In short
Look at what happens once people reach your site. If they leave quickly, can’t find what they need, or struggle on a phone, the site itself is the problem and a redesign helps. If the site works well once people arrive but few people arrive, the problem is being found, and an SEO cleanup is the better place to start. Sometimes it’s both.
Signs you need a redesign
- It’s hard to use on a phone: the text is tiny, or you have to zoom and scroll sideways.
- Visitors can’t tell what you do within a few seconds.
- The way to contact you is buried at the bottom of the page.
- It looks noticeably older than your competitors’ sites, or no longer matches your business.
- You can’t update it yourself when you need to.
- It’s slow, even on a good connection.
Our Juniper Home Repair exercise is a typical redesign case. The before page had competing headings, dense service copy, fixed desktop columns squeezed onto phones, and the contact section near the bottom. The redesign kept the same services and information, but gave the page one clear heading, three service groups, readable type, a single column on phones, and an early “Ask about a job” button. None of that is a search problem: the page just didn’t work well for the people reading it.
Signs you need an SEO cleanup
- Your site looks fine and works well, but almost nobody finds it through Google.
- Searching for your own business name doesn’t bring your site up near the top.
- Your page titles are your business name or a slogan, not what you offer.
- All your services share one page, so none of them has a page of its own.
- Your location isn’t mentioned, or only appears in the footer.
- Google Search Console shows pages as not indexed, or it was never set up.
- Shared links show the wrong title or image.
This website was in that state. It looked finished, but the homepage title was a slogan, the description was long enough to be cut off in search results, the privacy and error pages told search engines and social apps they were the homepage, and every service shared one section with no page of its own. None of it was visible to a visitor.
Fixing it meant new titles and descriptions, a page for each service, structured data describing the business and its Boulder location, and corrected technical settings. It didn’t need a redesign. The SEO cleanup page lists everything we changed.
When it’s both
Some sites are hard to use and hard to find. Then it’s usually best to redesign first and build the search basics into the new site, so you’re not paying to fix titles and pages that are about to change. Every website we build includes those basics: page titles, descriptions, a sitemap, and link previews.
One caution: a redesign can cost you search traffic if old page addresses stop working. If your current site gets real visits from Google, the new site should send each old address to its new home.
A five-minute check
- Open your site on your phone. Can you tell what you do and how to contact you without zooming?
- Search Google for what you do and your town. Does your site appear?
- Search for your business name. Is your site the first result?
- Look at the title in your browser tab on each page. Does it say what that page offers?
- Send your homepage link to yourself in a message. Do the title, description, and image look right?
If the answer to the first question is no, start with the design. If the first is yes but the others are no, start with search.
Cost and time
An SEO cleanup is usually a smaller job than a redesign, because it changes words, pages, and settings rather than rebuilding layouts. Its results take longer to show: search engines have to revisit your pages first, which often takes a few weeks. A redesign takes longer to build, but visitors see the difference the day it launches.
For what drives the cost of a full website, see What affects the cost of a small business website?
Not sure which you need?
Send us your website address through the project form and tell us what isn’t working. In our reply, we’ll say whether we think it’s a design problem, a search problem, or both, before anything is agreed.