Your existing site is a set of URLs, content and rankings. Those are preserved. Everything else is replaced.
Is this even the right purchase
Three checks you can run before spending anything.
A redesign is the wrong answer more often than agencies admit, and it is an expensive wrong answer. Run these first.
- If almost nobody is arriving, the site is not the problem
- A redesign changes what happens after someone lands. If the traffic is not there, a better-looking site converts the same near-zero number of visitors. The money belongs in whatever brings people to the domain, and that is not this studio’s trade.
- If the content is the failure, rewriting beats rebuilding
- Pages that do not say what the business does, in words a buyer uses, keep failing inside a new design. Commission a copywriter, put the new text into the existing site, and see what moves before rebuilding anything.
- If the old site has fewer than ten real pages, build new instead
- Below roughly ten pages, migrating is more work than writing fresh - the audit, the URL map and the content extraction cost more than the pages are worth. A new build is cheaper and the result is better. That answer costs this studio money and it is still the right one.
What will I lose
What survives the move, and how it is proven.
- Every URL worth keeping
- The old site is crawled and inventoried before anything is designed. Each URL is then mapped to its new address, retired deliberately, or flagged as a decision for you - never dropped silently.
- A permanent redirect for every mapped URL
- Deployed in the host’s own format, then verified by requesting a sample of the old addresses and confirming the status code and the destination.
- The content that earned the rankings
- Migrated as content, not as screenshots of the old layout. Where a page is restructured, the substance that search engines indexed is still on the new page.
- Metadata and structured data
- Titles, descriptions and JSON-LD carried across and improved where they were thin, rather than regenerated from scratch and silently changed.
- Proof of migration
- Before-and-after crawl
Both sites are crawled and the results compared page by page, so the claim that nothing was dropped is a document you can read rather than an assurance.
- Monitoring window
- 30 days
After cutover, crawl errors and redirect failures are watched and fixed at no charge for a month.
How it proceeds
Audit first, design second. In that order, always.
Week 0
Audit and crawl
The existing site is crawled, the URL inventory built, and the analytics and search console history read to find what is actually earning.
You supply
Read access to analytics, Search Console, and the current hosting or CMS.
Week 1
URL map
Every old URL gets a destination, a retirement decision, or a question for you. This document is agreed before any design work begins.
You supply
Decisions on the pages nobody is sure about.
Weeks 2-3
Design system
Built for what the business is now, not derived from the old site’s layout. The old design constrains nothing except the content that has to fit.
You supply
One named decision-maker and a direction chosen within three days.
Weeks 3-6
Build and migrate
Pages built on a separate URL with the migrated content in place, so you review the real thing rather than a mockup.
You supply
Two consolidated rounds of comments.
Cutover day
Staged switch
Redirects deployed, DNS switched, a sample of old URLs verified, sitemap resubmitted. The old site stays intact and reachable until you confirm.
You supply
Registrar and DNS access, and a date that is not a Friday.
The price
From EUR 1,700, and what raises it.
Redesigns vary more than new builds because you are paying for what already exists as much as for what replaces it. The starting price and what it covers come first; everything that moves it is listed underneath.
Website redesign
fromEUR 1,700
per project
4 to 8 weeks, cutover in one working day
Included. Audit of the existing site, a new site of up to 8 pages, up to 10 pages of content migrated, redirects for up to 50 old URLs, new design system and build, cutover. The price rises beyond those numbers and with any custom functionality carried over from the old site.
Not included. Rewriting the existing copy, new photography, recovering content that the old platform cannot export, and rankings lost before the project started.
| Decision | Effect on the price | Why |
|---|---|---|
| More than 8 pages on the new siteSame rate as a new build: the design system is what costs, and an extra page inside it is cheap. | + EUR 220 per page | |
| More than 50 old URLs that must surviveThe redirect map is built and verified URL by URL. The first 50 are in the starting price. | + EUR 1 per URL beyond 50 | |
| Custom functionality inherited from the old siteA booking flow, a member area or a calculator is a rebuild of software, not a migration of content, and pretending otherwise is how redesigns overrun. | Quoted separately | |
| More than 10 pages of content to migrateThe first 10 pages are in the starting price. Beyond that, per page of real content moved and re-checked, not per URL. | + EUR 12 per page | |
| Old platform does not export cleanlyProprietary site builders that emit HTML with no structure underneath mean content is extracted by hand. This is checked and quoted before the project starts, not discovered in week four. | + 20% on migration |
Before the first day
What has to be ready on your side.
A redesign stalls on access far more often than on design. All five of these take minutes to arrange and weeks to chase.
- Registrar and DNS access
- Not the agency that set it up eight years ago - your own access, confirmed working before a cutover date is agreed.
- Current hosting or CMS access
- Read access is enough for the audit. Write access is needed only at cutover, and only if redirects have to live on the old host.
- Analytics and Search Console
- Read access, so priority is decided from what pages actually earn rather than from what somebody assumes.
- A content owner who can approve copy
- One person who can say yes. Migration decisions are relentless and small, and a committee turns a four-week project into a twelve-week one.
- A decision on what does not move
- Every old site has pages nobody will defend. Deciding to retire them is your call, and making it early is what keeps the URL map short.
Asked about migration
Questions about a redesign.
Will my rankings drop?
There is usually a dip of two to four weeks while search engines recrawl and re-evaluate, even on a technically perfect migration. What decides whether it recovers is whether every old URL resolves to the right new one with a permanent redirect (a 301), and whether the content that earned the ranking actually moved across. Both are planned before any design work starts, and both are verified by crawling the old and new sites and comparing them.
How long does the cutover itself take?
One working day, scheduled with you. The new site is built and reviewed on a separate URL first, so the switch is a DNS change and a redirect deployment rather than a rebuild in place. If something is wrong, the old site is still there and the change is reversed the same day.
Can we run the old site in parallel for a while?
On a subdomain, yes, and it is often sensible for an internal tool or a section that is not ready to move. What is not sensible is leaving the whole old site publicly reachable: two live copies of the same content compete with each other in search and both lose.
What if the old site has no analytics history?
Then the URL inventory comes from a crawl and from the existing sitemap and search console data instead, and the priority order is decided from the structure rather than from traffic. It is a worse starting point - there is no way to tell which pages were earning anything - and it is the argument for connecting analytics before the project starts rather than during it.
Send the current URL with the brief and the first reply will name what the audit found, including whether a redesign is the wrong purchase.