Technical & content audit
A full crawl of what exists: every URL, what it ranks for, what links to it and what traffic it earns. This decides what gets kept, merged, rewritten or retired.
Build · Redesign
WordPress website redesign without losing your rankings.
Most traffic drops after a redesign are not caused by the new design. They are caused by URLs that changed without redirects, content that quietly disappeared, and nobody checking until the following month. We treat the migration as seriously as the design. That is what our WordPress website redesign work is built to fix.
- Every existing URL mapped and redirected before launch
- Content and metadata migrated, then verified page by page
- Rankings monitored for weeks after go-live, not just on launch day
The problem
When businesses come to us for WordPress website redesign.
The last redesign cost us our traffic
Organic traffic fell off a cliff and never came back. Usually this is hundreds of URLs that changed without redirects, so every ranking page became a 404 and every backlink stopped counting.
The site no longer matches the business
You sell things that are not on the site and the site sells things you stopped doing. Navigation reflects an org chart from four years ago. The site is describing a company that no longer exists.
Nobody can update it
The person who built it left. Making a change means finding a developer willing to touch it, so nothing gets updated, and the site drifts further from reality every quarter.
It is slow and we have stopped linking to it
The site has become something the team works around rather than uses. Campaigns point to landing pages built elsewhere because the main site is too slow or too painful to change.
How it works
How it actually runs.
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Audit
Crawl, rankings, traffic and backlinks — what the current site is genuinely worth.
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Map
Every URL assigned a destination: keep, merge, rewrite or redirect.
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Design
A new system designed against your real content and real page inventory.
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Build
Clean build on staging with content migrated and redirects in place.
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Test
Page-by-page QA against the audit, plus redirect and performance testing.
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Launch
Low-traffic deploy with rollback ready, then weeks of monitoring.
Results
What the work produced.
MEDICO Hennef
A new site, and the clothing shop underneath it
MEDICO came to us for a new website. What we inherited was a Flatsome demo that had never been cleaned up: Google was being served 144 URLs of demo clothing products and 64 leftover demo pages, while the practice's two real pages sat on /auto-draft/ and /auto-draft-2/. Designed and built six new pages, then removed everything that was never theirs — the demo pages, an unused WooCommerce shop that had never taken…
144 → 8
URLs in the sitemap
191 → 32
database tables
Bewerk GmbH
A redesign that had to hold up on a phone
The existing design worked on a desktop and came apart on a phone. The hero cropped people's faces, the fixed navbar sat on top of the content it was meant to sit above, and menu dropdowns were clipped by the header itself. Redesigned the front end around mobile first: a full-bleed 100svh hero with per-page background positioning so faces stay clear at every breakpoint, a glass navbar, and fixes for the iOS…
12 / 12
items closed in final QA
3 rounds
of client QA, all cleared
Capabilities
The WordPress website redesign stack we work in.
Audit & analysis
- Screaming Frog
- Search Console
- Google Analytics 4
- Ahrefs / Semrush
- Log file analysis
- Content inventory
Migration
- 301 redirect mapping
- WP-CLI migrations
- Metadata transfer
- Schema preservation
- Media library migration
- Internal link rewriting
Rebuild
- Block themes
- Gutenberg blocks
- theme.json
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Custom post types
Verification
- Redirect testing
- Crawl comparison
- Core Web Vitals
- Rank tracking
- Staging QA
Engagement
Three ways this usually runs.
Redesign audit
Fixed fee
A crawl, a content inventory and a URL map with recommendations — what to keep, merge or retire, and what a redesign would realistically involve.
- 2–3 weeks
- No obligation to continue
- Yours to take elsewhere
Full redesign
Fixed price after audit
Design, build, content migration, redirects and launch, quoted as one fixed price with dated milestones so there are no surprises halfway through.
- Dated milestone plan
- Redirects tested pre-launch
- Post-launch monitoring included
Phased redesign
Monthly
For large sites that cannot go dark. We replace the site section by section, keeping both versions running until the last template is migrated.
- Section by section
- No big-bang launch
- Lower risk, longer timeline
Questions
WordPress website redesign questions, answered plainly.
If your WordPress website redesign question is not covered here, send us the details and we will reply with a straight answer.
Will a redesign hurt our SEO?
It only should if the migration is handled badly. The damage comes from URLs changing without redirects, metadata being lost, internal links breaking and content silently disappearing. We audit and map every URL before build starts, test the redirects on staging, and monitor rankings for weeks after launch.
How long does a redesign take?
It depends far more on page count and content readiness than on design complexity. A focused marketing site moves quickly; a several-hundred-page site with content that needs rewriting takes considerably longer. We give you a dated milestone plan after the audit, so you know what lands when before committing.
Can we keep our existing content?
Usually a lot of it, and the audit tells us which parts are worth keeping. Pages that rank and earn traffic get preserved and improved. Thin or duplicated pages are often better merged into one stronger page with a redirect, which frequently improves rankings rather than risking them.
Do we have to change platform?
No. If you are already on WordPress, a redesign usually means a new theme and block system on the same install, keeping your content and URLs in place. Moving platforms is a separate decision, and we will only recommend it when your current setup is genuinely holding the business back.
What happens to our backlinks?
They keep working, provided every old URL has a 301 redirect to the most relevant new page. That is why URL mapping happens before build rather than as a launch-day scramble. Redirects pass the great majority of link value, so earned authority follows you to the new structure.
Can you redesign in phases instead of all at once?
Yes, and for large or high-traffic sites it is often the safer choice. We replace one template or section at a time while the rest of the site keeps running, so risk is spread across months rather than concentrated in one launch night. It takes longer overall but almost nothing can go badly wrong at once.
Will a WordPress website redesign lose our rankings?
Only if URLs change without redirects. We inventory every URL and its traffic before any design work starts, then decide keep, move, merge or retire for each one.
The platform itself is documented at wordpress.org.
How long does it take?
Six to twelve weeks for a considered build, most of which is decisions and content rather than development hours. Timelines slip on content far more often than on code.
Start here
Start your WordPress website redesign project.
The more you can tell us, the more useful our first reply will be. No sales sequence — one of the people who would actually do the work reads this.
- We read it and look at your site
- You get a written reply with our honest read
- If it fits, we scope it properly
Prefer email? hello@dotance.com