Your website is not the problem. What it does is.
A website redesign for businesses whose current site is slow, dated or invisible in search — rebuilt fast and accessible, with the rankings rebuilt alongside it.
“It looks dated” is usually the wrong diagnosis
When a website stops earning, the first thing anyone says about it is that it looks old. Sometimes that is fair. But looking old is rarely why it stopped working, and a redesign aimed only at the looks fixes the one thing that was not costing you anything.
Four questions sort it out quickly, and you can answer all of them yourself this evening.
- Can anyone find it? Search what you do plus your town, from a phone, not logged in. If you are not there, design is not the problem.
- Does it load before someone gives up? On mobile data, not on the office wifi. Most abandoned visits are decided in the first couple of seconds.
- Does it say what you actually do? In the words a customer would use, not the ones the industry uses. A lot of sites describe a business in language nobody searches for.
- Can somebody get hold of you in one step? A working form, a tappable phone number, no hunting.
If the answer to the first one is no, a redesign on its own will not change your year. It will change the wallpaper in a room nobody walks into.
A prettier version of a site nobody finds is still a site nobody finds.
The risk nobody warns you about
Here is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that can cost you real money: a redesign done carelessly loses the rankings you already had.
Google has spent years learning your current pages at their current addresses. Change those addresses without telling it where everything went, and every position those pages earned points at a dead end. The traffic does not move to the new site. It simply stops.
It is a slow, quiet failure. The new site looks better than the old one, everybody is pleased with it, and three months later the enquiries have dried up and nobody connects the two events. By then the evidence needed to prove what happened is gone.
What a redesign should do about it
- Measure first, on a date. Record where the site ranks and which pages earn before anything is touched. Without that snapshot, “it is doing better now” is an opinion, and so is “it is doing worse”.
- List every old address, including the forgotten ones. Search Console knows about pages you do not remember publishing, and some of them are the ones carrying your traffic.
- Keep the address if it has earned something. A tidier URL is not worth losing a page's history. Redirect the ones that must move, keep the ones that are working, and only retire a page deliberately.
- Check it after launch, not just before. A redirect that silently does nothing looks identical to one that works, because the home page still answers.
That is standard practice here rather than an optional extra, and the weekly checking afterwards is part of the search work. A rebuild is priced the same as a new site — both prices are on the packs page.
If nobody wrote down where you were before, nobody can prove where you got to.
Send me the address of the site you've got.
I'll tell you whether it needs rebuilding or just needs finding — and if it's the second one, I'll say so.
Questions people ask
Will a website redesign hurt my Google rankings?
It can, and this is the single biggest risk in a redesign. It is also entirely avoidable.
Rankings are attached to specific page addresses. If those addresses change and nothing tells Google where each page went, the positions those pages held stop sending anyone. Every old address needs to be listed before the rebuild, each one either kept or redirected to its replacement, and the redirects tested after launch — a redirect that quietly fails looks exactly like one that works, because the home page still answers.
Do I need a redesign or just SEO?
Search what you do plus your town on a phone, not logged in. If your site is nowhere, the problem is being found, not how the site looks.
A redesign is worth it when the site is slow, unusable on a phone, impossible to update, missing the pages your customers are searching for, or actively putting people off. If it is simply not visible, redesigning it changes the wallpaper in a room nobody walks into. Both jobs are in the same pack here, which is why the honest answer does not cost me anything.
Can you keep the content from my existing website?
Yes, and where a page is already earning traffic that is usually the right call.
The useful version is not a copy-paste. Content that is working gets kept at the same address so its history survives; content that reads like it was written for a search engine in 2015 gets rewritten in the words your customers actually use. Pages nobody has ever visited get retired on purpose rather than carried over out of habit.
What happens to my old URLs after a redesign?
Each one is either kept exactly as it is, or permanently redirected to the page that replaces it.
The full list comes from Search Console rather than from memory, because most sites have pages the owner has forgotten about and some of them carry real traffic. Anything genuinely retired is marked as gone rather than left to return a generic error, so search engines drop it cleanly instead of retrying it for months.
How much does a website redesign cost in New Zealand?
The same as a new build here: $890 to $1,990 excluding GST hosted with me, or $1,290 to $2,390 hosted elsewhere, plus $59 to $99 a month.
A rebuild is not cheaper than a new site, because the work is the same work plus the migration. What it does come with is the part most quotes leave out — mapping the old addresses, keeping what already ranks, and checking afterwards that nothing quietly broke.