Website redesign.

Whether a redesign makes sense does not depend on how old the site is, but on whether its foundation still holds. Requests that arrive with the word "redesign" usually fall into one of three situations — and only one of them is actually a redesign.

• A redesign fits when your offering and audience are essentially unchanged, but the site looks dated, is awkward on a phone, loads slowly, or has become hard to maintain. Here the content and the existing search visibility are assets you carry forward.
• A new build fits when the business itself has changed: new positioning, new services, new markets, a merger. The old site then carries little weight, and repainting an outdated structure would be a mistake. How a project from scratch works is described on having a website built.
• Targeted fixes fit when the site looks fine and brings in inquiries but has specific problems: missing titles, duplicate content, poor load times, a broken form. A redesign is an expensive detour for that. The better investment is a website audit from CHF 1,500 that prioritizes the issues, or ongoing work with an SEO agency.

A useful test before deciding: write down what the new site should do better, in measurable terms — more calls, fewer back-and-forth questions, faster updates. If the list mostly says "more modern," look at your current site's numbers first.

Relaunches rarely lose rankings because of the design. They lose them through avoidable mistakes: URLs change without redirects, pages with traffic disappear, or the staging block goes live with the site. Our process is built to rule out exactly those mistakes.

1. Record the baseline. Before anything changes, we export performance data from Google Search Console: which pages get clicks and impressions, for which queries, at which positions. Search Console only keeps this data for 16 months — after the relaunch, that export is your only point of comparison.
2. Build a content inventory. We capture the entire old site, including PDFs and pages that dropped out of the navigation long ago. Every URL gets a decision: keep, rewrite, merge with another page, or retire.
3. Create the redirect map. For every old URL that changes, we define which new URL it points to with a 301 redirect — matched by topic rather than dumped on the home page, and without chains of multiple hops.
4. Build on staging. The new site is developed under its own preview URL, protected and blocked from search engines. You see progress from day one without a half-finished version getting indexed.
5. Launch with a checklist. On switchover day we verify: search engine block removed, robots.txt correct, redirects tested, canonical tags and the XML sitemap current and submitted, forms, phone links and conversion tracking working.
6. Follow up. In the weeks after launch we compare Search Console data with the step 1 export, fix reported errors, and check that key pages have been picked up again.

To be straightforward about it: even with a clean process, Google re-evaluates a rebuilt site, and positions fluctuate in the first weeks. The goal is not to prevent every movement, but to make sure you do not lose visibility to mistakes that could have been avoided.

A redesign is the cheapest moment to make a site readable for answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews — because structure and content are being reorganized anyway. Retrofitting the same work later costs considerably more.

In practice that means prices, service area, services and contact people appear as readable text on their own pages rather than in images or PDFs. Common customer questions get direct, complete answers. Company name, address and phone number match exactly across the website, your business profile and directories. Structured data describes the company, services and questions in machine-readable form, and an llms.txt file summarizes what the site offers. A common relaunch mistake runs the other way: a new robots.txt blocks AI crawlers without anyone intending it.

What this work cannot do is promise that you will be named in a specific AI answer. It creates the conditions for it. How generative engine optimization works as an ongoing service is described on GEO agency Switzerland.

Our redesigns run in five phases, and the first is the one missing from many proposals: the content audit.

• Content audit (first week): Search Console export, inventory, and a conversation about goals and about what bothers you in the current site. The result is a list of what stays, what gets built new and what goes.
• Concept: Within 48 hours of the first call you receive a designed concept for your home page — free and without obligation, via our free design offer. Only then do you decide whether to proceed.
• Content and structure: new navigation, page structure and redirect map; copy is carried over, revised or rewritten.
• Development: built on Next.js and TypeScript under a preview URL, with attention to load time and Core Web Vitals.
• Launch and follow-up: switchover with a checklist, handover of code and credentials, then monitoring of Search Console data.

As a rule of thumb, a redesign with a manageable number of pages goes live in four to eight weeks. More pages, a second language or new features extend that. And one planning rule that holds up: launch day does not belong in the week before your busiest season.

A redesign with us costs between CHF 3,000 and CHF 25,000 — and unlike a new build, the existing site drives the figure more than the design does. Five factors move it within that range:

• Number of pages and documents that need to be reviewed, assessed and redirected.
• Share of new copy versus content carried over.
• Languages: each additional language is its own page tree with its own URLs and its own upkeep.
• Features such as inquiry wizards, configurators, calculators or a reference manager.
• Integrations with existing systems, such as booking, CRM or newsletter tools.

How a website budget breaks down in detail is set out under web design and prices; the project calculator gives you a first cost range in a few minutes. Ongoing search work after the relaunch is not included in the redesign and can be booked separately — local SEO from CHF 300 per month, full-service SEO from CHF 800 per month.

The following projects are redesigns of existing sites; each is documented with the brief and the solution in our work.

• Edelweiss Clearances: rebuilt in 2026 — bilingual in German and English, with town pages across the canton of Zurich, the Winterthur location, a pricing page, a glossary and preparation for AI search engines. At its core is still the 5-step inquiry configurator. Documented results: #1 on Google in Zurich for clearances and an average of 1–2 inquiries per day.
• KanalGenie: redesign for a drain and pipe specialist, with a 5-step booking flow, an emergency page, a glossary and a magazine, plus SEO, GEO and Google Ads.
• CJ Recruitment: redesign for a finance and real estate recruiter in business since 1990 — with separate paths for candidates and companies, a salary calculator behind a lead gate, a 5-step inquiry wizard, and a central lead dashboard.
• Kigips: redesign for a plastering company in Gossau SG, with a custom reference manager the client runs themselves.
• Basilica Zurich: already the third website we have built for the same client.

We only publish numbers where they are documented. For the other projects we publish no metrics — and we do not estimate any.

A redesign is not always the right investment. In these cases we say so in the first conversation:

• The site brings in inquiries and the wish is mostly a matter of taste. Rebuilding a working site just because you no longer like it puts at risk what it does today. Targeted improvements to individual pages are usually the better path.
• The problem is not the website. If too few people find the site in the first place, a new design solves nothing — what is missing is visibility, not design. The same applies if visitors arrive but the price or offering does not fit.
• It is a single technical problem. A slow server, a broken form or misconfigured redirects can be fixed without rebuilding everything.
• Nobody is available to supply or approve content. A redesign that puts old copy in a new shell rarely delivers what people hope for. If there is no internal time for it, postponing the start is worth it.
• The budget is below CHF 3,000. Then we will not build half a thing. For a small site with no meaningful Google traffic, a website builder may be the more honest solution.