WEBSITE REDESIGN SERIES

Part of our collection of practical guides designed to help business owners make informed decisions before investing in a new website.

What Should You Keep When Redesigning Your Website?

If your website has been around for several years, it may contain valuable content. Before starting again, it’s worth looking at what deserves to come with you.

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Start by looking at what already works

It’s easy to focus on everything that’s wrong with an old website. Perhaps the design looks dated. Maybe the navigation is confusing or the technology is causing problems. But there may be plenty of things that are still valuable. A redesign gives you the opportunity to separate the good from the outdated. Ask yourself:

Which pages are useful to customers?
Which services are still important?
Which content gets people to contact you?
Which information has real value?
What are customers already responding well to?

A good redesign improves on what you have rather than automatically starting from zero.

Keep the important parts of your business story

Your website should reflect your business today, but your history and experience can still matter. You may want to keep:

Your business story
Your experience
Qualifications and accreditations
Important milestones
Information about your team
Your approach to working with customers

The difference is that this information may need to be updated and presented differently. A redesign is a chance to make your story clearer, not erase it.

What about your URLs?

This is an important part of a redesign. Your existing website has a collection of web addresses — the URLs people and search engines use to find individual pages.

If you simply change or remove lots of URLs when the new website launches, you can create broken links and potentially lose search visibility.

That doesn’t mean every old URL has to stay forever. It means changes should be planned.

Where an old page is being replaced by a relevant new page, a redirect can help send visitors and search engines to the right place.

Don’t forget your case studies and testimonials

Your previous work is valuable evidence. Case studies can show potential customers what you actually do, while testimonials provide reassurance from people who have already worked with you.

These are often worth carrying across to a new website.

You may also have older testimonials that could be refreshed, or case studies that deserve a more prominent position in the new structure. Your past work can be one of the strongest parts of your new website.

Your best content may be worth keeping

Over the years, you may have created pages that answer useful questions or explain your services particularly well. Some content may need rewriting. Some may need combining with another page. Some may no longer be relevant. And some may be worth keeping almost exactly as they are.

The important thing is to review your content before deciding what happens to it.

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A redesign is a chance to simplify

Some things should be left behind

Keeping everything isn’t the answer either. An old website can contain pages that are:

No longer relevant
Duplicated
Outdated
Too thin to be useful
About services you no longer offer
Written for an old version of the business
Difficult to navigate or understand

A redesign is an opportunity to be more selective. Your new website doesn’t need to carry all the baggage of the old one.

What about old blog posts?

If you’ve been blogging for years, you may have a large collection of older articles. Don’t assume they all need to move across. Some may still be useful and relevant. Others may contain outdated information or no longer reflect your business. You can review them and decide whether to:

Keep: still useful and relevant.

Update: valuable but needs refreshing.

Combine: several older posts could become one stronger resource.

Remove: no longer useful or relevant.

This can make a new website much more focused.

Your SEO history matters

If your website has been online for a long time, some pages may have built up search visibility. A page that looks old doesn’t necessarily have no value. Before removing important pages, it’s worth considering:

Does the page receive visitors from search?
Does it rank for useful searches?
Does another website link to it?
Is there a relevant replacement page?
Does the URL have an established history?

A redesign should improve your website without unnecessarily throwing away what you’ve already built.

What should you review?

Before rebuilding your website, it’s useful to look at:

Pages
Which pages are important to your customers and business?

Content
What’s useful, what’s outdated and what’s missing?

Services
Are you still offering everything that’s currently listed?

Testimonials
Which reviews best represent your business today?

Case studies
Which projects demonstrate the type of work you want more of?

Images
Which photographs still represent your business well?

URLs
Which existing page addresses need to be retained or redirected?

Search visibility
Which pages are already bringing people to your website?

A redesign is a chance to simplify

One of the benefits of starting again is that you don’t have to take every old page with you. Over time, websites can accumulate information that seemed useful at the time but no longer serves a purpose.A redesign lets you step back and ask:

What does my customer actually need?

Then you can build the new website around that.

The result is often a smaller, clearer and more useful website, even if your business itself has grown.

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