Redesign Your Agency Website Without Losing What Works

Why redesigns go wrong

A redesign can go wrong in a quiet way. The new site looks better, the team is pleased, and a few months later the valuation requests have thinned out. When that happens the cause is often not the design at all. Pages that had been bringing in visitors for years were deleted or moved without a redirect, and search engines had to start again.

Area pages are at particular risk. An agency might have a ten-year-old page about a particular village that ranks well and sends a steady trickle of sellers. Nobody on the team remembers writing it, so it is left out of the new page map. The redesign service exists to stop that happening.

Step one: the audit

Before any design work we look at what the current site is doing. With your permission we use your search console and analytics data, along with a crawl of the live site, to build a picture of:

• which pages receive visits from search, and for which kinds of query;
• which pages lead to valuation requests, viewing requests or calls;
• which addresses other websites link to, because those links carry weight;
• which pages are thin, duplicated or out of date and are better removed;
• how listings reach the site today, and where the data drops out.

The output is a short written report that sorts every page into keep, improve, merge or retire, with a reason for each. You approve it before we go further. Nothing is retired on our say-so alone.

Step two: the new structure

With the audit agreed, we design the new page map. Pages marked keep or improve stay at their current address wherever possible. Where an address has to change, for example because the old site put every area page under a confusing folder, we plan a permanent redirect from the old address to the closest new page.

This is also where we fix structural problems that grew over time. Ones worth checking for on any agency site include separate sales and lettings sites that compete with each other, branch pages that duplicate one another word for word, and fee information buried in a PDF that search engines and screen readers handle poorly.

Step three: rebuild and migrate

The rebuild follows the same approach as a new build: listing templates first, then forms, branch pages, lettings sections and guides. Existing content is moved across and edited rather than pasted in, because a redesign is a good moment to check that what the site says is still true. That includes fee tables, scheme memberships, opening hours and team members who have since left.

Listing feeds get particular care. If you are changing CRM at the same time as redesigning, we strongly suggest separating the two dates where you can. Changing two moving parts at once makes it much harder to tell what went wrong if listings stop appearing.

Step four: launch and the weeks after

On launch day we put the redirects live with the new site, submit the new sitemap and test a sample of old addresses by hand. For the following weeks we watch for addresses returning errors, for pages that drop out of the index and for forms that stop sending. A written check-in at two weeks and again at six weeks tells you what we found and what we fixed.

What a redesign costs compared with a new build

A redesign is not automatically cheaper than a new site. The audit and redirect work add effort that a fresh build does not need, while reusing good content saves effort elsewhere. For a site with a long history the redesign route can be the safer one even when it costs a similar amount, because it protects search visibility that took years to earn. The pricing page explains how we quote.

Things we check on every agency redesign