Website Revisions: What They Are and What They Cost You in Search
Updated: Sep 9
A website revision is a change to a site you already have. A redesign replaces it. People use the words interchangeably and then get surprised by the bill, or by what happens to their search traffic afterwards.
This page separates the two, and then covers the part that gets left out: what a redesign does to the rankings you already had.
Revision or redesign
A revision changes content or a component. New copy, a swapped photograph, a corrected phone number, an added page, a reworked contact form. The structure stays.
A redesign replaces the structure. New layout, new navigation, often new addresses for the pages. The content may survive; where it lives usually does not.
The practical test: after the work, does every page still live at the same address? If yes, it was a revision. If no, it was a redesign regardless of what anybody called it, and the section below applies to you.
When each is worth doing
A revision is worth doing whenever something on the site is wrong, out of date, or unclear. There is no reason to batch these up. Fixing a wrong phone number in March rather than waiting for a redesign in September is not a difficult decision.
A redesign is worth doing when the structure itself is the problem. Visitors cannot find things, the site cannot be used on a phone, the platform is unsupported, or the business has changed enough that the site describes something you no longer do. A redesign because the site looks dated is a much weaker case than it feels like from the inside, because you look at it far more than your customers do.
The part nobody mentions until afterwards
If your site has been up for a few years, some of its pages have earned a position in search results. That position is attached to the address of the page, not to your business.
Change the addresses without redirecting the old ones and you discard that, permanently. The old address stops existing, anyone who arrives at it sees an error, and the position it held goes to somebody else. This is the single most expensive thing that routinely happens during a redesign, and it usually happens by accident because nobody's job included it.
The fix is not complicated and it has to be done as part of the work rather than after:
Before anything changes, list every address on the current site and note which ones get traffic.
Decide the new address for each one.
Set up a permanent redirect from every old address to its nearest real equivalent.
Redirect to the closest matching page, not to the home page. A pile of redirects all pointing at one general page tends to be treated as though the pages simply vanished.
After launch, check the old addresses actually redirect, by opening them. Not by assuming.
The related failures are collected in ten website redesign mistakes that destroy search rankings.
What it costs
Honestly: it depends on scope and who does it, and any specific figure quoted on a page like this one is somebody guessing. What you can control is knowing what you are buying.
Ask how many rounds of changes are included and what happens after those are used.
Ask whether redirects for the old addresses are in the quote. If the answer is vague, that work will not happen.
Ask who owns the site and the accounts afterwards. The answer should be you.
Ask what happens if search traffic drops after launch, and who fixes it.
How often
Revisions: whenever something is wrong. Redesigns: when the structure genuinely stops working, which is far less often than the industry suggests. A site that works and is kept current does not need replacing on a schedule.
If a redesign is coming and you want the search side handled properly rather than discovered afterwards, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work.
Written by Spencer Capron at Capron Media, in collaboration with our AI agents. The same way we do the work for clients. Spencer reviews everything published here.
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