Top 10 Mistakes Businesses Make When Redesigning Their Website

Redesigning a website can feel like a fresh start, but it is also where many businesses stumble. From neglecting SEO to overlooking user experience, costly mistakes during a redesign can damage traffic, conversions, and brand credibility. This guide highlights the ten most common errors businesses make and shows how to prevent them with proven strategies and real-world insights. By steering clear of these pitfalls, IT leaders and digital teams can ensure their redesign drives measurable growth rather than setbacks.

1. Redesigning Without Clear Business Goals

Jumping into a redesign without defined objectives is like setting sail without a map. Gartner notes that 68% of failed projects stem from unclear goals. Businesses often focus on “making it look modern” rather than tying the project to KPIs such as reducing bounce rates, increasing lead form submissions, or improving e-commerce conversion.

Setting measurable objectives such as achieving a 25% improvement in mobile conversions or a 2-second reduction in load time keeps the redesign aligned with business outcomes.

2. Ignoring SEO From the Start

One of the most damaging mistakes is forgetting to preserve SEO equity. Redesigns often result in lost rankings because businesses do not map old URLs, ignore metadata, or miss structured data. According to SEMrush, 61% of websites lose significant organic traffic post-redesign due to poor migration planning.

A strong redesign process should include an SEO migration checklist with 301 redirects, meta descriptions, title tags, and XML sitemaps to protect existing visibility.

3. Overlooking User Experience (UX)

A sleek design means nothing if users cannot navigate it. Adobe’s 2024 survey found that 59% of people abandon sites with poor usability. Businesses often get caught up in trendy visuals and forget about intuitive navigation, accessibility, and clear CTAs.

Wireframing and testing layouts with real users ensures that the new design improves usability rather than complicating it.

4. Failing to Prioritize Mobile Responsiveness

Google reports that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load. Yet, many redesigns still take a desktop-first approach. This creates clunky experiences for mobile visitors, who often make up more than half of web traffic.

Building with a mobile-first mindset helps create responsive layouts, fast-loading pages, and thumb-friendly navigation that meet modern user expectations.

5. Neglecting Website Speed and Performance

Redesigns often add heavy animations, oversized images, or unnecessary plugins. This drags down performance, leading to higher bounce rates. Portent’s 2024 research showed that a site loading in 1 second had a 3x higher conversion rate compared to one loading in 5 seconds.

Optimizing assets, auditing third-party scripts, and implementing CDNs ensures that performance improves rather than suffers.

6. Forgetting Accessibility and Compliance

Accessibility is not just about inclusivity, it is also a legal requirement in many regions. Yet, businesses often skip WCAG guidelines during redesign. The result is a risk of lawsuits and alienating customers with disabilities.

Following accessibility best practices such as proper color contrast, alt text for images, ARIA labels, and compliance testing makes websites usable for all audiences and reduces risk.

7. Lack of Stakeholder and User Feedback

Some redesigns are driven purely by the marketing team or a single executive. Without feedback loops, the new design risks missing real user needs. A McKinsey report found that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that are not.

Involving cross-functional teams and collecting feedback from existing customers helps align the final product with real-world expectations.

8. Overcomplicating Content Management

A redesign is the perfect time to streamline content workflows, yet many businesses ignore it. They end up with outdated CMS systems, poor content governance, and bottlenecks that slow updates.

Choosing a CMS that supports flexible updates, multi-user permissions, and scalability ensures content teams remain agile after launch.

9. Skipping Security and Data Protection

New designs sometimes open doors for vulnerabilities, especially when agencies rush to deliver. In 2024, Verizon’s Data Breach Report showed that web applications remain a leading attack vector.

Redesign projects should include SSL enforcement, secure coding practices, regular patching, and compliance with GDPR or CCPA to protect data integrity.

10. Treating the Redesign as a One-Time Project

Many businesses think the redesign ends at launch. In reality, it is the beginning. Without continuous optimization, even the best websites become outdated quickly.

Regular SEO audits, A/B testing, and ongoing feature upgrades turn a redesign into a sustainable growth engine.

Final Takeaways

• Define clear business goals before starting.
• Protect your SEO and prioritize performance.
• Make UX, accessibility, and mobile responsiveness non-negotiables.
• Treat redesign as an ongoing process, not a one-time milestone.

A website redesign is an investment in future growth. Avoiding these mistakes ensures higher visibility, stronger engagement, and better ROI.

At Anchor Points, we specialize in creating redesign strategies that preserve SEO equity, optimize performance, and deliver user-focused digital experiences.