WordPress redesign

Redesign the WordPress site without torching the rankings.

Editorial WordPress redesigns for brands that have moved on but the site has not. We protect every URL, every link, and every rich result while we rebuild the front of house. The new site looks like the company you've become and ranks like the one you used to be.

Continuity

URL + redirect + schema parity

Design

Editorial, art-directed

Performance

CWV targets, real-user verified

Stabilization

30-day post-launch SEO watch

What is WordPress website redesign?

WordPress website redesign is the practice of rebuilding a WordPress site to a new design system while protecting SEO equity. The work covers art direction, content architecture, redirect mapping, schema parity, and a thirty-day post-launch monitoring window so rankings move up rather than down.

Why this exists

Redesigns kill rankings when teams treat them as a design project.

Most WordPress redesigns bury weeks of SEO work under a pretty new homepage. URLs change, internal links break, schema disappears, the new theme ships without canonicals, and three weeks after launch the traffic graph turns into a cliff. A Haxtiv redesign treats SEO continuity as a first-class deliverable. We crawl the live site before kickoff, map every URL, plan redirects deliberately, and watch real-user CWV for thirty days post-launch. The site looks new and ranks better — not despite the redesign, because of it.

What we hear most

Why brands redesign with us instead of starting from scratch.

If a redesign is on the calendar and one of these is on your worry list, we are the right call.

01

The brand has evolved past the site

New positioning, new photography, new tone — and a website that still reads like the company three years ago. The redesign needs to land the new brand without becoming a rebrand exercise.

02

Conversion has plateaued or dropped

Traffic is fine. Conversion is not. The hero is doing too much, the CTAs are buried, and the social proof shows up too late. The redesign needs to move the conversion needle, not just the visual one.

03

SEO equity is at risk

You have years of backlinks, ranking pages, and rich results. A bad redesign loses 20–60% of that within a quarter. You need a partner who treats migration as the first design problem.

04

The CMS has aged badly

Forty plugins. A page builder the team hates. Editorial workflow that makes content feel like effort. The redesign is the moment to fix the editor, not just the front-end.

05

Performance is failing CWV

LCP past three seconds, CLS in the red. The redesign is also a performance reset — new theme, new image policy, and Core Web Vitals targets you can hit in production.

06

The previous agency disappeared

The site you have now has no documentation, no design tokens, no theme handover. The redesign is also a chance to take ownership back — clean repo, documented system, named conventions.

What we deliver

What ships in a Haxtiv WordPress redesign.

A new front of house, a healthier engine room, and the SEO continuity work that makes the new site outrank the old one.

Discovery & continuity

  • Full crawl of the live site (Screaming Frog + Search Console)
  • Ranking-page inventory and intent map
  • Redirect map authored URL by URL — no wildcard sweeps
  • Schema audit and reconciliation plan
  • Internal-link plan for the new architecture

Design

  • Editorial design system — type, grid, motion, photography
  • Art-directed templates: home, services, case study, blog, contact
  • Component library shared across templates
  • Interaction polish (reveal, magnetic, scroll-tied motion) without gimmicks
  • Brand consistency across the unloved corners (404, search, archive)

Build

  • Custom WordPress theme rebuilt from the ground up
  • ACF Pro content model — named fields, validated inputs
  • Custom Gutenberg blocks for editorial flexibility
  • Performance budget: LCP < 2.0s, CLS < 0.05, INP < 150ms
  • Image and asset policy revisited and applied site-wide

Launch

  • Staging-to-production checklist with sign-offs
  • DNS / cache strategy without downtime
  • Search Console submission and indexation watch
  • Real-user CWV monitoring for 30 days
  • Daily ranking-watch on the top 50 keywords

Stabilization

  • 30-day post-launch SEO watch with weekly reports
  • Schema validation and rich-result restoration
  • Internal link adjustments based on early traffic
  • Lighthouse and CWV regression checks
  • Optional retainer for ongoing CRO and SEO

Process

How this service runs end to end

The same six-step shape we use across every Haxtiv project — adapted to the specifics of this scope.

  1. 01

    Discover

    Audit, intent, and the part nobody is saying out loud

    We open with a working session — not a deck. We pull analytics, crawl the existing site, audit the brand, and interview the people closest to revenue. We surface the friction inside the team, not just the friction on the screen.

  2. 02

    Define

    Sitemap, story, and the metrics that actually matter

    We define the audience journeys, the commercial pages we are willing to defend, the SEO architecture, and the measurable outcomes. You get a shape of the project that survives feedback because it was built on evidence.

  3. 03

    Design

    Editorial system, art-directed, never templated

    Type, grid, motion, and tone built as a system. We design the hero, the long pages, the unloved corners, and the empty states. Every screen looks like it belongs to the same studio. Nothing is parked for later.

  4. 04

    Build

    Production code your team can keep

    WordPress, Shopify, or page builder — we build clean, accessible, performant, and documented. Component-led, naming you'll recognize next year, and a changelog your in-house team can read.

  5. 05

    Launch

    Migration without losing rankings or sleep

    Pre-launch crawl, redirect map, schema and metadata cutover, performance baseline, and a launch playbook. We run the deploy with you, not at you.

  6. 06

    Grow

    Care plan, CRO sprints, and quiet improvements

    We stay involved. Monthly performance reports, security and core updates, and CRO sprints that compound. The site gets better the longer you keep us.

What this looks like in production

Numbers we earn, not numbers we round up.

0+

Sites shipped

across 27 countries

0k

Studio hours

delivered since 2019

0.0x

Avg conversion lift

post-redesign clients

0%

Client retention

into year two

In their words

Senior teams who chose us.

Haxtiv replatformed our marketing site without losing a single ranking. We saw organic leads up 38% inside the first quarter and the editorial team finally has a layout system they don't fight.

Mara Iglesias

VP Marketing · Lumenwave Health

Headless WordPress redesign

Our previous Shopify build was a Frankenstein of apps. The Haxtiv team simplified the stack, rebuilt the PDP and CRO patterns, and our store is faster and more profitable than it has ever been.

Daniel Korver

Founder · Northbound Goods

Shopify Plus rebuild

Frequently asked

Answers worth asking for.

Don't see the question you're holding? Send it to [email protected] and we'll answer the same day.

No, if it's done properly. The biggest causes of post-redesign ranking drops are URL changes without redirects, schema lost on the new templates, internal linking thinned out, and CWV regressions. We handle all four explicitly and watch real-user data for 30 days post-launch.

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Where to go next

Start here

Bring us the redesign that has to land — and the rankings that have to stay.

30-minute call. We'll review the live site, point at the risks, and share a fixed quote.

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