Website redesign
Your website exists. The question is whether it still works.
People are visiting and not getting in touch. That is a diagnosis before it is a design job — and the answer is often smaller and cheaper than a rebuild. We find out which part is failing before anyone proposes replacing anything.
The review is the diagnosis, and it is free. Normally back within two business days.
The real problem
“It looks dated” is a symptom, not the diagnosis
Looking dated is what people notice. It is rarely what costs them the enquiry.
What usually costs the enquiry is a homepage that does not say what the business does, a phone layout that was an afterthought, a services page nobody can find, or a contact form that asks for nine things when three would do.
Redesigning the visual layer without fixing those leaves you with a better-looking website that performs the same.
The diagnostic
Six places a website usually loses people
Most sites fail on two or three of these, not all six — which is why a full rebuild is so often the wrong prescription.
What visitors run into
What a redesign changes
- Message
- SignalVisitors cannot tell what you sell, or who you sell it to.
- ChangeThe offer stated in the first screen, in your customers’ words.
- Structure
- SignalKey services sit three clicks deep, or on a page nobody links to.
- ChangeNavigation rebuilt around what people came to find.
- Mobile
- SignalText needs pinching, buttons crowd each other, the menu fights back.
- ChangeThe phone layout designed, not inherited from the desktop one.
- Trust
- SignalThe site looks smaller and older than the business now is.
- ChangeCurrent work and a considered interface, matching your standard.
- Enquiry path
- SignalOne contact form at the very end, and no way to reach you sooner.
- ChangeClear actions where the decision happens: form, WhatsApp, phone.
- Platform
- SignalNobody updates it, because doing so is slow or risky.
- ChangeMade maintainable, or moved. The audit decides which.
Preserve or replace
A redesign should not throw away what you have paid for
Years of content, search history and customer familiarity have value. The default is to carry them over, and to justify every replacement individually.
Usually carried over
Usually rebuilt
- Content that still answers a real customer question
- URLs that rank or that other sites link to
- Brand recognition, logo and established colours
- Functionality the team relies on daily
- Photography and imagery that still represents you
- Domain, hosting and accounts already in your name
- The homepage message and what it leads with
- Navigation labels and the order of the pages
- The mobile layout, designed rather than adapted
- Where and how enquiry actions appear
- Page templates, spacing and typographic hierarchy
- Anything slow, broken or quietly unmaintained
Right-sizing the job
Redesign, targeted improvement, or a genuine rebuild
Three different jobs, three different costs. Choosing the wrong one is the most expensive mistake available here.
A redesign is the right call when
- The content is largely sound but presented badly
- The business has changed and the site has not caught up
- Mobile is clearly the weak point
- People arrive but the path to enquiry is unclear
- The platform is workable, just poorly used
- You want to keep your URLs and search history intact
Something else is the right call when
- Only the homepage is failing — a targeted improvement is cheaper
- The platform genuinely cannot support what you need next, which makes it a new website design and development project
- Almost nobody is visiting — that is a traffic problem, and closer to search work than a design one
- Enquiries arrive but go unanswered, which is a follow-up process problem
- The offer or pricing is the objection, not the website
How it runs
Review, then prioritise, then build
The first two stages exist so the third one is spent on the right things. WeDevelop is South African and runs redesigns remotely, including the hosting, domain and DNS coordination a cutover depends on.
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Review
The six areas above, on your live site, on a phone and a desktop.
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Prioritise
Findings ranked by impact against effort. You decide how far to go before any quote is fixed.
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Restructure
Message, pages and navigation settled. Every existing URL mapped to where it will live.
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Improve
The agreed parts rebuilt. Content that stays is migrated, not retyped.
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Validate
Redirects, forms, devices and browsers checked, then the switch is made.
The new version is prepared separately and reviewed before it replaces anything. Your current site stays live and unchanged until the switch. The Pedregal Property Group case study shows this run as a positioning-led rebuild, where the structure changed because the proposition did.
Scope, price and timing
What the audit changes about the estimate
A redesign quote given before anyone has looked at the site is a guess. These are the variables the review resolves.
What you already have
- The platform, and whether it can be improved in place
- Page count, and how much content is genuinely distinct
- Condition of the existing content and imagery
- Integrations, plugins and custom functionality in use
- Volume of URLs that need mapping and redirecting
How far you want to go
- Homepage only, key pages, or the whole site
- Visual refresh against a full structural rebuild
- New functionality added during the redesign
- Whether content is rewritten or migrated as-is
- Migration to a different platform or host
Redesign work is normally scoped as a Website Upgrade, from R8,500, or as part of Website and Automation where the enquiry process is being improved at the same time. Published starting points for all three are under project packages. Every project receives a written scope and price before work begins.
Start here
The review is the first stage of the redesign
You already have a public website, which means we can do the diagnosis before you commit to anything. It is the same six-area assessment described above, run on your site and written up.
You end up with a prioritised list you own. If you take it to another provider, or do the work yourself, that is a legitimate outcome — and if the review finds the website is not your constraint, we will say so, even where that means there is no project in it for us.
Free Website Review
Free, with no obligation, and normally back within two business days.
If the audit shows the foundation cannot support what you need next
Website DesignIf enquiries arrive but get lost before anyone responds
Automation & IntegrationsQuestions about redesigning an existing site
Will we lose our Google rankings?
Careful migration removes most of the avoidable risk, but nobody can guarantee rankings stay unchanged. What we avoid is the common failure: deleting pages and changing URLs without a redirect plan.
Can you work on our WordPress site, or does it have to move?
It usually does not have to move. Sometimes the site is improved in place, sometimes rebuilt on a cleaner base. The recommendation follows the audit, not a preference for any particular technology.
Will the live site go down during the work?
No. The new version is built and reviewed separately, and visitors keep using the current site until a short, planned cutover.
We do not have the original files or a developer. Is that a problem?
Usually not. We need access to the hosting, domain and site administration. Where design files are gone, the site is rebuilt from what is live. Tell us what you can reach and we will work out what is realistic.
How do we know the redesign worked?
Agree what you are measuring before we start, usually enquiry volume and quality. Be wary of anyone promising a percentage improvement: results also depend on your traffic, offer and response times.
Next step
Find out what is actually failing
Send the address. You get the diagnosis in writing, and you decide what to do with it.
Prefer to talk it through first? Send us the details.
Or email lance@wedevelop.co.za