Website redesign
Redesign your site without losing your rankings.
Most Sydney website redesigns look better and perform worse. The design was never the hard part — keeping the search traffic, the enquiries and the pages Google already trusts is. We rebuild sites so the traffic comes with you.
The number that matters
A redesign that loses 40% of your organic traffic has cost you more than it saved, however good it looks. Before anything is designed, we map every URL you currently rank for and make sure each one still resolves after launch. That single step is the difference between a redesign that grows and one that quietly sets you back a year.
First question
Do you need a rebuild, or just a refresh?
These are different jobs at very different prices, and plenty of businesses are sold the expensive one when the cheap one would have done. Here is how to tell them apart before you get quoted.
Usually enough
A refresh
New colours, updated photography, rewritten copy, tidier layouts, faster images — all on the site you already have. Right when the structure works, the site is reasonably fast, and it simply looks dated. Cheaper, quicker, and it carries almost no SEO risk because the URLs never move.
Worth the money
A full rebuild
A new site on new foundations. Right when the platform is obsolete or insecure, the site fails on mobile, page speed cannot be fixed without starting again, your services have changed shape, or nobody in your office can edit it. More expensive, and where the ranking risk actually lives.
Signs
Seven signs your website is costing you work.
Not looking dated. Actually losing you enquiries. If three or more of these are true, a redesign will pay for itself.
01
It is slow on a phone. Most of your visitors are on mobile data, not office wifi. If the site takes more than about three seconds to become useful on a phone, a large share of people leave before they have seen anything — and Google measures that.
02
You cannot edit it yourself. If changing a phone number, adding a staff bio or publishing a job ad means emailing a developer and waiting, the site is a bottleneck rather than an asset — and you are paying for every small change.
03
Enquiries dropped and nothing else changed. A steady decline in form submissions or calls, with no change in your marketing, usually means either rankings slipped or the site stopped converting. Both are fixable, but only once you know which it is.
04
What you sell no longer matches what the site says. Services you no longer offer are still listed. The thing you actually make money from is buried three clicks down. This is the cheapest problem on the list to fix and the most commonly ignored.
05
It is not accessible. Low contrast text, images without alt text, forms that cannot be completed with a keyboard. This locks out real customers, and in disability, health and government-adjacent sectors it is increasingly a procurement requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
06
The platform is unsupported or insecure. An abandoned theme, an ancient PHP version, plugins that stopped receiving updates years ago. At this point every month is borrowed time, and a hacked site costs far more to recover than to prevent.
07
You are embarrassed to send people to it. Not a technical metric, but a real one. If you are winning work in spite of your website rather than because of it, you are leaving money on the table every week.
The real risk
Why redesigns lose search traffic.
A redesign is the single most common way an established business destroys rankings it spent years earning. It is entirely avoidable, and it comes down to a handful of unglamorous steps that get skipped when a project is running late.
01
Every old URL gets mapped before design starts. We export every page that currently earns impressions or links, and decide where each one lands on the new site. Pages that disappear without a redirect take their rankings with them.
02
Redirects are 301, one hop, and tested. Chains of redirects leak authority and slow the site. Every old address should reach its new home in a single step, and every one gets checked after launch rather than assumed.
03
Page titles and headings are carried across deliberately. The words on your best-performing pages are part of why they rank. A designer rewriting them for visual balance can undo years of work in an afternoon.
04
Structured data and internal links are rebuilt, not dropped. Schema markup and the links between your own pages are invisible on screen, which is exactly why they get lost in a rebuild. Both get reinstated as part of the build.
05
Core Web Vitals are measured before and after. A redesign that looks better but loads slower will rank worse. We benchmark the old site, then check the new one against it rather than hoping.
06
Search Console is watched for the first month. Most migration problems show up within three weeks as a drop in impressions on specific pages. Watching for it is how you catch it while it is still cheap to fix.
Cost
What a redesign costs in Sydney.
We scope before we quote, so we do not publish a price list. What we can do is tell you honestly what the market looks like, drawn from what Sydney agencies publish on their own websites.
Refresh only
Restyling, new photography and rewritten copy on your existing site. The cheapest option by a wide margin, and often the right one. No URLs move, so no migration risk
Small business rebuild
Sydney agencies publish figures from roughly $1,500 to $7,000 for a standard small business site. Suits five to fifteen pages, standard forms, no integrations
Established business rebuild
Published figures from Sydney agencies for custom builds start around $8,000 and run past $20,000. Suits larger sites, custom functionality, bookings, portals or multi-location structures
What moves the number
Page count, how much content you write versus we write, integrations such as bookings or payments, and whether the old site has years of URLs that need mapping
Ongoing
Hosting, maintenance and support are quoted separately. Ask any agency for the three-year total, not the launch price
If you want the published figures agency by agency, we put them side by side on our comparison of Sydney web designers — including agencies other than us, with sources.
The process
How a redesign actually runs.
Six stages. You will know at every point what is happening, what we need from you, and what happens if content is late.
1
Audit what is already working
Before anything is designed, we pull your Search Console data, page speed, current rankings and every URL earning traffic. This is the baseline everything gets measured against, and it is what stops a redesign quietly going backwards.
2
Structure and sitemap
We map the new site around what people actually search for and what you actually sell, then match every old URL to a new one. Structure decisions get made here, where they are cheap, rather than during the build where they are not.
3
Design and content
Layouts designed against your real content, not placeholder text. We draft or guide the copy, with accessibility built in from the first screen rather than audited in at the end. You approve before anything is built.
4
Build
Built on WordPress so you are not locked to one supplier, with a page builder your own team can use. Forms, integrations, schema markup and internal linking all go in here, not afterwards.
5
Launch and migrate
Redirects in place and tested before the switch, not after. Sitemaps resubmitted, indexing requested for the important pages, and the old site kept available until we have confirmed everything resolves.
6
Watch for a month
We monitor Search Console and page speed for the first four weeks, because that is when migration problems surface. Then handover training, so your team can run the site without us if you want to.
Straight answers
Website redesign questions, answered.
How often should a website be redesigned?
Every three to five years is the usual guidance, but age is the wrong trigger. Redesign when something is actually broken: the site is slow on mobile, you cannot edit it, enquiries have fallen, the platform is unsupported, or what you sell no longer matches what it says. A well-built site that still does its job does not need replacing because it turned four.
Will a redesign hurt my Google rankings?
It can, and this is the most common way established businesses lose search traffic. Rankings are lost when URLs change without redirects, when page titles are rewritten for looks, or when structured data and internal links are dropped in the rebuild. Handled properly, a redesign usually improves rankings, because the new site is faster and better structured than the old one.
Can you redesign my site without losing SEO?
Yes, and it is a specific piece of work rather than a promise. Every URL currently earning traffic gets mapped to a new address, redirected in a single hop, and tested after launch. Titles and headings on high-performing pages are carried across deliberately, and Search Console is watched for the first month so anything that slips is caught early.
How much does a website redesign cost in Sydney?
Published figures from Sydney agencies run from around $1,500 for a small business rebuild to over $20,000 for a large custom one. A refresh of your existing site costs considerably less than either. The variables are page count, who writes the content, integrations, and how many old URLs need mapping.
How long does a website redesign take?
Four to eight weeks for a typical business site, longer for large or heavily integrated ones. The stage that slips is almost never design or build — it is content. If you know upfront that nobody in your team has time to write, say so early and we will price the writing in rather than watch the project stall.
Should I rebuild or just refresh?
Refresh if the structure works, the site is reasonably fast and it simply looks dated — you get most of the visual benefit for a fraction of the cost and none of the migration risk. Rebuild if the platform is obsolete, mobile is broken, speed cannot be fixed, or you cannot edit your own site. If you are unsure, we will tell you which one you need, including when it is the cheaper one.
Do I have to change platform?
Not necessarily. If you are already on a current, supported WordPress site, a rebuild can often stay where it is. We move platforms when the existing one is unsupported, insecure, locks you into a single supplier, or cannot do what the business now needs. Changing platform for its own sake adds cost and migration risk without adding value.
What is included in a redesign?
Strategy and audit of the existing site, sitemap and structure, design, content drafting or guidance, the build itself, accessibility, schema markup, URL mapping and redirects, launch, and a month of monitoring afterwards. Hosting and ongoing support are quoted separately so you can see what recurs and what does not.
Send us the site you want to replace.
We will tell you whether it needs a rebuild or a refresh, what is currently earning you traffic that must survive the move, and roughly what it costs. If a refresh is the honest answer, we will say so.