Website Redesign Mistakes that Cost Traffic, Leads, and Trust

If your website is over half a decade old, it’s probably showing its age. 

Site-wide messaging might feel off. Your products or services might not reflect your actual offering because the site is hard to update without a developer. Maybe your branding looks dated compared to competitors’ sites.

All of these issues can result in hard-earned visitors leaving without taking action. 

The first call any results-oriented business owner will likely make is to undertake a redesign. 

That’s the right direction to go. However, your website is a fragile digital representation of your company that can break if you make mistakes, or if you aren’t careful enough throughout the process. And that break can cost you traffic, leads, and audience trust.

In this article, we’ll share these mistakes and how you can avoid them.

What’s Involved in a Website Redesign?

A website redesign can include: 

• Reshaping site structure
• Improving conversion paths 
• Overhauling navigation
• Boosting technical performance
• Adding new tech integrations 
• Updating branding and messaging
• Expanding it with new content areas
• Optimizing existing content for search and AI citation

It’s about making a conscious, strategic effort to improve all of the factors that help visitors find what they need, while ensuring that your site actually supports your business goals.

As a B2B business or non-profit leader, your website is often the first real touchpoint a potential client, partner, or donor has with your organization. Once your website fails to attract and retain these clients, you will have to spend more on paid ads and record higher customer acquisition costs (CAC).

That’s why a good redesign is important—any little mistake can have a negative impact on the entire website experience, and render it ineffective or even worse than before.

Six Website Redesign Mistakes to Avoid

Here are some costly redesign mistakes you need to look out for, and how to prevent them from happening. 

1. Changing URLs Without Protecting Your Search Rankings

One of the things that happens during a website redesign that includes a heavy content restructure and navigation updates is a change in your page URLs. This is normal, because page titles change to suit business goals and audience needs, and it makes sense for the URL to get updated to match the current title. 

The problem is that Google already recognizes and indexes these old URLs. Some people, like your clients or repeat customers, may have also bookmarked the ones they deem important.

A 301 redirect passes the information that search engines already understand about a page to a new version, and most (or sometimes all) of its authority and rankings. If you change URLs during a redesign but fail to add a 301 redirect, search engines will see the new URLs as completely separate pages, which have to start earning their rankings from scratch. Anywhere that the old URL still exists will take users to a frustrating 404 error page. 

That means lost traffic, potential customers, conversions, and revenue.

Gregor Emmian, Deputy Chief Digital Growth Officer at Rise, a zero-commission trading platform that uses real-time data to help traders make smarter decisions, has seen this happen during a redesign and found a way to fix it. 

“Search traffic is one of the most valuable assets a website has, and one of the easiest to accidentally destroy during a redesign. When we made a few solid redesigns to reposition our brand, we noticed some pages dropped off SERPs and had to do a technical audit to figure out the issue. The old URLs weren’t redirecting traffic to the new ones.

“To avoid that now, we always audit what’s ranking, document every URL, map every old address to its new destination, and set up 301 redirects before putting the new design up. It’s worth the effort because recovering lost rankings takes months but protecting them takes only a few hours,” Emmian said.

Xradar, a company that specializes in concrete imaging and non-destructive testing, wanted to do a visual redesign of their website. To do that without breaking old URLs, Forge and Smith mapped out a fresh site structure and carefully reorganized its existing content, keeping SEO in mind with thorough 301 redirection planned before launch. Three months after launch, Xradar earned 15% more top-three rankings and saw an 81% increase in contact conversions.

2. Redesigning Without Clear Goals

Redesigning without clear goals means you don’t have a clearly defined target that the new site needs to accomplish, before you start work on the project. And without a defined target, you can’t evaluate whether the redesign did its job.

Your website might look great aesthetically, but if it brings in the same quantity and quality of leads as before, or fewer, then the redesign hasn’t achieved anything substantial.

That’s not to say that visual engagement isn’t part of the broader objectives, but it should be a means to achieve results like traffic, leads, conversion, and revenue.

Before any design work begins, write down two or three specific outcomes you want the redesign to drive. For example:

• More demo requests
• More email sign-ups
• Stronger engagement on your core service pages
• Lower bounce rate from organic traffic
• Fewer questions sent to your team because people can’t find answers on the site

Once you set those targets upfront, design and content decisions become much easier to make and evaluate.

TrustFlight is a platform for aerospace and compliance, and that’s exactly what they did. They came with clear goals, including improving site architecture and user experience to drive more conversions and build a stronger organic growth foundation. As a result of making decisions around those goals, conversions rose by 73%.

3. Improperly Designed Navigation

In the B2B world, when someone arrives with a specific question or task, they expect to spend only a few seconds to find the resource they need. If your redesign stacks those resources in hidden menus, aesthetic hamburgers that disappear, or behind too many touchpoints, they might leave and explore competitors whose resources are a click away.

That’s why your navigation should be simple and fully accessible with fewer touchpoints: 

• Start with a clear site architecture that groups related pages logically and puts your most important resources where visitors can find them, without digging through multiple menus
• Your main menu should only need to cover your core products or services, resources, pricing, and contact page or other CTA button
• Everything else can sit underneath these categories or in a utility menu, rather than competing for space in the main menu
• Test the navigation with real users and see how quickly they can find common pages

Spark Mortgage, a private lending company with over 22 years in business, needed a full site built from scratch to support new marketing initiatives. But the problem was that they served more than a single audience, and collapsing them into a single page would only cause navigation chaos.

Forge and Smith designed an information architecture that clearly served two distinct audiences, with room for the trust and credibility content that matters in financial services. This resulted in 151% organic search growth and 50% higher contact conversions annually.

4. Skipping Responsive Design or Treating It as an Afterthought

A common misconception is that responsive design means building a separate mobile version of your site, often near the end of the project when time is running short. 

That approach tends to produce a site that works on desktop and technically functions on mobile, but with compromises like awkward layouts and navigation on a smaller screen.

What you instead need to do is incorporate responsiveness into design strategy from the start:

• Strategize an architecture to support both desktop and mobile
• Consider all screen sizes when planning menus, layouts, and functionality 
• Design accessibly—readability on mobile devices is critical for accessibility 

Performance is part of responsiveness too, and speed makes up a large part of that. Responsive design helps resources load quickly. You can first evaluate your pre-redesign performance and speed using GTmetrix, and fix the issues that pop up

Then, run another evaluation post-redesign and compare your results to see if there’s an improvement.

5. Going Live Without Testing

There are multiple places throughout a redesign project where small mistakes can be made and not noticed. A couple of rounds of thorough QA testing (including post-launch testing that day, a week out, and several weeks out) is the best way to catch avoidable errors. 

Andrew Bates, COO of Bates Electric, a licensed electrical contractor operating across 18 US cities with over 100 service trucks and 50,000 completed projects, sees the same risk in his industry. “For us, skipping inspection can result in a liability. Imagine our entire service page becomes inaccessible for a couple of days due to a simple error like a broken link. That can result in lost customers and affect our revenue pipeline within that period.

“To avoid outcomes like these, you need to first test your website and every redesigned section before going live. Check every form submission, interactive elements, links, and key pages,” Bates said.

You can use tools like Screaming Frog to check whether every page is redirecting as it should, catch 404s, and fix other diagnosed issues. QA testing including technical SEO audits before and after launch are included in all of Forge and Smith’s projects. 

It can also be helpful to let real users outside your company test the new design and walk through every new addition, so they can provide feedback that reflects how your audience uses the site.

6. No Analytics Baseline Before or After Launch

Without documented baseline metrics from your existing site, there’s no reliable way to know whether the redesign actually improved performance. You’ll end up relying on assumptions instead of measurable results.

Bryan Henry, President of PeterMD, says, “A website redesign in healthcare should be measured by more than traffic or conversion numbers. You also need to understand whether users can find the information they need, move through the site without confusion, and feel confident taking the next step. 

“Tracking these behaviours before and after a redesign gives you a much clearer picture of whether the new experience is actually working for the people it serves.”

To avoid having no way of tracking this, document your current performance before any design work begins. Track traffic by page, use an SEO tool to export the organic rankings for your most important keywords (and which pages are ranking for which queries), examine top entry pages and where visitors go from there, log conversion rates on key actions, and track Core Web Vitals scores.

In the first 90 days post-launch:

• Use GA4 to track behavior and conversions
• Use Google Search Console to monitor search health and catch any pre-existing indexing issues
• Run regular performance checks with GTmetrix to make sure nothing has slipped on the technical side as content gets updated and new pages go live

Wrapping Up

The mistakes above aren’t rare edge cases. They often show up if you skip the planning work, or treat a redesign as a purely creative exercise rather than a strategic one.

If you’re planning a redesign, run through this list before the project kicks off. Check every URL and ensure they are mapped appropriately. Set a clear goal for the redesign, ensure simple navigation, and build responsive design into your strategy from the start. 

Lastly, test your newly redesigned site before going live and implement analytics tracking before and after to measure performance changes.