Can anyone share a real before-and-after case study before we spend money on a redesign?

We redesigned our apparel site last year. For the first 60 days, we saw a sharp drop in organic traffic, plunging from 40,000 down to 28,000 a month. However, thanks to the new checkout flow, our on-site conversion rate shot up from 1.2 to 1.9. Even though traffic dropped, our total order volume barely moved. After month four, the traffic even surpassed its old baseline.

Designers usually bloat the DOM size and push critical content behind client-side rendering just to make things look modern. If Googlebot experiences delayed rendering while crawling your page, your rankings will tank. Definitely verify Core Web Vitals metrics and server-side HTML output on staging before anything goes live.

Tearing everything down to build from scratch all at once is a classic agency trap. Why throw away the whole site in one go? First revamp just the cart and checkout flow, measure the impact. Then tackle the product detail page. Most radical redesigns serve nothing but agency egos.

on our old site they completely nuked the seo of our top-performing blog posts while changing the inner page layout. header tags were turned from h1 to p tags and stuff like that. we only caught it three months later and fixed it while basically crying and definitely check every single page by hand before launching imo.

There are three things you must freeze before kicking off a redesign: 1) URLs and title tags of your top 50 traffic-driving pages, 2) Internal linking blocks on category pages, 3) On-page schema markup. Leave those untouched, and traffic drops will be kept to a minimum.

Three years ago at a furniture brand I worked for, our founder said 'the site feels too dark, let's go for an airy Scandinavian vibe.' 50,000 dollars later, the site was pure white, and load speeds tanked. We closed that winter season with practically zero organic sales and were forced to roll back to the old theme. I've been extremely skeptical of redesigns ever since.

Before handing 45,000 dollars to an agency buy an independent technical SEO audit for 2,000 dollars. Pinpoint where the current site is actually struggling. Then dictate the redesign specs to the agency based on that technical report yourself.

This is exactly what we experienced. A page that answers one question works better than one touching on five topics.

Just leaving this note, it might be useful.

This is exactly what we experienced. Discussing numbers without verifying the measurement setup is a waste of time.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

I didn't know that.

i'm a small business let me explain from my side. internal linking is the cheapest and most neglected task.

There is something to watch out for. Solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

I agree with this. Processes without records never improve, because you don't know what to fix.

Ranking is the result, search intent is the input. Look at intent first. If you have questions, write them; I'll answer as best I can.

ive been down this road, let me tell you. processes without records never improve, because you dont know what to fix.

I'm a small business, let me explain from my side. The answer varies greatly by industry; there is no one-size-fits-all rule.

Just leaving this note, it might be useful.

Just a heads-up. If you get three different answers on a topic, the question was asked wrong.

If I were you, I'd go this route.

Three different views emerged, they all complement each other. A competitor's ranking might come from years of accumulation, not just their content.

Trying to do this alone is the most expensive way. If you post the result here, it will help others too.

The most overlooked point about website redesign case study is this: Everyone rushing into website redesign case study gets stuck at the same point.

Any unwritten clause becomes a point of disagreement later, as both sides remember it differently. Of course it varies if your situation is different.