Redesign without the drop
Website redesign agency: a new site without losing your rankings
A redesign is a move: every old URL gets a destination, and we measure from the first day.
Why new sites so often lose traffic
A website redesign agency is usually hired for the look: the site feels dated, breaks on a phone or nobody can edit it. What gets forgotten is that Google knows your old site page by page, and every page carries its own rankings.
When a page moves to a new address and the old one does not point to it, Google sees a page that vanished and a new one that has proven nothing yet. Rankings slide, sometimes for months. That is not bad luck; it is a redesign that should have been run as a migration.
We are a studio in Ghent, Belgium, building sites in up to five languages for clients at home and abroad. This page sets out what a redesign agency should hand you, the six steps that protect rankings, what a redesign costs by size, and when a refresh beats a rebuild.
What a redesign agency should hand you
Ask for these five documents before, during and after the launch. If an agency cannot show them, the migration is being done from memory.
| Document | When | What it proves |
|---|---|---|
| URL inventory | Before design starts | Every old URL from the sitemap, Search Console and backlinks, with its traffic, is known |
| Redirect map | Before the build ends | Each old URL has one new destination, including pages that merge |
| Title sheet | During the build | Titles and headings that ranked carry over or improve, page by page |
| Launch check | On launch day | Every old URL returns a 301 and then a 200, the 404 is real, canonicals and hreflang are right |
| Weekly report | Six weeks after launch | Impressions, clicks and positions against the baseline, with fixes where they drop |
Why a 301 and not a 302 is explained in 301 redirect; the full method with a redirect sheet is in website migration SEO. If the host or the domain changes too, read moving a website to a new host first.
Six steps, each with what you measure
Inventory
Every old URL from the sitemap, Search Console and your backlinks, with its traffic.
Measure: Baseline: impressions, clicks, positions
Map old to new
For each old URL its new one, in a sheet. None drops out without a destination.
Measure: Every URL with traffic has a target
Build with the content
Titles, headings and internal links that work come along, the rest gets better.
Measure: Titles per page side by side
A 301 per URL
One permanent redirect per page, direct, without chains or a 302.
Measure: Every old URL returns 301, then 200
Launch and check
Submit the sitemap, check the real 404, canonicals and hreflang.
Measure: Errors in Search Console, days 1 to 7
Measure
Six weeks of weekly comparison with the baseline, fixing where it drops.
Measure: Weeks 1 to 6 against the baseline
Business Centrum, Google impressions per day
220 a day13 to 19 September
The steps apply to any redesign. The chart is the real Search Console series of Business Centrum, where the technical foundation came first.
Two sites we moved ourselves
SN Group, a construction company in Ghent, ran on a single-page app that built its content in the browser and had no real 404. We moved it to a static export with its own HTML page per address, a real 404, redirects from the old addresses and a canonical per page, then added guides and checks in Dutch and English.
At Business Centrum, a payroll bureau in Ghent, the technical foundation came first: one address per page, titles on the terms employers type, everything crawlable, in four languages. In five weeks daily impressions in Google went from 220 to 10,200, and searches without the brand name on page one from 13 to 1,593.
Our own site moved to vbsmarketing.eu on 20 October 2026: every address from the old sitemap and from the old site's redirects got a 301 to its new page, and a check on every release confirms they still do.
What a redesign costs by size
The price of a new site follows from its design and features. A redesign adds one line: the migration, which grows with the number of pages and languages. In Belgium, where we work from, business sites run 2,000 to 6,000 euro on the market and custom builds 15,000 euro and up; a website with us starts from 1,500 euro.
| Size | Typical site | What the migration takes | Where the market lands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 10 pages | Services, about, contact | A redirect sheet checked by hand, titles per page | 2,000 to 6,000 euro for the site, the migration a small share |
| Around 50 pages | Sector pages, a blog, two languages | A map per language, merged content, hreflang | Between a business site and custom, depending on how much you rewrite |
| 200 pages and more | Guides, products, several languages | A script for the redirects, a test that walks every old URL, measuring per section | Custom, 15,000 euro and up |
Ask where the migration sits in every quote. If redirects, the inventory and measuring are missing, you pay for them later in visitors. How to set quotes side by side is in compare website quotes, the wider ranges in website cost, and a first estimate for your own site in the website cost calculator. We work for a fixed price per project after a first call, with the migration as its own line; how we run website design is on the service page.
Refresh or rebuild
Not every slow or dated site needs to start over.
- Choose it when
- RefreshThe structure works but the site is slow or looks dated
- RebuildThe platform holds you back: no second language, no own URL per page, a builder you cannot leave
- Typical work
- RefreshLighter theme, compressed images, better titles and calls to action
- RebuildNew design and build, with an inventory, a redirect map and six weeks of measuring
- Example
- RefreshAt Villa Lidia the home page went from 8.4 MB to 1.4 MB
- RebuildSN Group from a single-page app to a static export with its own page per address
- Risk to rankings
- RefreshLow: the addresses stay
- RebuildNone if every old URL gets a 301, high if it does not
Start with an SEO audit when you are unsure: it shows whether the problem is the platform, the speed or the words.
Redesigns for a market abroad
Many of our redesigns add a language or a market at the same time. That is the moment a migration goes wrong most easily, because the new language pages have no history and the old ones may change address. Three rules we keep:
- One address per language,with hreflang that tells Google which page serves which reader. How we build that is on multilingual website development.
- Translate the terms, not just the wordsA buyer in Leeds types other words than one in Ghent; each language gets its own titles from its own search data.
- Do not change the domain in the same moveunless you have to. Two moves at once make it hard to see what caused a drop.
If the site is slow rather than old, improve website speed may be enough. If Google barely reads it at all, test it first with the check for a site that is not showing on Google. Keeping WordPress is fine as well; the trade-offs are on WordPress website development and Wix or WordPress. After launch we keep the site current through website maintenance, so it does not age into the next redesign.
Questions to ask any redesign agency
- Who builds the URL inventory, and from which sources?
- Will I see the redirect map before launch, and can I check it?
- Do redirects go straight to the final page, as a 301, without chains?
- Which titles and headings carry over, and who decides when they change?
- How is the new site tested on launch day, and what happens with a 404 that slipped through?
- Who measures for six weeks after launch, and against which baseline?
- What happens to the hreflang and canonicals if we add a language?
- Is the migration a separate line in the quote?
Website design
How VBS helps you with this
We build your site from design to copy, imagery and code, in one team, so that Google and your buyers find it and get in touch.
- Design and copy built on your buyers' questions
- Fast, multilingual when you need it, at a fixed price
- Forms, cookieless analytics and hosting on AWS
How we approach it is on our page about Website design.
Redesign your site without losing what already ranks?
Send us your address and, if you have it, access to Search Console. After a call you get the inventory of your current site and a fixed price for the new one, migration included. This is how we run website design; a website brief helps you prepare.
Rather get in touch right away?