What to Keep From the Old Site During a Website Redesign

A redesign brief built entirely around what is wrong with the current site — outdated look, clunky navigation, slow load — routinely skips the opposite question. Which existing pages, content and structure are already working, and should be protected rather than swept away by default?

Why “we’re redesigning everything” is a risky default

A page that currently ranks well in Google, already carries inbound links from other sites, and already answers a real question a visitor has, represents real, accumulated value that took time to build. Rewriting it purely because the rest of the site is being redesigned risks losing that value, on the assumption the new version will be at least as good. That assumption has no guarantee behind it. This section will not paper over the gap with an invented “redesigns typically lose X% of traffic” statistic, because no such figure is sourced here.

The audit to run before deciding anything

Pull every existing URL, its organic traffic and its ranking position for its main queries, from Google Search Console’s Performance report. A page bringing in consistent, relevant traffic is doing real work, regardless of how it looks.

Check inbound links to each page, where available. A page other websites link to has accumulated a form of trust that a brand-new page, however well written, starts without.

Identify content that answers a specific, current question well, independent of ranking — an FAQ page, a detailed service explanation, a genuinely useful guide. Even where traffic is modest, usefulness to an actual visitor is a real signal, distinct from search performance.

Note which pages have almost no traffic and no links, and honestly serve no current purpose. These are the genuine candidates for removal or consolidation. A redesign is the natural moment to retire them, rather than carrying dead weight into a new structure.

Freshness and durability are different questions

A page can be genuinely worth keeping in structure and core content, while still needing specific facts brought current — a price example, a regulation reference, a statistic with a date attached. Conflating “this page is fundamentally sound” with “this page needs no changes at all” causes real problems. The redesign either updates nothing that needed updating, or rewrites wholesale content that only needed a handful of facts refreshed. The useful question for each retained page is not only “is this worth keeping”. It is “which specific parts of this have aged and need updating, separately from the parts that have not”.

Preserving the internal linking, not just the individual pages

Beyond the content of any single page, the links between pages on the existing site represent a structure. It was built up deliberately or accidentally over time: which pages point to which, and with what anchor text. A redesign that reorganises navigation can sever these connections, even where every individual page’s URL and content survive unchanged. A new navigation structure genuinely is one of the legitimate reasons to redesign. But the audit in this page should also note which existing internal links were carrying real weight, a frequently-used link from a high-traffic page to a conversion-relevant one, for instance. That way the new structure can deliberately preserve that relationship, rather than losing it as an unnoticed side effect of a cleaner-looking menu.

Images and media are their own audit line, not an assumed part of the text

A photograph, a diagram or a downloadable PDF can independently rank in Google Image search. It can be independently linked to or embedded by other sites. And it can independently be indexed at its own direct file URL, regardless of what happens to the page it originally appeared on. Auditing only the text content of a page, and assuming its images will simply “come along” with a content migration, misses this. An image with real external links pointing directly at its file path needs the same redirect-or-preserve decision as a full page. The mechanics are covered on content migration: the work nobody quotes.

A short decision framework

Signal	What it suggests
Strong organic traffic and ranking for its main term	Keep the page’s core content and URL; redesign around it, not over it
Meaningful inbound links from other sites	Preserve the URL specifically — a link pointing at a URL that disappears becomes a dead link, wasting the trust it carried
Genuinely useful content, modest traffic	Keep the content; the presentation can change freely
No traffic, no links, no current relevance	A genuine candidate to retire or fold into another page

What this protects against specifically

The most common, avoidable failure in a redesign is treating “new site” as licence to discard URLs, content and structure wholesale. Then, after launch, the pages driving the majority of organic enquiries no longer exist in a form Google or a returning visitor can find. Redesigning without losing rankings covers the technical side of preserving what this audit identifies as worth keeping. This page is about deciding what that actually is, before the technical work begins.

Setting website redesign goals, conversion metrics and objectives before you redesign website performance and refresh outdated pages

A redesign project needs its own stated goals and success metrics — improved conversion, better usability, faster load, a refreshed visual brand. Decide these before the redesign process begins. Do not discover them after launch by comparing whatever changed against a vague sense that the new site “feels” better. Website redesign objectives that never get written down tend to default to whatever the loudest stakeholder in the web design project cares about most. That is rarely what the audience and the site’s own performance actually need addressed.

Branding, logo, visitors, user experience and visual design trends: what a redesign strategy should protect

A redesign strategy built entirely around fresh visuals can quietly discard branding equity a business has spent years building. That includes a logo, a colour palette, and a visual style the target audience already recognises on sight. Test a proposed visual direction against an actual user, before committing the whole site to it. That catches a usability or brand-recognition problem while it is still cheap to fix, rather than after a full website redesign has shipped. None of this argues against updating outdated design trends where they genuinely are outdated. It argues for treating brand and visual continuity as its own audit line. That is the same way this page treats content, links and structure: as separate questions, rather than one undifferentiated “redesign everything” decision.

Where CMS and web design platform choice fit into a redesign project phase

A redesign project is often the moment a business also changes CMS or hosting platform. That decision belongs in its own phase, assessed separately from the content-and-structure audit this page covers. A platform migration changes what “preserving the existing structure” technically requires to execute.

What to do next

Run the audit above before writing a single line of a redesign brief. It turns “make it look better” into a specific list of what must survive and what can genuinely change. For the copywriting side of deciding what gets rewritten versus retained, website copywriting covers how that work is scoped.