Website Redesign in Murray, Kentucky

It can, badly, and it is the most common way a redesign goes wrong. The damage almost never comes from the new design. It comes from changed URLs with no redirects, from rewriting or deleting pages that were quietly earning all your traffic, and from launching with pages accidentally blocked from indexing. A redesign done carefully usually improves rankings, because the new site is faster, works properly on a phone, and has more and better content. A redesign done carelessly can cut organic traffic by half within a month, and recovering takes far longer than the launch did. The protection is unglamorous: inventory every existing URL, map a 301 redirect for every one that changes, preserve the content on your best-performing pages, and watch Search Console closely for the first eight weeks.

A 301 is a permanent redirect: a rule on your server that says the page that used to live at this address now lives at that one. It matters for two audiences. For visitors, it means the link somebody bookmarked, printed on a business card, or posted on Facebook three years ago still lands somewhere useful instead of on a 404 page. For search engines, it passes along most of the accumulated credit the old page had earned, so the new page inherits the ranking rather than starting from nothing. Every URL that changes in a redesign needs one, mapped to the closest equivalent new page. Dumping every old URL onto the homepage is not a redirect map, it is a way to lose everything you had while technically avoiding 404s.

A refresh is the better buy more often than most designers will admit. If the structure is sound, the content is still accurate, the platform is still supported, and the real problems are that it looks dated, loads slowly, and is awkward on a phone, then new design work, better photography, speed optimization, and a security cleanup can get you most of the way for a fraction of a rebuild. A full redesign earns its money when the site is on a platform nobody supports anymore, when forms are broken or the site is not secure, when you cannot edit anything without calling somebody, when the content genuinely no longer describes your business, or when it is missing entire sections you need such as service pages and area pages. We will look at what you have and tell you which one you are, including when the answer is the cheaper one.

Yes, and it is a rebuild rather than a move, because neither platform lets you export a working site. Squarespace will export a partial file that covers some pages and blog posts and loses your layout, forms, and anything platform-specific. Wix has no meaningful export at all. So what actually happens is that we take your content, meaning the text, the images, and the structure, and rebuild it on a platform you own. The good news is that the content is the part with the value, and moving it is straightforward. The critical detail is the URL structure, because those platforms use their own address patterns. We inventory every existing page, decide the new address for each, and put a 301 in place so nothing that already ranks gets orphaned.

Four to seven weeks for most Murray-area businesses, which is one to two weeks longer than an equivalent new build. The extra time is the migration work: inventorying existing URLs, deciding what to keep, mapping redirects, and moving content that is worth moving. Larger sites with a few hundred pages take longer, mostly in the audit phase. What sets the pace, as always, is content. If your existing text is accurate and you have decent photographs, we move quickly. If everything needs rewriting and reshooting, plan for the longer end. We work on a staging site the entire time, so your current site stays live and unchanged until the day we switch over.

Roughly the same as a new build, sometimes slightly more, which surprises people who assume the hard part is already done. Our starter tier begins at $1,499 and the business tier at $3,499, quoted as a fixed number in writing before we start. The reason a redesign is not cheaper is that you are doing all of the new-build work plus a full URL inventory, a redirect map, content migration, and careful preservation of the pages that already earn traffic. Where a redesign does come in cheaper is when your existing content is genuinely reusable, because copywriting is one of the largest line items on any build. A refresh instead of a redesign costs considerably less. We wrote out the full pricing picture on our website cost page.

It should not, and in practice it almost never does. We build the entire new site on a staging address while your current site keeps running untouched. When you have approved everything, we do the launch in a specific order: put the new site in place on the server, install the SSL certificate, verify every redirect works, test the forms end to end, and only then change the DNS to point your domain at the new server. DNS changes propagate over a few hours, and during that window some visitors see the old site and some see the new one, both fully working. The one thing we schedule around is email, because if your email runs on the same domain we make sure those records are carried over exactly before anything moves.

We keep what is earning and retire what is not, deliberately rather than by accident. Before anything is designed, we pull a list of every page on your existing site along with what it ranks for and what traffic it gets. Pages that are pulling their weight get moved, kept at the same address wherever possible, and improved rather than rewritten from scratch. Pages that are outdated, duplicated, or have never received a visitor get consolidated or retired, with a 301 pointing at the closest relevant replacement. Nothing gets deleted without a redirect. If you have a blog with years of posts, that archive is frequently the most valuable asset on the old site and the one careless redesigns destroy most often.

Usually, yes, and this is one of the most common calls we get. The first thing we do is establish who controls the domain name, which is the piece that causes the most trouble and the one almost nobody has documentation for. Domain registrars have recovery processes for the legitimate business owner, and we walk you through them. From there we determine where the site is actually hosted, which is sometimes a surprise, and whether we can get access. If we can, we take it over, patch it, and back it up. If we genuinely cannot, we can still rebuild from the public version of your site and put you on a platform where you hold every credential. Either way you end up owning your own domain, hosting, and files, which is where you should have been all along.

Because we measure it, and we set the baseline before anything changes. Before launch we record your current organic traffic, your top landing pages, your rankings for the searches that matter, your page speed scores, and your form submission and phone call volume. After launch we watch Search Console daily for the first two weeks for crawl errors, 404s, and indexing problems, then weekly for a couple of months. A normal redesign shows a small dip for one to three weeks as search engines reprocess everything, then a recovery above the old baseline. If it does not recover, that is a signal something is wrong and it gets investigated, not explained away. Businesses on a care plan get that monitoring as part of the plan.