Website redesign is about performance, scalability, and alignment with business goals. For growing companies, it’s often the moment when the website shifts from being a static asset to a dynamic business tool. Adobe’s 2024 report shows that 38% of visitors leave when they think a page looks bad, and 47% exit if it takes more than two seconds to load. If a site misses both benchmarks, it loses money.
Website redesigns often start because branding is evolving, marketing priorities shift, or conversion rates plateau. A fitting case comes from Jones Metal, a precision manufacturing company that worked with The Media Captain. Their original site featured duplicate content and irrelevant blog posts, leading to unqualified leads and wasted sales hours. Their redesign process took 8 months. The Media Captain consolidated content, simplified architecture, and placed a strong emphasis on landing pages pertaining to their primary areas of expertise, all based on in-depth stakeholder interviews. A shorter sales cycle, improved lead quality, and higher search rankings were the results. Same traffic, sharper structure, better outcomes.
Where most redesigns go wrong
Too many redesign projects over-index on appearance and underdeliver on function. Teams get fixated on modernizing the look while ignoring the systems that power the site: CMS flexibility, SEO fundamentals, analytics tracking, conversion paths, etc. One of the most common issues we see is when companies adopt overly complex design systems that look polished but break down in execution: slow load times, inconsistent UX across devices, or worse, CMS bottlenecks that make simple content updates painful.
When Coalition Technologies reworked Houzer’s website (luxury sinks & faucets, moving from WooCommerce to BigCommerce DTC), they launched a fully functional storefront in under six weeks. Key impacts included:
- A scalable BigCommerce build designed to grow with their expanding product line
- Lightning-fast launch: live and conference-ready in six weeks
- Lean code and native flexibility, resulting in faster page loads and a better user experience
- SEO, PPC, email, and social tracking enabled from day one, so leads and revenue appear in real time
The whole endeavor was a business upgrade. The right partner can shift a site from a static brochure to a growth engine.
How to evaluate redesign agencies intelligently
When reviewing potential agencies, skip the buzzwords and focus on the process. A few key things to ask:
- Do they perform a content audit before touching design? If not, you’re about to waste money polishing pages no one visits.
- Can they integrate with your existing stack? That includes CRM, analytics, email, and any custom tooling. The best web design agencies understand this isn’t just a site, it’s part of your sales and ops infrastructure.
- Will they involve marketing and engineering early? Design in a vacuum is how sites get rebuilt again in 12 months.
Redesigning without tanking your SEO
A redesign without SEO planning is a traffic disaster waiting to happen. Yet it’s common. Proper URL mapping, redirect plans, schema preservation, and content migration are non-negotiables. Redesigns don’t happen in isolation because Google notices everything.
We’ve seen brands lose half their organic traffic overnight by ignoring this. One ecommerce site relaunched without redirecting thousands of product pages. A simple 301 redirect strategy could have avoided the fallout. Recovery took nearly a year.
When to do a full rebuild vs a phased revamp
Not every redesign has to be a tear-down. In many cases, an iterative redesign makes more sense. For companies with ongoing traffic and live ad campaigns, ripping everything out at once can kill momentum. Instead, rebuild section by section. Start with the homepage and navigation. Then move into high-impact areas like product or service pages. This phased approach can preserve SEO equity and spread out cost.
Calendly did this in 2023. They rebuilt core conversion pages first, then worked outward. By concentrating on important areas of their website, the team was able to collect data, conduct A/B testing, and secure funding for the following stage. The approach was smart, controlled, and low risk.
Get help from teams who’ve done this right
We maintain a vetted list of agencies that don’t just talk about results, they show them. These teams have experience handling redesigns visually, structurally, technically, and strategically for growing companies across ecommerce, SaaS, and services. Check out the list of our recommended web design agencies. They’ve been reviewed for real-world outcomes, not just portfolio shots. If you’re past the point where a template will cut it, this is the right place to start.