Website redesign, or just a refresh

Refresh or redesign, a plain test

Open your site on your phone and try to do what a customer would do: find a service, read about it, and send a message. Note where it went wrong.

A refresh is an afternoon of editing. A redesign is a new site. Be honest about which one you are looking at, because a refresh cannot fix a broken structure.

• The words are old but the pages are right: refresh
• The photos are stock or stale: refresh
• Text is unreadable on a phone or the menu does not open: redesign
• You sell things the site never mentions: redesign
• There is no clear next step on most pages: redesign

What a redesign should keep

The instinct is to start from nothing. Resist it. A site that has been live for years has things worth keeping, even if the design is not one of them.

Keep the page addresses where you can. Keep the phone number. Keep the proof: photos of real work, the license, the areas you actually cover. Keep the words customers use when they call you, because those are the words they type.

How the builder reads your existing site

During the interview, the in-app assistant can read your existing website address to fill gaps in what you tell it. Your services, your areas, your story, as they are written today.

You still answer the questions, because the new site is written from a conversation and not copied from the old one. What the old site gives is a head start and a list of what you already say about yourself. Every page then passes a check that runs before anything publishes.

Before anything is built you see the planned pages and what the build costs, and you approve it. That is the moment to compare the new list with the old site and spot a page you would lose.

Page addresses, keeping them or redirecting

Every page on your old site has an address, and some of those addresses are linked from other places and known to search engines. If a new site changes an address and nothing points the old one anywhere, a visitor lands on a not-found page.

A redirect, sent with a 301 status, tells a browser and a search engine that the old address has moved to a new one. Keeping the same addresses is simpler. Redirecting the ones that change is the next best thing.

Make a list of your old addresses before you start, especially the ones you know people link to. The builder gives every new page a clean address. Matching old to new is a job to plan, not to discover after launch.

Going live without a gap

The new site lives on a free address until your domain is connected. You can look at it, send test leads and fix copy while the old site stays up.

When you are ready, connect the domain with one DNS record, a CNAME, at your registrar. The SSL certificate is issued for you, and the assistant walks you through the record step by step.

You can schedule the publish for a date and time in your own time zone. Every publish keeps a version, so the switch is not a one-way door.

What to check after launch

The first hour after a launch is the cheapest time to find a problem. Do these on your phone as well as a desktop.

Every site from the builder serves its not-found page with a real 404 status. Search engines then learn that a missing page is missing, rather than treating it as a page.

• Click every item in the menu and every link in the footer
• Send a test lead from the form and confirm it arrived where you work
• Type a wrong address after your domain and confirm the branded not-found page appears
• Add your Search Console verification token and watch for not-found reports over the next few weeks
• Confirm your phone number, hours and areas are the current ones

What a redesign does not fix

A new design cannot rescue thin copy, invented proof, or a form nobody replies to. If the old site said nothing genuinely useful, the new one needs new answers, not a new color.

That part is the interview. Answer it properly, keep what was true on the old site, and let the new structure carry it.