Website redesign, rebuild, or a fix. Which one you need.

Six signs you actually need a website redesign

A redesign is worth paying for when the problem is structural. These six are the ones we see most often in UK small-business sites, and each one is a reason on its own.

• It fails on a phone. Text you have to pinch to read, a menu that will not open, a form that pushes the submit button off screen. Most of your traffic is on a phone, so this is not a cosmetic fault.
• Nobody can edit it. The content management system is gone, the login does not work, or every change costs £80 and a fortnight of chasing. A site you cannot change is already a museum piece.
• The platform is unsupported or unsafe. An abandoned WordPress theme, plugins that have not been updated in three years, an SSL certificate that lapses, a browser warning that says not secure. Visitors see that warning before they see your work.
• It describes a business you no longer run. Services you dropped, an area you left, prices from four years ago, staff who moved on. Wrong information loses more work than dated design does.
• Search traffic has slid for a year, not a month. Thin pages, no structure, a single services page trying to rank for eleven different jobs. A month of noise is normal. Twelve months of decline is a signal.
• It is genuinely slow. Six seconds or more to first paint on a mobile connection, 4MB hero images, a page weighed down by builder scripts. Some of that is fixable. When the slowness is baked into the platform, it is not.

Three signs you only need a fix

These three get quoted as redesigns constantly. They are not. Paying five thousand pounds to solve a problem that costs a few hundred is the most common mistake in this market.

• Traffic is fine, enquiries are not. That is conversion, not design. Check the headline, the contact path, and where the form actually sends its email before you redraw anything. Our walkthrough is here: zero enquiries from your new website, four things to fix first.
• You dislike it, but customers do not. If enquiries are steady and the phone rings, the site is doing its job. Taste is a real reason to change something, but be honest that it is the reason, and price it accordingly.
• One page is wrong. Out-of-date prices, a missing service, a broken booking link, photos of a van you sold. Fix the page. The other nineteen are fine.

What a website redesign costs in the UK in 2026

The build price is the part everyone compares. It is rarely the part that decides the total. Ask any quote to separate four things, because most of them merge the four and the difference shows up as an invoice six weeks after launch.

• Design and build. The one-off number on the front of the quote.
• Content. Who writes the words and who supplies the photographs. If the answer is you, that is unpaid work you have just taken on.
• Running it. Hosting at £5 to £30 a month, domain at £10 to £20 a year, backups, updates, and an SSL certificate that has to keep renewing.
• Changes after launch. Either a retainer at £50 to £300 a month, or a per-edit rate, or a silence that becomes a problem the first time you need a price changed.

A £4,000 redesign with no support is usually dearer over five years than a £79 a month arrangement that includes the build, the hosting and the edits. We ran that arithmetic properly in pay-monthly vs one-off websites, the five-year maths, and there are cases where the one-off wins. The line-item version of the whole market sits in what a small business website actually costs in the UK in 2026.

How to redesign without losing your Google rankings

Rankings do not belong to your business. They belong to individual URLs. That single fact explains almost every relaunch that tanks. Do these five things and a redesign is close to risk free.

• Measure first. Before anything changes, export twelve months of Google Search Console queries and pages, export your top landing pages from analytics, and save a full list of every live URL. If you cannot say which pages earn your traffic today, you cannot tell whether the redesign helped.
• Keep the URLs that rank. The strongest move is not to change them at all. A prettier address is worth nothing. If /gutter-cleaning-croydon brings in work, it stays exactly as it is.
• Map every change one to one. Where a URL genuinely has to move, a 301 redirect goes from the old address to the closest matching new page. Not to the homepage. Bulk redirects to the homepage are treated as soft 404s and the ranking dies with them.
• Keep the content that earns the traffic. Redesigns often cut the word count by two thirds because the new layout looks better with less text. If a page ranks on 900 words of detail, replacing it with 200 words and a hero photo removes the reason it ranked. Restyle it, do not gut it.
• Check the week after. Submit the new sitemap, watch index coverage, crawl for 404s and redirect chains, and confirm titles and descriptions survived the move. Expect a small wobble for two to four weeks. If traffic is still down at week six, something in the list above was missed.

How long a website redesign takes

A fix takes days. A redesign on the existing page structure takes four to eight weeks with most UK studios. A rebuild with new pages and a migration takes eight to twelve. Those are calendar weeks, not working weeks, and the difference is mostly waiting.

The build is seldom the bottleneck. Content is. Photographs are. Getting three people in one business to agree on a headline is. When a project slips, it is almost never the code. We keep our own builds to about a week from brief to live, because the sites are small, the review loop is one person, and we write the first draft of the copy so there is something concrete to argue with.

Collect the access before you announce the move

There are six things to get hold of, and the order matters far less than the timing. Ask while the relationship is still cordial. Access gets dramatically harder to obtain once you have said you are leaving, and impossible once the provider has stopped replying. The one people forget is the analytics history, because it is the only baseline you will ever have and it does not come back.

The full checklist, item by item, with the wording to send and what to do when the domain turns out to be registered in someone else's name, is in the recovery checklist for when a web designer stops replying, and the switch itself is walked through on our website maintenance page. When we take a client on, the collecting is our job rather than yours, and there is no migration charge.

How we handle a redesign on a monthly fee

We rebuild the site and then run it, for one flat monthly amount. There is no redesign fee, no setup fee, and no separate maintenance contract afterwards. Essentials is £49 a month, Growth is £79, Pro is £200. Pay for the year up front and take 10% off. Full pricing detail and what is included in each tier.

The sequence is the same every time. A 30-minute brief on what the site is failing to do. A crawl of the current site so every URL, title and ranking page is recorded before anything moves. A draft inside two working days. One or two rounds of revisions. Then the switch, with the redirect map in place and the DNS copied record by record so email never drops. After launch you email us when something needs changing and it changes, without a ticket number.

For a worked example of the same process on a real site, a pressure-washing business we run ourselves, read the Sameday Jetwash case study. For a client redesign off a builder platform, the Dirty South Power Wash case study covers a Horley firm whose nine GoDaddy pages became 90, with nine redirect rules tested end to end and all eleven Microsoft 365 email records carried across before the switch. If the rebuild is not what you wanted, tell us inside 30 days and we refund the months you have paid, and you keep the domain. We work from East Dulwich with clients UK-wide, and the areas we cover in person are on our London and Surrey pages.