Back to Blog

Below: how to tell a redesign from a refresh, what the scope actually contains, what gets migrated and what gets thrown out, what moves the price, the week-by-week timeline, and the five ways a redesign quietly loses the traffic you already had.

Redesign or refresh, and how to tell which one you need

Four signals decide it. If none of them describe your site, you want a refresh, and a refresh costs a fraction of a rebuild. Saying that out loud costs us projects, which is exactly why it is worth saying.

The structure is wrong, not the styling. If the navigation cannot express what you sell now, if three pages compete for the same search term, or if the thing a buyer needs sits four clicks deep, no amount of new typography fixes it. That is an information architecture problem and it is the clearest reason to rebuild.

The foundation is slow, not the images. We ran a structural speed audit on 152 Calgary small business homepages. The median site shipped 33 script tags and a 736ms time to first byte, and 71% landed in the Slow or Painful tiers. A theme carrying 33 scripts does not get faster because someone swapped the hero photo. Compressing images is a refresh. Removing the reason the page needs 33 scripts is a rebuild.

Traffic arrives and nothing happens. If sessions are steady and enquiries are not, the problem is usually the path through the page rather than the paint on it. Start with why sites stop converting before you commission anything, because a redesign that keeps the same broken path just makes it prettier.

You cannot ship a change without a developer. If a price update or a seasonal banner requires a ticket and a week, the platform is the constraint. That is a replatform, and a replatform is a redesign whether or not the design changes.

What a website redesign service actually includes

Eight line items. Discovery and audit of what currently earns traffic. Information architecture, meaning the sitemap and the navigation before any visual work starts. Design of the templates, not every page. Build. Content migration. Redirect mapping. QA across devices and browsers. Launch and post-launch monitoring.

Two of those disappear from cheap quotes, and they are always the same two. Content migration and redirect mapping are unglamorous, they take real hours, and neither shows up in a mockup, so they are the first things trimmed when an agency is competing on price. A third one, reinstalling analytics and conversion tracking, is often assumed by both sides and owned by neither.

Ask for those three by name in the proposal. If they are not itemised, they are not scoped, and you will be arguing about them in week six.

What you keep, what you migrate, and what you throw away

Keep the URLs that earn. Pull the pages with impressions, clicks, or inbound links, and keep those exact paths. Where a path has to change, map the old one to the closest new one before launch, not after somebody notices the drop.

Migrate the content that answers a question. Long service pages, guides, and FAQs are the pages AI answer engines and search both read. Cutting a 900-word service page to 120 words because the new layout looks tidier is the most common self-inflicted traffic loss in this whole process.

Migrate the schema, the tracking, and the forms. Structured data, analytics, conversion events, form endpoints, CRM integrations, and booking widgets are each separate migrations. Each one has an owner or it does not happen.

Throw away the duplicates and the orphans. Pages nothing links to, near-identical service pages competing with each other, and PDF-only content that no search engine reads well.

Platform choice sits inside this decision. Read what each website builder costs you and, if the shortlist is down to two, Webflow versus a hand-coded build. Moving platform during a redesign is cheaper than moving platform later, and more expensive than not moving at all.

What a redesign costs in Canada

Meridian15 publishes fixed project pricing and it does not change because a site already exists. A simple one-page site can be as low as $2,000. Most business sites with a handful of pages land around $5,000 to $10,000. Larger builds with ecommerce, integrations, or bespoke functionality scale up from there. The detailed scope-by-scope breakdown is in what a custom Calgary site costs, and the local version with the form and process sits on Calgary web design pricing.

What moves the number: the count of unique templates rather than the count of pages, whether copy is written or migrated, whether ecommerce is in scope, how many third-party systems have to be reconnected, and how much of the old site has to be preserved rather than replaced. A 40-page site with four templates is cheaper than a 12-page site with eleven.

What should not move the number is the redirect map. If a quote gets cheaper when redirects come out of it, that is not a discount, it is a deferred bill.

The timeline, week by week

Simple sites typically launch in 1 to 2 weeks. Larger brand and ecommerce builds take 4 to 8 weeks or longer. Those are the commitments we publish, and they describe delivery, not outcomes.

Week 1. Audit, content inventory, URL inventory, sitemap and navigation agreed. Nothing visual ships yet, and that is the point.

Weeks 2 to 3. Template design. Homepage, service template, editorial template, contact. Four templates decided beats forty pages designed.

Weeks 3 to 6. Build, content migration, schema, forms, tracking. On a larger ecommerce build this is where most of the calendar goes.

Final week. Redirect map written and tested, QA across devices, analytics and conversion events verified firing, then launch. Monitor index coverage for the first fortnight after go-live.

The five ways a redesign loses traffic

This is the part page-one competitors do not write about, because the pitch is transformation and the risk is on you.

1. Dropped URLs with no redirect map. Every changed path without a 301 is a page that had authority and now returns a 404. This is the single biggest cause of a post-launch traffic cliff and it is entirely preventable in an afternoon of work.

2. Stripped schema. Structured data lives in the old templates and does not travel by itself. We parsed every JSON-LD block on 403 Calgary business homepages: 72% ship structured data, but only 61% declared a business type, and 91% skip FAQPage with a populated mainEntity. The full breakdown of the structured data most sites get wrong is worth reading before the new templates are signed off, because a redesign is the cheapest moment to fix it and the easiest moment to lose it.

3. Content cut for visual reasons. Designers shorten copy because whitespace looks better. Search engines and answer engines read the copy. The resolution is a template that holds long content well, not less content.

4. A slower build than the one it replaced. New sites frequently ship heavier than the ones they replace: bigger hero video, a page builder, an animation library, a chat widget, a heatmap script. Measure time to first byte and script count before and after. If the new site is slower, the redesign lost.

5. Tracking that never got reinstalled. Analytics, ad platform pixels, conversion events, and call tracking each need re-verifying on the live site. Not on staging. On the live site, with a real submission.

What to ask before you sign

1. Who writes the redirect map, and when do I see it? The answer should be a person and a date before launch week.
2. Which pages are you keeping, and how did you decide? If the answer is not tied to actual traffic and link data, nobody looked.
3. What is the template count? It is the number that actually drives the price, so an agency that cannot state it has not scoped the job.
4. Who reinstalls and verifies tracking? Name the owner in the contract or it lands nowhere.
5. What happens in the two weeks after launch? Index coverage, 404 monitoring, and form testing are post-launch work, not favours.

After launch, the site needs upkeep, and that is a separate line item from the build. Here is a maintenance plan after launch and what one should contain. If you want to see finished work first, selected builds are on the portfolio.

Frequently asked questions

What is included in website redesign services?

Discovery and audit, information architecture, template design, build, content migration, redirect mapping, QA, and launch. Content migration, redirect mapping, and reinstalling analytics and conversion tracking are the three line items most often left out of a cheap quote, so ask for them by name in the proposal.

How much does a website redesign cost in Canada?

Meridian15 prices redesigns the same way it prices new builds. A simple one-page site can be as low as $2,000, most business sites with a handful of pages land around $5,000 to $10,000, and larger builds with ecommerce, integrations, or bespoke functionality scale up from there. The number is driven by the count of unique templates, not the count of pages.

How long does a website redesign take?

Simple sites typically launch in 1 to 2 weeks. Larger brand and ecommerce builds take 4 to 8 weeks or longer. The first week goes to audit, content inventory, and agreeing the sitemap. The final week goes to the redirect map, QA, and verifying tracking on the live site.

Will a website redesign hurt my Google rankings?

It can, and the causes are known. Changed URLs without a redirect map, structured data that did not travel to the new templates, content cut for visual reasons, and a build that ships slower than the one it replaced. Each of those is preventable, and each is a scoping decision made before launch rather than a surprise after it.

Should I redesign my site or rebuild it on a new platform?

Rebuild on a new platform when you cannot ship a change without a developer, when the platform blocks something you need, or when the running cost no longer matches what you get. Stay put when the only complaint is how the site looks. Moving platform during a redesign is cheaper than moving platform separately later.