questions people ask about business website redesign
How often should a business redesign its website?
When it stops doing its job, not on a calendar. A site that loads quickly on a phone, shows the prices and the contact route, and describes the current business does not need redesigning because it is five years old.
Should we change platform during the redesign?
Only if the current platform cannot do something you need. A platform change turns a redesign into a migration, with the page map, the redirects and the rebuilt features that involves.
What is the biggest risk in a redesign?
Losing the search rankings and links the old pages had by changing their addresses without redirects. It is entirely avoidable with a page map and it is the commonest way a redesign costs a business enquiries.