How to Choose a Website Redesign Agency That Won't Hurt Your SEO

Choose an agency that measures your current traffic before it designs anything, maps every old URL to a new page, and checks Search Console after launch. Ask about those three things on the first call, and listen for specifics.

Most traffic drops after a redesign come from the same few mistakes: missing redirects, deleted content, rewritten headings and a slower site. We covered the fixes in how to redesign a website without losing SEO. This article is about the step before that: picking the agency that will do them.

5 questions to ask a redesign agency

1. What will you measure before you start?

A good answer names the numbers: which pages bring in search clicks, which queries they rank for, which pages produce leads, and how fast the site loads today. Those numbers decide what the new site has to keep. If the plan starts with moodboards, nobody has checked what the current site is earning.

2. How will you handle URLs and redirects?

Listen for a URL map: a list of every current URL and the page it moves to, with one 301 redirect each. Ask who builds the map, who checks it on launch day, and what happens to pages being cut. "We'll redirect everything to the homepage" is the answer to walk away from.

3. What happens to our existing content?

Redesigns often shorten pages to fit a cleaner layout. If a page ranks because of what it says, cutting the copy can cut the ranking. A good agency tells you which pages earn traffic and keeps or improves their text, instead of trimming every page to the same length.

4. Who writes the titles, headings and meta descriptions?

Somebody has to. If it's left to whoever enters the content, new pages launch with titles like "Services" or "Home". Ask how they write titles and H1s, and whether they check them against the queries the old pages ranked for.

5. What do you do in the month after launch?

Search engines take a few weeks to recrawl a redesigned site. Ask what the agency checks in that time: crawl errors, 404s, redirect chains, indexing and rankings for the pages that mattered. An agency that hands over the site on launch day and moves on leaves you to find the problems yourself.

Red flags in a redesign proposal

• No mention of Search Console or analytics
• A new URL structure with no plan for the old one
• Page speed left for later, with heavy video or motion on every page
• A quote that leaves out content, SEO checks or post-launch support without saying who does them

An example from our own work

When we redesigned ANYTIMES, a Japanese community marketplace, the UX and the SEO were handled in the same project, by the same team, from strategy through to code. Nothing was handed off between a design agency and a separate SEO vendor. After the redesign, the founder told us they were seeing SEO growth, and transaction volume grew 400%.

FAQ

Can an agency guarantee my rankings won't drop after a redesign?

No one can promise that. A short dip while search engines recrawl the site is normal. What an agency can do is keep the URLs, content and headings that earn traffic, and fix problems in the weeks after launch before they cost you leads.

Should I hire an SEO specialist separately from the design agency?

Only if the agency doesn't cover the basics above. If they measure first, map redirects and check after launch, a separate specialist is usually only needed for large sites or ongoing content work.

Planning a redesign?

We start every redesign by checking what the current site earns, so the new one keeps it. See how we run a website redesign, or start with the free website diagnostic.