What do website redesign services include for a Canadian company?
Website redesign services cover everything between “our site looks dated” and a new site that performs better than the old one: auditing what currently works, planning structure and URLs, designing and building new templates, moving content, rebuilding lead capture, testing accessibility and launching without a traffic cliff.
The visible part, new colours, layouts and photos, is maybe a third of the job. The rest is protecting what the old site has earned. A ten-year-old site with an ugly homepage may still have hundreds of pages that rank, backlinks from industry associations and a contact form that sends leads to three people. A redesign that ignores those assets looks better for a month and then quietly costs you business.
For Canadian companies there are usually two extra goals attached: meeting accessibility expectations, particularly in Ontario, and adding or improving a French version. Both are much cheaper to build into a redesign than to bolt on afterwards.
- Audit of SEO, analytics, backlinks and lead sources
- Site structure, navigation and URL plan
- New templates designed mobile-first
- Content inventory: keep, merge, rewrite or retire
- Forms, tracking and CRM connections rebuilt
- Accessibility built to WCAG 2.0 Level AA
- Optional French version with proper language tags
- Staged launch, monitoring and rollback plan
When should a Canadian business redesign its website?
Redesign when the site is costing you leads, not just when you are tired of looking at it. Clear signals include a poor experience on phones, slow pages, a content management system nobody can safely update, accessibility gaps you have been told about, a missing French version customers ask for, or services and branding that no longer match the business.
Sometimes a refresh is enough. If the structure is sound, pages rank and the platform is healthy, new styles, better photos and clearer calls to action on the existing templates can deliver most of the benefit at a fraction of the risk. A full redesign makes sense when the structure itself is wrong: services buried three clicks deep, pages that overlap and compete, or a platform that blocks the changes you need.
A useful test is to ask your sales or front-desk team what customers complain about. If the answers are “I couldn't find the price”, “the form didn't work on my phone” or “is there a French page?”, the redesign has a brief already.
Refresh when
structure and rankings are healthy and the problem is mainly visual or copy-related.
Redesign when
navigation, templates, platform or accessibility are holding the business back.
Will a website redesign hurt your SEO?
It does not have to. Traffic drops after a redesign almost always trace back to preventable causes: URLs changed without redirects, ranking content removed or thinned out, titles and headings rewritten without regard to what people search, internal links broken, or the new site blocked from crawling at launch.
Google's documentation on moves with URL changes is candid that rankings may fluctuate while Google recrawls and reindexes, and that for a medium-sized site this can take several weeks. It recommends permanent server-side redirects such as 301 or 308 and keeping them generally at least a year. We treat those as the minimum.
The best protection is to change fewer URLs. If your current addresses are sensible, the new design can keep them exactly, and a redesign becomes a content and template change rather than a site move. When structure really must change, a redirect map and a checklist on launch day keep the dip small and short. Nobody can honestly promise zero movement in rankings, and anyone who does is guessing.
The pre-redesign SEO and analytics audit: what to save before anything changes
Before the first mock-up, capture a snapshot of how the old site performs. Once templates change, that baseline is gone, and so is your ability to prove the new site is better.
We export Google Search Console's queries and pages for the last sixteen months, analytics landing pages and conversions, a list of pages with backlinks, a full crawl showing every URL, title, heading, canonical tag and status code, and the site's structured data. We also record Core Web Vitals and page weight for the main templates. All of it goes into a folder in your own drive.
The audit answers three questions that shape the redesign. Which pages bring organic traffic and leads, and must be preserved? Which pages overlap and should be merged? Which pages have neither traffic nor purpose and can be retired with a redirect? It also flags technical debt, such as duplicate pages, broken internal links or blocked resources, that the new build should fix rather than inherit.
- Search Console performance by page and by query
- Analytics landing pages, goals and form submissions
- Backlinked pages and the sites linking to them
- Full crawl with titles, headings, canonicals and status codes
- Structured data currently in use
- Speed and Core Web Vitals for the main templates
Keeping leads flowing during a website redesign
List every way the current site generates enquiries before you change anything, then rebuild and test each one. Leads are lost in redesigns far more often through a broken form or missing tracking tag than through rankings.
Typical lead paths on a Canadian company site include contact and quote forms, click-to-call numbers, booking widgets, chat, newsletter signups, downloadable guides and job applications. Each has a destination: an inbox, a CRM, a booking system or a spreadsheet. Each may have tracking attached, such as analytics events, ad conversion tags or call-tracking numbers. We map all of it in the audit.
On the new site, every form is tested from a phone and a laptop, every notification is confirmed by the person who receives it, and every conversion event is checked in analytics. If you send commercial email, signup forms keep clear consent wording, since Canada's anti-spam law expects consent. For the first weeks after launch we compare weekly lead counts with the audit baseline, so a drop is caught in days, not months.
URL and redirect planning for a website redesign
Give every old URL a fate in a spreadsheet: keep, merge into another page, move to a new address or retire. Anything not kept at the same address gets a permanent redirect to its closest equivalent. That spreadsheet is the most valuable document in the whole redesign.
We build the list from the crawl, the sitemap, Search Console and backlink data, so that pages Google knows about and pages other sites link to are all covered, including PDFs and images that attract traffic. Retired pages redirect to the most relevant remaining page, not the homepage, because a mass homepage redirect wastes the relevance the old page carried.
Two practical rules keep redirects healthy. First, point redirects directly at the final destination; if the old site already had redirects, we update them so a visitor never bounces through several hops. Second, update internal links on the new site to the new URLs rather than relying on redirects. Once live, we test the full list automatically and fix anything that returns an error.
- Keep: same URL, new design
- Merge: two overlapping pages become one, the other redirects
- Move: new address, one-hop 301 redirect
- Retire: redirect to the closest relevant page
AODA accessibility upgrades during a redesign
If your organization is covered by Ontario's accessibility rules, a redesign is the natural moment to meet them, because accessibility is cheapest when it is part of the templates from the start.
The Government of Ontario's guidance on how to make websites accessible says that, as of January 1, 2021, designated public sector organizations and businesses or non-profits with 50 or more employees must make their public websites meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA, other than live captions and pre-recorded audio descriptions. The rules apply to websites and web content published after January 1, 2012, and to sites the organization controls directly or through a contract. Smaller organizations are not covered by that deadline but gain the same usability benefits.
In practice we build templates with correct heading order, sufficient colour contrast, visible focus states, keyboard access to menus and forms, labelled fields with clear error messages, alt text prompts in the editor, and captions for any video you supply. We test with automated tools plus manual keyboard and screen reader checks. Whether your organization is legally covered, and how to report, is a question for your own advisers; our job is a site that meets the standard. More on AODA-compliant website builds.
Adding a French version during a website rebuild
Building French into the redesign costs far less than retrofitting it later, because templates, navigation, forms and URLs are created for two languages from day one.
The technical pieces are straightforward. French pages get their own URLs, usually under a /fr/ path, and each page declares its language. Google's guidance on localized versions uses language and optional region codes such as fr-CA, and requires each version to list itself and every other version, or the annotations may be ignored. It also notes that Google detects a page's language with its own algorithms rather than from those tags, so real French content matters more than markup.
The work that takes time is content. We write in English and do not machine-translate your site, so the French text comes from your translator or bilingual staff, delivered into a structure we prepare. Forms, confirmation emails, error messages, cookie banners and PDFs all need French versions too. If you do business in Quebec, ask a lawyer how the Charter of the French language applies to your site; our Bill 96 website page covers the build side.
Keep, merge, rewrite or retire: handling content in a redesign
Decide page by page using the audit data. Pages that rank and convert keep their core content and URL; overlapping pages are merged; thin pages with no traffic are retired or rewritten with a clearer purpose.
Redesigns go wrong when content is treated as filler for new templates. A service page that ranked because it answered detailed questions will lose its position if the new design trims it to three short paragraphs and a stock photo. We flag every high-value page in the content inventory, and the new template is built to hold that depth, with headings, lists and FAQs rather than long blocks.
Merging is often the biggest win. Older sites accumulate near-duplicate pages, such as three posts on the same topic or separate city pages with identical text, which compete with each other in search. Combining them into one stronger page, with redirects from the others, usually improves rankings after a redesign rather than risking them.
What changes in design, speed and user experience?
A good redesign makes the next step obvious on every page: call, book, request a quote or buy. Visual polish matters, but clarity, speed and mobile usability are what change results.
We design mobile-first, because most service searches happen on phones, and we keep the main call to action visible without hunting. Navigation is flattened so key services are one or two taps away. Pages are built light, with modern image formats, minimal scripts and fonts loaded efficiently, and we measure Core Web Vitals on real templates rather than a blank demo.
We also look at trust signals your customers expect: clear contact details, licensing or association memberships you actually hold, real photos where you have them, and plain explanations of process and pricing. Clear, direct answers to common questions also help AI search features quote your pages accurately.
Change platforms only if the current one blocks what you need: safe editing by staff, speed, security, multilingual content or ecommerce. Otherwise, redesigning on the same platform keeps risk lower.
Most Canadian company sites we redesign run on WordPress, and it often stays the right choice when many staff edit content. Stores may be better served by Shopify, which is its own project with migration steps for order history and redirects. Marketing sites that rarely change can be built as fast static sites that are cheap to host and hard to break.
Whatever the platform, the audit, redirect map and accessibility work are the same. What changes is the editing experience your team inherits, so we ask who will update the site, how often, and what they are comfortable with before recommending anything.
Staged launch and rollback: how to switch to a redesigned website safely
Launch in steps, with the old site kept ready to restore. A staged launch turns a risky one-night switch into a series of small, reversible moves.
The new site is built on a private staging address with search engines blocked. Before launch, your team reviews every template and runs through the lead paths. On launch morning, Canadian time, we remove the staging block, load the redirects, switch the domain, submit the new sitemap in Search Console and test the redirect list, forms and tracking within the first hour.
The rollback plan is simple: a full backup of the old site and its hosting settings, kept intact for several weeks, and DNS settings documented so the domain can point back quickly if something serious goes wrong. For large sites we sometimes launch section by section, for example the blog first and service pages a week later, so each step can be checked before the next.
- Staging site blocked from search engines until launch
- Launch on a weekday morning, not before a long weekend
- Redirects, sitemap and analytics checked in the first hour
- Old site backed up and restorable for several weeks
- Daily Search Console and lead checks for the first two weeks
How much do website redesign services cost in Canada?
Quotes vary widely, because a ten-page refresh and a two-hundred-page bilingual rebuild with a platform change are different projects. With us, website redesign services start at US$150 for sites up to 100 pages, and at US$300 for large SEO sites of 299 pages or more.
The cost drivers are the number of unique templates, how much content is rewritten, merged or translated, the size of the redirect map, the number of forms and integrations, whether the platform changes, and whether a French version launches at the same time. Accessibility work is built into templates rather than priced as an afterthought, but a site with lots of PDFs or video needs extra time for alternatives and captions.
Costs outside our quote include hosting, premium plugins or themes, stock photography and translation, all paid by you directly. For a broader picture of what Canadian businesses spend on sites, see website design cost in Canada.
How long does a website redesign take?
The build itself is quick: one to two weeks for a site up to 100 pages, three to five weeks for a large SEO site. The overall project is usually longer, because the audit, content decisions, translations and your team's review take calendar time.
A realistic sequence for a mid-sized company site is a week for the audit and redirect plan, a week or two for design approval, the build, then content entry, French content if needed, testing and launch. The slowest steps are nearly always on the client side: gathering approvals from several people, supplying photos, or waiting for translated copy. We agree those dates at the start and flag early if something is slipping.
Working with a redesign team in India from Canada
Our evenings in India overlap Canadian mornings, so review calls happen early in your day, Eastern or Pacific, and design changes are often ready by your next morning. We answer WhatsApp seven days a week.
In the first two weeks: a video call to understand your business, audience, lead sources and goals; read-only access to Search Console, analytics and your current site; the audit delivered to your drive; and an itemised quote in USD within about two working days of the call. After you approve it in writing, we share the URL plan and first template designs for review.
Payments are in USD or CAD through Wise, bank wire or PayPal, following the schedule in your quote, with invoices from India. Nothing is billed before approval. We never visit in person, so photography or on-site interviews should be arranged locally. General terms are on our terms page.
Who owns the redesigned website?
You own the domain, hosting, website files, content, design files and every account involved. We work through user accounts you create and remove when the project ends.
At handover you receive administrator access to everything, the audit and redirect spreadsheet, the design files, a short guide or recording on editing pages, and a list of plugins or services with who pays for each. If you later work with someone else, they start with a complete record of how and why the site was rebuilt.
Worked example: redesigning a Burnaby engineering consultancy's site
This scenario is hypothetical, to show the process, not a past client. Say a small civil engineering consultancy in Burnaby has a nine-year-old WordPress site with about seventy pages, a few service pages that rank for local searches, a project gallery, and a contact form that sends leads to two partners. They want a modern design, better accessibility, and French pages because they now bid on work in Quebec.
The audit might show that five service pages bring most organic leads, that three older blog posts overlap, and that the project gallery has dozens of thin pages. The plan keeps the five service URLs exactly, merges the overlapping posts, groups project pages by sector with redirects, and adds a /fr/ section for the service pages first, with copy from the firm's translator.
The redesign would fall in our starting plan, from US$150, with the French structure and redirect work itemised. Launch happens on a Tuesday morning Pacific time, with the old site backed up for rollback and lead numbers checked weekly against the audit baseline.
Website redesign services checklist: before, during and after launch
Keep this list with the project plan. Each item should have a name next to it and a date.
- Search Console, analytics, backlink and crawl exports saved to your drive
- Top lead-generating pages and forms identified
- Every old URL assigned: keep, merge, move or retire
- Redirect list built and tested on staging
- Templates checked against WCAG 2.0 Level AA
- French pages, forms and emails reviewed by your translator
- Every form and call link tested; conversion events verified
- Staging blocked from search engines until launch
- Old site backed up with a written rollback plan
- Sitemap submitted and redirects retested after launch
- Weekly traffic and lead comparisons for the first month
After launch, the two free months of maintenance cover fixes and small changes. For ongoing updates, see website maintenance in Canada.