I want to redesign our website but I'm terrified of losing our traffic — where should I start?

Keeping your URL structure should be priority number one. If a platform change forces URL updates, not a single line of code should go live without a complete 1:1 301 redirect map in place. Also, crawl robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and canonical tags in staging. Most agencies forget to remove the noindex tag from staging when pushing to production, and the site ends up de-indexed for weeks.

In the Russian market, search engines place massive weight on UX and commercial trust signals. When modernizing the design, don't overcomplicate checkout steps, spec sheet download buttons, or contact pages. If users land on the new UI, can't find what they need, and bounce, your rankings will tank even with perfect technical SEO. Refresh the interface without breaking user habits.

Last year we redesigned our wholesale site of a similar size on a 550,000 RUB budget. We saw a temporary dip of about 10 percent in organic traffic for the first 3 weeks. But because our 301 map was airtight and we left the content intact, traffic surpassed our old numbers by the end of month two. If you have a solid plan, any dip won't be permanent.

Never buy into an agency promising "traffic won't drop at all." It takes search engines a few weeks to recrawl the new layout, parse the CSS/JS, and re-evaluate trust signals. Minor fluctuations during that window are inevitable. An agency offering a "zero risk" guarantee either knows nothing about technical migrations or is lying to close the deal.

Does the scope in their proposals cover content migration? How are hundreds of product descriptions, meta tags, and images on a 45k-visitor site being moved—manually, or via a migration script? Agencies usually just reskin the frontend and dump content migration on the client. Did you clarify this in writing?

First thing Monday: export the top traffic-driving pages from the last 12 months via your analytics dashboard into an Excel sheet. Mark those pages off-limits. Hand that list to the agency and tell them, "You will preserve the URLs and headings on these pages; the new design builds around this content." If you set the roadmap, you cut the risk in half.

our old dev took the lazy way out and redirected every single changed link to the homepage half our traffic evaporated in a month. every page must 301 redirect to its exact equivalent, be super strict about this with the agency from day one.

Three clear clauses to get into the contract: 1) A full SEO crawl in the staging environment at least 1 week before going live, 2) Delivery of a 301 redirect map mapping every indexed URL on the old site to its new path, 3) Weekly crawls to fix any 404 errors that crop up during the first 30 days post-launch at no extra charge.

I've been down this road, let me tell you. The real issue isn't the number, but what it's based on.

If you post the result here, it will help others too.

theres a part I dont understand. btw weekly written progress reports are much more useful than asking for dates.

i'm also curius if anyone does it differently.

let me share my experience but anyway when making decisions write down the worst-case scenaro too not just the best.

that's all, sorry if I went on too long.

I completely agree. The answer varies greatly by industry; there is no one-size-fits-all rule.

Solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late.

I'm in the same situation, that's why I'm asking. Implementing a change request process doesn't slow things down, it speeds them up.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

My question might sound amateurish, sorry about that. Ask who prepared the quote and who will actually do the work.

If it's your first time, start small; scaling comes later. If you have questions, write them; I'll answer as best I can.

just a heads-up. any unwritten clause bceomes a point of disagreement later as both sides remember it differently.

if you get three different answers on a topic the queston was asked wrong.

Let me share my experience. If scope grows, either time or budget must grow. There is no third option.

If it's your first time, start small; scaling comes later.

Let me summarize the topic since several different answers were given. Code without setup documentation isn't yours, even if you have it.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

Thanks, that was the answer I was looking for. The biggest time-waster for us was not knowing who had the final say.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.