Website redesign and migration without losing traffic

Signs it is time to redesign

• The site is awkward on a phone: tiny text, hard-to-tap buttons, constant zooming.
• Changing anything small needs a developer or takes half a day.
• Pages load slowly, and the CMS and plugins have not been updated in a long time.
• There is no Estonian or Russian version, even though your customers speak those languages.
• The services and prices on the site no longer match what the company actually does.

What changes and what stays

The design, structure, admin panel and technical foundation change. What already works stays: copy that customers respond to, pages with search traffic, URLs that external sites link to, reviews and project photos.

Before work begins, the studio reviews the old site and proposes which pages to move as they are, which to merge and which to rewrite. Decisions are based on data: page traffic, inbound links and whether the content is still current.

How to migrate a website without losing traffic

• List every page of the old site that is indexed by Google or has links pointing to it.
• Assign a new URL to each old one, producing a redirect map.
• Set up permanent 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones — no chains, and no sending everything to the homepage.
• Carry over or improve the titles and descriptions of pages that bring traffic, rather than dropping them.
• Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
• After launch, monitor 404 errors and Search Console reports.

How long to keep redirects

Google recommends keeping redirects in place for at least a year after a move. Rankings may fluctuate in the first weeks — a normal reaction to URL changes. That is exactly why each old URL should point to its true equivalent on the new site, not just somewhere on it.

Moving your content

Texts, photos, services, products and reviews are transferred into the new site’s admin panel. If the old site has only one language, this is a convenient moment to add Estonian, English or Russian — each with its own URLs.

The domain stays the same and is registered in your name if it was previously held by a contractor. Email on the domain keeps working: only the records that point to the website are changed during the switch.

How a redesign project runs

• You send the address of the old site and explain what is not working.
• The studio analyses the old site: pages, traffic, inbound links, content to migrate.
• Price, deadline and the list of pages to migrate are fixed in a contract.
• The new site is built on a staging address closed to search engines, while the redirect map is prepared.
• On launch day, the domain is switched, redirects go live and the sitemap is submitted to Google.
• In the first weeks after launch, the studio monitors errors and indexing.

Common site migration mistakes

• Launching the new site without redirects, so old links from Google lead to errors.
• Redirecting every old URL to the homepage, which search engines treat as lost pages.
• Deleting pages during a “clean-up” that were bringing in most of the visitors.
• Leaving the staging version open to indexing so it appears in search as a duplicate.

What affects the cost of a redesign

• the number of pages and products on the old site;
• whether content can be exported automatically or has to be moved by hand;
• adding language versions;
• new features: booking, a store, payments;
• rewriting copy and restructuring the site.