A surprising share of B2C redesigns produce a better-looking site with fewer enquiries. The new site is genuinely nicer and performs worse commercially. This happens because redesigns are scoped as design projects when they are actually migration projects with a design component.
1. Baseline everything before you touch anything
Record current organic traffic by page, current keyword rankings, current conversion rate by source, and current Core Web Vitals. Without a baseline you cannot tell whether the redesign helped, and you cannot detect a problem before it costs a quarter of enquiries.
2. Identify which pages actually earn
Typically a small number of pages generate most organic traffic and enquiries, and they are frequently not the pages stakeholders care about. Those pages need their content, structure and URLs preserved or carefully migrated. Redesigning them from scratch is the single most common cause of traffic loss.
3. Decide positioning before design
A redesign that only changes appearance leaves the actual problem — unclear positioning — untouched. Decide who the site is for, what it claims, and what evidence supports the claim. This work belongs in a messaging workshop, not in a visual design review.
4. Map every redirect
If URLs change, every old URL needs a 301 to its closest equivalent. Not to the homepage — that loses the value. Crawl the existing site, build the mapping, and test it before launch. This is tedious and it is where most search equity is lost.
5. Set a performance budget and enforce it
Decide the target — for example, mobile largest-contentful-paint under 1.8 seconds — and enforce it in CI so no release regresses past it. B2C visitors often browse on mobile, and a slow site loses them silently. This is a build-time constraint, not a post-launch optimisation.
6. Design a conversion path for a real buying process
B2C visitors rarely convert on a first visit. The site needs paths for someone researching, someone comparing options and someone ready to buy or get in touch. In practice: substantive content for research, evidence and reviews for comparison, and a low-friction, credible contact route for the visitor who is ready.
7. Plan content migration as work, not as an afterthought
Content migration is consistently underestimated. Every page must be reviewed, potentially rewritten and re-entered with correct metadata and internal links. Scope it explicitly or it becomes an unplanned scramble in the final week.
8. Preserve and improve structured data
Organisation, service, FAQ and breadcrumb schema affect how you appear in search results. If the existing site has it, do not lose it. If it does not, add it. This is inexpensive and directly affects click-through.
9. QA against devices, not just browsers
Test on real devices at realistic viewport sizes and on throttled connections. Check forms actually deliver — including to spam folders. Verify analytics and conversion events fire correctly before launch, not after.
10. Monitor for 30 days after launch
Watch rankings, traffic by page, conversion rate and crawl errors daily for the first month. Problems are recoverable if detected within days and expensive if detected after a quarter. We include 30-day post-launch monitoring in our redesign package specifically because this is when redesigns quietly fail.
What good looks like
A well-executed B2C redesign should hold or improve organic traffic within four to six weeks of launch, improve Core Web Vitals materially, and increase enquiry conversion. If traffic drops and stays down after six weeks, the migration was flawed — usually redirects — and it is fixable if you are measuring.
Want this applied to your operation?
A free 45-minute discovery call will establish whether the framework above applies to your situation, and what it would cost to act on it.