A website redesign means rebuilding an existing site, its structure, its design and often its content, without starting from scratch on what already works: the domain name, the search rankings you’ve earned and the pages that bring in business. Done well, it doesn’t lose a single position on Google. Done badly, it wipes out years of work in a few weeks.
This guide covers everything you need to know before launching yours: when it’s justified, what it costs, how it unfolds and, above all, how to lose nothing along the way.
Redesign, new build, facelift: not the same thing
Three words get used for three very different jobs, and mixing them up gets expensive when the quote arrives.
| Job | What changes | What stays | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Facelift | Colours, fonts, a few visuals | Structure, content, page addresses | 2 to 4 weeks |
| Redesign | Structure, design, content, technology | Domain name, search rankings, history | 6 to 12 weeks |
| New build | Everything | Nothing, the site didn’t exist | 4 to 10 weeks |
If your site bothers you but its pages show up on Google, you’re looking for a redesign, not a new build. The difference isn’t cosmetic: it decides how the switchover is handled and what the budget is.
When should you redesign your website?
A brochure site lasts three to five years before the gap with competitors starts to show. But age alone decides nothing. The signals that matter are concrete:
- You no longer dare give out your website address, so you send people your Instagram instead.
- Mobile is treated as an afterthought, even though most of your visitors arrive on their phones.
- You can’t change a page any more without calling someone.
- Pages take more than three seconds to load.
- Your offer has changed and the site still describes the business you were four years ago.
- You don’t appear in any search other than your own name.
We’ve set out the seven signs that justify a redesign, along with the cases where it can wait. If your only problem is speed, start by checking whether you simply have a slow WordPress site: that can be fixed without redoing everything.
How much does a website redesign cost?
The price almost never depends on the number of pages. It depends on five factors, in this order of importance:
- The volume of content to carry over. A hundred pages to migrate means a hundred decisions: keep, merge, redirect, delete.
- The number of languages. Each language is a site in its own right, not a translation laid on top.
- How bespoke the design is. An adapted template and a proper art direction don’t take the same amount of work.
- Features. Booking, client area, shop, connection to a business tool: each one adds a project within the project.
- What’s at stake for SEO. A site that already gets traffic needs a migration plan, redirects and monitoring after the switchover.
On the French market, a brochure site redesign typically costs between €4,000 and €15,000, and goes beyond that as soon as there’s volume, several languages or features. Be wary of both extremes: below that range, you’re being sold a template with no migration; well above it, check what the “support” line actually covers. We explain how a quote is put together in our article on how much a website costs.
The seven stages of a redesign
The order matters. Half of all failed redesigns fail because the design was signed off before the site structure was settled.
- 1. The audit. What works today: pages that get traffic, searches that bring you visitors, external links pointing to you. This is the list of things you’re not allowed to break.
- 2. The site structure. The map of pages, their addresses and how they link to one another.
- 3. The content. What stays as it is, what gets rewritten, what gets merged, what gets deleted. Every deletion calls for a redirect.
- 4. The design. Built on the site structure, never the other way round.
- 5. The development. Build, performance, accessibility, structured data.
- 6. Testing. Page-by-page proofreading, testing on mobile, checking the forms and the redirect plan.
- 7. Switchover and monitoring. Going live, submitting the sitemap, then four to eight weeks of checking rankings and errors.
The real risk: losing your search rankings
This is the one point where a redesign can cost far more than it brings in. When page addresses change without redirects, Google finds itself facing hundreds of pages that can’t be found. The rankings you’d earned disappear, and they don’t come back on their own.
The good news is that this risk can be fully controlled. The checklist:
- Record every current address before touching anything.
- Set up a permanent redirect from each old address to its new one, one by one, never mass-redirecting to the home page.
- Keep the title tags and descriptions of the pages that rank well.
- Check that no useful page is blocked from indexing at the moment of switchover.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console as soon as the site goes live.
- Monitor pages not found and rankings for two months.
An example that’s anything but theoretical: our redesign of the Simont Braun website, a Brussels business law firm. Nearly five thousand pages in three languages, including more than one thousand seven hundred legal articles that had been ranking for years. Not a single position lost at switchover, and search traffic has since grown by almost half. We’ve also devoted a whole article to the method for keeping your search rankings during a redesign.
What’s changing in 2026: being readable by artificial intelligence
A growing share of searches no longer ends with a click. Users ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI overview their question and read the answer without visiting a single site. On the French search for “refonte site internet” (website redesign) itself, an AI-generated overview now holds the top spot.
A redesign carried out in 2026 therefore has to aim at two readers: the visitor and the answer engine. In practice:
- Answer the page’s question in the first two sentences, before going into detail.
- Structure content as lists, tables and questions and answers, which are easy to extract.
- Name the business, its trade, its city and its services explicitly rather than hinting at them.
- Add the structured data that describes the business, its services and its frequently asked questions.
- Give figures and verifiable examples: that’s what the models quote.
That’s the focus of our approach to SEO and AIO.
The five mistakes we see most often
- Signing off the design before the site structure. Everything has to be redone when a forgotten page turns up halfway through.
- Redirecting all old pages to the home page. Google treats these redirects as pages not found in disguise.
- Using the redesign to change domain name. Two risky jobs at once, and each becomes impossible to diagnose.
- Going live on a Friday. Problems show up in the hours that follow, not on Monday.
- Treating go-live as the end of the project. It’s the start of the period when you need to keep watch.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a website redesign take?
Six to twelve weeks for a brochure site, longer as soon as there’s a lot of content, several languages or features. The longest phase is almost never development, it’s preparing the content.
Should you change domain name during a redesign?
No, unless the name itself is a problem. The domain carries your site’s age and the links it has received, the two things hardest to rebuild. If a change is unavoidable, do it at a later stage, once the redesign has settled.
Can you keep the content from the old site?
Yes, and you should in fact keep everything that ranks. The rule is simple: a page that gets visitors from Google is kept, possibly improved, but never deleted without good reason.
Redesign or new site: how do you decide?
If your current site gets search traffic or has external links, it’s a redesign. If it has neither, the question no longer arises: you can start from a blank page without losing anything.
How do I know if my redesign has worked?
Three indicators after four weeks: the pages that mattered before have held or improved their rankings, the number of pages not found is close to zero, and the form conversion rate hasn’t dropped. Looks aren’t on this list; they’re judged differently.
Going further
We carry out redesigns for law firms, restaurant groups and businesses with a history to protect. If you’re weighing it up, our website redesign page explains the method, and the Simont Braun case study shows what a five-thousand-page switchover with no losses looks like.
Further reading
- websites for law firms: the special case of regulated professions.
- websites for restaurants: the other silo, with its own codes and constraints.
