A client told me six months ago he was redesigning his website. I asked if he’d briefed the designer on his offer, his audience, his conversion goals. He said the designer “handles all that.”
I didn’t hear from him again until last month.
The new site looked incredible. Custom photography. Scroll animations. The designer called it “clean and modern.” His analytics called it something else. Not a disaster — worse. The same. Same traffic. Same enquiries. Same conversion rate, almost to the decimal. Twelve thousand dollars and a website he was finally proud of — and absolutely nothing had changed.
He wanted to know what went wrong. Nothing went wrong. The designer delivered exactly what was asked for: a better-looking website. Nobody asked for a better-performing one.
The pattern I've watched repeat for 20 years
I’ve been running digital strategy for two decades now. In that time, I’ve audited hundreds of websites post-launch. And the number that actually moved the needle on sales? Roughly one in ten.
Not because the designs were bad. Most of them looked fantastic. The problem was always the same, and it was never visual.
The design improved. The offer didn’t. The messaging didn’t. The traffic strategy didn’t change. The same audience landed on the same proposition wrapped in a prettier package — and did exactly what they’d always done.
It’s like repainting a restaurant that serves bad food. The walls look great. The kitchen hasn’t changed. And you’re wondering why nobody comes back for seconds.
The 80% failure rate nobody talks about
This isn’t just my experience talking. Aggregated industry research puts the number at nearly 80% — eight out of ten website redesigns fail or significantly underperform against their pre-launch baseline. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a systemic problem.
And the financial damage is immediate. A poorly planned redesign typically triggers an organic traffic drop between 10% and 40% the moment the new site goes live. In severe cases — where the dev team didn’t bother mapping redirects — traffic losses blow past 60%. I’ve seen businesses lose 90% of their organic visibility overnight because someone changed a URL structure without telling Google where the old pages went.
Here’s what makes this especially painful for Australian SMBs: you’re spending $10,000 to $25,000 on a professional redesign. That’s real money. And the Australian Small Business Ombudsman’s data shows nearly one in three small businesses end up in a formal dispute with their web provider, with 70% terminating the relationship inside 12 months.
Those disputes almost never happen because the designer did bad work. They happen because the business expected a sales engine and received a digital brochure.
Where the money actually disappears
he research on this is brutal in its clarity. When a redesign goes wrong, the destruction follows two predictable paths.
Path one: your search equity gets wiped. Your old site accumulated authority over years — backlinks, indexed pages, keyword rankings built one piece of content at a time. A redesign that changes URL structures without implementing proper redirects nukes all of that overnight. Every backlink pointing to a page that no longer exists becomes a dead end. Google stops sending you traffic because, as far as it’s concerned, your content no longer exists.
One case study tracks this precisely. Imhoff Painting had an ugly website generating 300 qualified organic visits per day. Their new agency delivered a gorgeous redesign — and failed to migrate the hundreds of service pages and blog posts that drove all that traffic. Within a month, daily visits collapsed from 300 to 10. Not a typo. Three hundred to ten.
Path two: design eats the message. Designers build wireframes with placeholder text. Beautiful, symmetrical blocks of Lorem Ipsum. Then the actual copy — the words that explain what you do, who it’s for, and why they should care — gets crammed into those rigid visual boxes like furniture into a flat that’s too small. The value proposition disappears beneath a full-screen hero video. The testimonials get buried. The call-to-action hides in a hamburger menu because a visible button “ruined the aesthetic.”
A user who can’t figure out what you do within three seconds bounces. Research confirms it: 88% of online consumers won’t return after a bad experience. Your beautiful new website just gave them one.
"But I'm not a marketer — that's why I hired a designer"
I hear this constantly, and it’s a fair objection. You run a plumbing business, or a law firm, or an ecommerce store. You hired a professional to handle the website precisely because you don’t know how to build one. You shouldn’t need a marketing degree to get a site that works.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth, though: your designer’s job is to make it look good. Your job — the part only you can do — is to make it sell. Those are two completely different skills. Asking your web designer to handle your sales strategy is like asking your architect to decide what business you run from the building they designed. They’ll give you a gorgeous structure. But they can’t tell you what to put inside it.
The good news? You don’t need to become a strategist. You need ten minutes and five questions. That’s it. Ten minutes of clarity saves ten thousand dollars of guessing.
The five questions your designer can't answer (but you must)
Before a single pixel gets pushed, you need written answers to these:
Who exactly is your customer? Not “everyone” — the specific person. What’s their job? What keeps them up at night? What have they already tried that didn’t work? Your designer doesn’t know this. You do.
What is the single action you want them to take? Call you? Fill out a form? Book online? Buy a product? Pick one. A site that asks visitors to do five things gets them to do zero.
What objections will they have? “Is this too expensive?” “Will it work for my situation?” “Can I trust these people?” Every visitor arrives with silent objections. Your site needs to answer them before they’re asked. Your designer has no idea what those objections are.
What proof do you have? Testimonials, case studies, before-and-after photos, data, awards. The specific evidence that makes a sceptical visitor think “okay, these people are legit.” If it’s not on the site, it doesn’t exist.
What happens after they click? Do they get an instant confirmation? A phone call within the hour? A three-week wait? The experience after conversion determines whether your leads become customers or ghost stories. Map it out.
Hand your designer those five answers and the site almost builds itself. Hand them a logo and “make it modern” and you get a $15,000 brochure.
Same website. Different strategy. Completely different result.
The Imhoff Painting story has a second act. After the disaster, a recovery team was brought in. They didn’t scrap the new design — it was genuinely better-looking than the original. Instead, they resurrected the old content, rebuilt the URL architecture to preserve backlink equity, and rewrote the copy with clear calls-to-action, visible testimonials, and service-specific landing pages that actually spoke to what customers were searching for.
Within one month, organic traffic recovered to 300 daily visits. But here’s the part that matters: because the restored SEO content was now paired with strategic copywriting inside the new design, Imhoff saw a 70% increase in leads compared to the old site. Same design. Different strategy. Seventy percent more business.
Another case worth knowing: Wasp Barcode, a B2B company, had a redesign stuck in a 14-month delay due to scope creep. Rather than wait, an optimisation team went to work on the existing site — testing headlines, repositioning CTAs, rewriting key copy. By the time the new design finally launched, the “ugly” old site had already grown product demos by over 200%. The new design’s conversion rate? Flat. Identical to the optimised legacy site.
The lesson is the same every time. Design doesn’t drive revenue. Clarity does. Specificity does. Answering the customer’s actual question in the first three seconds does.
A single line of copy can outperform a $50,000 redesign
If this sounds like I’m saying small changes beat big overhauls, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The data backs it up: L’Axelle rewrote one button — one line of copy on a checkout page — and saw a 38.3% lift in conversions that eventually drove 93% more clicks. CloudSponge updated their hero section with a clear reason to choose them alongside a demo video. Conversions jumped 33%. No redesign. No new wireframes. Just words that matched what the customer was actually thinking.
This is why I tell every client the same thing: before you spend $15,000 on a new site, spend two hours answering the five questions. Test new headlines on your current site. Rewrite your calls-to-action. Add the testimonials you’ve been sitting on. You might find the site you already have just needed better inputs.
About that client with the $12,000 website
We didn’t touch his new design. Didn’t change a colour, didn’t move a single image. The designer’s work was good — that was never the issue. What we changed was everything the designer was never asked to think about. We rewrote his homepage headline from a vague “Quality Solutions for Your Business” to a specific value proposition that named his customer’s problem in their own language. We surfaced three client testimonials that had been buried on a subpage nobody visited. We replaced “Contact Us” with a CTA that told visitors exactly what would happen when they clicked.
Same website. Same twelve thousand dollars already spent.
But for the first time, someone had briefed the strategy before judging the design. The analytics didn’t tell the same story anymore.
See What Strategy Would Change
Take the 5-question test against your current website — and find out whether the problem is the design or the brief behind it.
Most clients discover their site already has what it needs — it’s the messaging, offer, and conversion path that nobody thought through. Takes 30 minutes.
You don’t need a new website. You need someone to brief the one you’ve got.