In 2020, a four-person development team at Agrofy, an online agribusiness marketplace serving Latin America, noticed their bounce rates were running well above industry benchmarks. Instead of blaming the content or the offer, they looked at how the site loaded. This article looks at how leading web design companies approach SEO during design, and why the strongest ones treat it as a design decision from day one rather than a fix applied after launch.
Speed Is a Design Decision, Not a Developer’s Problem
Agrofy’s team spent a month rebuilding the site’s rendering approach: lazy-loading offscreen elements, serving static assets through a content delivery network, and rendering critical content on the server instead of waiting on the client.These performance optimizations led to a 70% improvement in LCP, which correlated to a 76% reduction in load abandonment (from 3.8% to 0.9%) on product detail pages.
Vodafone ran a more controlled version of the same experiment. By running an A/B test specifically focused on optimizing Web Vitals, Vodafone found that a 31% improvement in LCP led to 8% more sales, a 15% improvement in their lead to visit rate, and a 11% improvement in their cart to visit rate, comparing two landing pages that were otherwise visually and functionally identical.
Neither company changed what their pages said. They changed how fast those pages became usable. That is a design and engineering decision, made well before anyone touches copy or keywords, and it is exactly the kind of decision that determines whether a redesign helps search performance or quietly undermines it.
Even Google Has Lost Traffic During Its Own Migrations
It would be easy to assume this only happens to smaller teams without dedicated SEO resources. It also happened to Google. When the company moved its Webmaster Central blog to what is now Google Search Central, the team wrote candidly about the process on their own blog. Localizing the site into more languages took far longer than expected, with URL mapping and other hiccups along the way, like broken Python scripts. The team’s own summary of the lesson: “De-SEOing is as weird as it sounds, but you REALLY want to capture the good traffic”.
That is a company whose entire business depends on understanding search, admitting that a redesign can still put existing rankings at risk if the migration isn’t handled carefully. If the team that writes Google’s own migration guidelines has to be deliberate about this, it is a reasonable bar for any agency handling a client’s redesign.
Google’s Own Documentation Treats URL Mapping As Step One, Not Step Five
Google’s official guidance on moving a site lays out the order of operations for situations like URL changes from HTTP to HTTPS, domain name changes, or URL path changes. The recommended sequence starts with understanding what to expect, then preparing the new site and testing it thoroughly, preparing a URL mapping from current URLs to their new format, then configuring redirects, and finally monitoring traffic on both the old and new URLs
Notice what comes first. The redirect map is listed before the site move even begins, because Google’s own systems need that mapping to understand a page has moved rather than disappeared. An agency that treats redirects as something to sort out after the design is approved is working against the order Google itself recommends.
Wireframes Decide More Than They Look Like They Decide
A wireframe looks like a rough sketch, but it’s where heading structure, internal linking, and content hierarchy actually get locked in. Once a homepage wireframe buries the main value proposition inside a rotating slideshow, or groups navigation in a way that makes sense to a designer but not to a visitor searching for something specific, that structure tends to survive all the way to launch.
This is part of why the redesigns that hold up, like Agrofy’s, tend to involve product, UX, and engineering people working on performance together rather than handing a finished visual design to developers and hoping the numbers work out afterward. Agrofy’s migration took two months and involved product and UX specialists and a software architect alongside the core development team, not backend engineers working in isolation.
What To Ask Before Hiring a Web Design Partner
Ask when SEO enters the process. If the honest answer is “after the design is approved,” that’s worth noting. Ask to see a redirect map from a past migration, and ask how it was tested before launch. Ask whether Core Web Vitals get checked with real user data after launch, the way Agrofy and Vodafone did, or whether performance review stops once the mockup gets approved.
A redesign is a chance to fix things that have been wrong for years, but only if search visibility gets a seat at the table from the first wireframe onward. Agrofy and Vodafone got better results by treating load time and structure as design problems worth solving before launch, not after.
The agencies worth hiring treat these as normal questions with ready answers, not as an audit they need to prepare for. Browse our vetted list of web design agencies to find a team that understands SEO during design.