Website redesign: price, steps and mistakes to avoid
A website redesign often starts for the same reasons: the site has aged, it no longer truly represents the company, it has become complicated to manage, or it no longer corresponds to the services offered.
So we decided to start from scratch. A few months later, the new site was online. It was more modern, faster, and more user-friendly. But sometimes, traffic dropped sharply.
And it's not necessarily because the new site is bad.
The problem often stems from what happened during the migration. Some decisions may seem innocuous at the time of the redesign, but they can have a significant impact on SEO. Here are the five most common mistakes we encounter, and more importantly, how to avoid them.
Before we begin: does your site really need a redesign?
It's a simple question, but one that's often overlooked. A complete redesign requires time and budget, and inevitably involves some risks to existing SEO rankings. In some cases, it's therefore more effective to improve the existing site rather than rebuilding everything.
A redesign may be justified when:
Your offer has evolved, but the website no longer reflects it;
The technology used limits what you want to do;
Technical performance remains poor despite optimizations;
the site doesn't work well on mobile;
You systematically rely on a service provider to modify a text, an image or a page.
Conversely, some problems don't necessarily require starting from scratch. If you simply find the design a bit outdated, if some pages are obsolete, or if your site generates few requests, the problem may lie elsewhere.
A lack of leads, for example, often stems from positioning, content, the offer, or acquisition. Completely redesigning the website won't change much if these elements remain the same.
At LANE Digital, we generally begin redesign projects with this consideration. Sometimes our recommendation is precisely not to rebuild the entire site, but rather to focus the budget on content, SEO, or acquisition.
A new website that tells exactly the same thing to the same audience will not necessarily produce better results.
At LANE Digital, this arbitration is part of our first exchange.
The 5 mistakes that can cause you to lose your SEO ranking during a website redesign
Mistake #1: Starting without taking inventory of existing URLs
This is probably the most important mistake.
When starting a redesign, we naturally think about the future: new site structure, new design, new pages, new content. But we sometimes forget to look closely at what already exists.
However, an existing website has accumulated value over time. Some pages already appear in Google, receive traffic, have inbound links, or rank for searches that are important to your business.
This value is not related to the page design. It is primarily linked to its URL and history.
Before redesigning the site, it is therefore necessary to establish a complete list of existing URLs and identify, for each of them:
the traffic generated;
the keywords on which the page is positioned;
the backlinks it receives;
its role in the user journey;
its title and metadata tags.
Google Search Console and a crawling tool already provide a very good foundation.
Without this inventory, the migration is largely done blindly. And important pages that have disappeared are often only discovered once traffic starts to decline.
Mistake #2: Neglecting the redirection plan
When a URL changes, the old address must tell Google and visitors where to find the page. This is called a 301 redirect.
It allows you to signal that a page has permanently changed its address and to transfer a large part of the SEO value from the old URL to the new one. It also prevents someone clicking on an old link from landing on an error page.
If URLs change during a redesign without redirects being properly implemented, some of the acquired SEO may be lost.
The problem is that this isn't always immediately visible. Rankings can start to decline gradually in the weeks following the launch. By then, the team has often already moved on to other projects, and the connection to the redesign is no longer obvious.
The redirection plan must therefore be prepared before going live, and not once the first errors appear.
Mistake #3: Losing title tags and metadata
Title tags correspond to the titles that typically appear in Google search results. Meta descriptions, on the other hand, allow you to quickly present the page's content.
During a redesign, these elements are sometimes automatically recreated by the new platform. This results in very generic titles such as:
Services
About
Blog
Contact
Whereas the old site may have had more precise titles, designed according to user searches.
This data should therefore be included in the inventory carried out before the migration. For important pages, it is generally better to retrieve existing titles, check them, and improve them if necessary, rather than starting from scratch.
It's a small task in the context of a redesign, but its impact can be significant.
Mistake #4: Deleting too much content to lighten the pages
A new website is often more streamlined than the old one. This is generally a good thing: more space, better-organized content, and a more pleasant reading experience.
But simplifying the design does not mean removing the substance.
A service page that contained a wealth of useful information can sometimes be reduced to a few paragraphs to fit a new layout. Visually, the result appears cleaner, but the page can lose much of its value.
The problem is that Google doesn't judge a page based on its aesthetics. If the old content accurately answered users' questions and the new version no longer does, the search engine ranking can suffer.
This particularly concerns:
detailed service pages;
the guides;
blog articles that are already generating traffic;
pages that answer several specific questions around the same topic.
The goal is obviously not to keep text for the sake of keeping text. It's simply a matter of ensuring that reducing the content doesn't inadvertently remove information that is important for the user and for search engine optimization (SEO).
Mistake #5: considering going live as the end of the project
Going live isn't really the end of a redesign. The weeks that follow are just as important, because that's when any potential problems become visible.
In the month following the launch, we recommend at a minimum:
submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console;
monitor 404 errors to identify any missing redirects;
compare the positions before and after the overhaul on the most strategic searches;
verify that the forms and conversion tracking are working correctly;
check that the analysis tools are correctly transmitting the data;
to reassess after several weeks to gain sufficient perspective.
It's also normal to see some positioning variations right after a redesign. Google needs to recrawl the pages, follow the new URLs, and recalculate their ranking.
A temporary drop in a few searches doesn't necessarily mean the migration has failed. It's crucial to monitor the trend over time and take swift action if important pages disappear completely from the results.
Building a good redirection plan
The redirection plan is one of the most important technical elements of a redesign. And above all, it must be prepared before going live.
In its simplest form, it is a table with two columns: the old URL and the new URL.
What makes the difference is primarily the rules used to construct this table.
Redirect each page to its equivalent
You should avoid redirecting all old URLs to the homepage. An old page dedicated to a service should ideally redirect to the new page corresponding to that same service.
Avoid redirect chains
If an old URL A redirects to B, and then B redirects to C, it is better to point A directly to C.
Check that there is no loop
A page should never link to a URL that then redirects back to the starting page.
Also include deleted pages
When a page no longer exists in the new site, it is necessary to determine if there is a page close enough to accommodate the redirection.
If no equivalent content exists, it can sometimes make more sense to let the page disappear cleanly rather than create a redirect that makes no sense.
Keep a copy of the plan
Keep the redirection file after going live. It will be very useful if you need to understand what happened to an old page or correct a migration a few months later.
In the redesign projects we take over, this table is often one of the first things we prepare. It also helps to clarify the structure of the future site, since it forces us to decide what happens to each existing page.
What changes during a website redesign in Switzerland
The principles of SEO are the same everywhere, but certain topics come up particularly often in Swiss projects.
Multilingual
This is one of the points that can most influence the structure of a site.
A website solely in French and a website planned in French, German, and English are not built in the same way. Multilingualism is not just about translating texts. It also influences the site structure, URLs, menus, and how the different versions of pages are linked together.
A poor structure can, for example, create several very similar pages that end up competing in search results.
We regularly encounter websites where translations have been created as separate, independent pages, instead of being properly linked to their main version. As a result, Google struggles to understand which version to display, and visibility can be spread across multiple pages.
The issue of languages must therefore be considered from the beginning of the project, even if all translations are not put online immediately.
Data hosting and protection
We still often hear that a Swiss website must be hosted in Switzerland to comply with data protection law.
This is not a general rule.
What matters most is how personal data is processed, the safeguards put in place, and the information provided to users.
However, certain sectors or companies may have stricter requirements. This may particularly concern healthcare, sensitive data, or contracts with large organizations.
The question of hosting therefore deserves to be asked at the beginning of the project, as it can influence the choice of platform used.
The domain name
A .ch domain that has been used for several years may also have accumulated value. In most redesigns, it is therefore preferable to keep it.
If the project also involves a name or domain change, the migration becomes more complex. The redirection plan is even more critical, and SEO stabilization may take longer.
How much does a website redesign cost in Switzerland?
The price of a redesign is not calculated exactly like that of a site created from scratch.
Some workstations are specific to the migration:
auditing the existing site;
the inventory of URLs;
the preparation of the redirection plan;
the migration or adaptation of existing content;
SEO checks after going live.
Other elements, on the other hand, may require less work if the existing foundation is sound. Part of the content or the site structure may already exist and simply need improvement.
The main factors that affect the price are generally the number of pages, the number of languages, the current state of the site, the required features, and the desired level of customization.
To delve deeper into this subject, we have also dedicated a full article to the price of a website in Switzerland and the different levels of service.
An example of website we know well: our own
When we audited LANE Digital's website, we found several of the problems mentioned in this article.
For example, some URLs contained a year, making them difficult to update without changing their address. Some articles also existed in multiple separate versions instead of being properly managed as translations.
On some topics, we had also published several similar pages over the years, to the point of distributing their visibility between them instead of having a clearly dominant page.
This wasn't the result of a bad decision made at a specific time. It's simply the kind of situation that gradually arises when a website evolves over several years: a new page here, an additional article there, a new language added later.
That's precisely one of the benefits of a redesign: taking the time to look at the site as a whole and to tidy up what has accumulated.
In summary
A successful redesign is not measured solely by the appearance of the site on the day it goes live.
We also need to look at what happens in the following weeks: traffic, Google positions, conversions, and visitor behavior.
The five errors presented in this article all have one thing in common: they concern what existed before the overhaul.
The main risk, therefore, is not necessarily building a bad new site. It is primarily forgetting the value accumulated by the old one.
By taking the time to audit the existing system, prepare redirects and monitor the site after it goes live, a redesign can instead be an opportunity to improve both the user experience and SEO.
At LANE Digital, we regularly support Swiss SMEs and companies in their redesign projects, from auditing the existing site to post-launch follow-up.
If you are considering redesigning your website and would like to know what to keep, improve or rethink, we would be happy to discuss it with you.
