When to redesign, and when not to

Redesign is the most expensive thing a small site does and is usually proposed as a solution to a problem design cannot fix. Worth separating the cases where it is the answer from the much larger set where it is a distraction.

When it is warranted

• It does not work on a phone, and the fix is structural rather than cosmetic.
• You cannot edit it. A site you need somebody else to change is a site that stops being updated, which costs more than its appearance.
• It is slow in a way that comes from the template rather than from your content.
• The business genuinely changed: different offer, different customer, different thing being sold.
• It is insecure or unmaintained, which is a reason to move rather than to redesign.

When it is not

When enquiries are down. When you are bored of it. When a competitor launched something nice. When somebody said it looks dated.

In each of those the underlying problem is traffic, offer, price or clarity, and a redesign makes the same problem better-looking while costing a quarter. The diagnostic: write down what a customer will be able to do afterwards that they cannot do now. If the honest answer is that it will look different, stop.

The cheaper thing that usually works

Most of what people want from a redesign is available without one. In rough order of effect for the effort:

1. 01Rewrite the first screen of your three most-visited pages. Usually the single largest improvement available.
2. 02Fix the contrast, the text size and the spacing. A plain page with consistent spacing reads as professional.
3. 03Remove whatever is slow: unused plugins, oversized images, third-party scripts nobody uses.
4. 04Shorten the form and remove forced registration.
5. 05Add the missing answers: price, delivery, what happens next, what it is not for.

Those five take a week between them and change what the site does. A redesign takes a quarter and changes how it looks, and frequently arrives with the same missing answers in a better typeface.

If you do it

1. 01Record your current numbers first: traffic by page, the outcome count, speed. Without a baseline you will never know whether it worked.
2. 02Keep every URL. If one must change, redirect it permanently to its specific equivalent.
3. 03Move content before styling. A new design around old copy is a new typeface on the same problem.
4. 04Launch at a quiet time, and watch the funnel for a fortnight rather than celebrating the launch.

Doing it in pieces

The underused option. A redesign does not have to be a launch; it can be a page at a time, over a few months, with each change live and observable.

Start with one template, usually the one with the most traffic. Get it right, confirm nothing got worse, then do the next. It takes longer in calendar time and less in total effort, nothing is ever broken for long, and you find out whether each change helped rather than launching thirty changes together and never knowing which one mattered.

If somebody else is doing it

• Ask who will be able to edit it afterwards, and get a demonstration rather than an assurance.
• Agree in writing that the URLs do not change, or that every one that does gets a specific redirect.
• Establish who owns the domain, the hosting and the accounts. The answer should be you, and it frequently is not.
• Ask what happens after launch: who fixes what is found in the first fortnight, and for how long.
• Give them the content, or agree explicitly who writes it. Unwritten content is the single most common reason these projects stall for months.

The fortnight after

Where the damage from a redesign actually shows up, and where nobody is looking because the launch is over. Watch the outcome count rather than the traffic, check the forms and the payment path yourself, look for pages returning errors, and compare your speed figures with the baseline you recorded. Most of what goes wrong in a redesign is found in the first two weeks by somebody checking, or in the third month by a customer.