The typical failed redesign looks like this: the new site goes live, visibly more modern and faster to load, and two months later the contact form brings in fewer enquiries than before. The pages that used to pull traffic from Google now live at different addresses, the copy was trimmed to make things feel lighter, and the page that explained the offer in detail was merged into two others.
Nothing is technically broken. The site simply went backwards commercially. That is the risk specific to a redesign. You are not starting from a blank page, you are starting from an asset that already works at least partly, with search history, URLs Google knows, content that answers real questions, and a form actual customers use.
The five mistakes below are the expensive ones, in the order they usually show up in a project.
The trap: a better looking site that performs worse
A redesign is judged on numbers, not on impressions. Before anyone shows you a mockup, pull three figures you already own: monthly visits over the last twelve months, the number of enquiries that came in through the site, and the ten pages that generate the most organic traffic. Without those reference points, nobody can say whether the redesign worked, and sign-off meetings turn into arguments about colours.
A dated site can still be a profitable site. A visually successful redesign stripped of its structured content, on the other hand, often means several months of reduced visibility while Google re-evaluates the new pages. That delay is the main hidden cost of a poorly prepared redesign, and it appears on no quote.
Mistake 1: redesigning without knowing why the old site fails to convert
Our site looks dated and brings us nothing is not a diagnosis. In practice the causes fall into four families: people do not find you (weak search presence and thin content), they find you and leave immediately (unclear offer, slow on mobile), they stay but never get in touch (long form, no visible phone number, no proof of past work), or they do get in touch and nobody calls back, which is a sales process problem rather than a website problem.
Those four families do not require the same budget or the same supplier. Half a day spent reading data you already have usually settles it:
- in Google Analytics: landing pages, share of mobile traffic, where visitors drop off, number of form submissions
- in Search Console: which queries actually bring clicks, average positions, which pages are indexed
- a speed test on a phone over mobile data, not on office wifi
- what your sales team hears: which questions keep coming by phone because the site does not answer them
This is also what answers the question of when to rebuild a website. If the technical foundation still holds, three rewritten pages and a simplified form will produce more, and sooner, than a full rebuild. A redesign earns its budget when the structure itself is blocking you.
Mistake 2: changing URLs with no redirect plan
This is the most common failure and the easiest one to avoid. When a page address changes, say from /it-services.html to /our-services/, the old address must point to the new one through a permanent 301 redirect. Without it, Google and every site that linked to you land on error pages, and the authority built up on those pages is gone.
A serious website SEO migration lives in a spreadsheet, not in a verbal promise: the full list of old URLs (Search Console export, the old sitemap, server logs if you have them), the matching new address for each one, then verification after launch. What to check on switch-over day and during the following week:
- a robots noindex tag inherited from the staging site and left in production, which can remove the whole site from Google within days
- a robots.txt file blocking the media folder or the entire site
- the XML sitemap regenerated and resubmitted in Search Console
- redirect chains (A to B to C) flattened into a single hop
- one canonical version of the site: HTTPS, with or without www, never all four live at once
- page titles and descriptions, frequently overwritten by the new theme defaults
- analytics and conversion tracking reconnected on day one, otherwise you lose measurement exactly when you need it
Keep a full backup of the old site, files and database, for at least three months. That is what lets you recover content deleted by mistake instead of rewriting it.
Mistake 3: budgeting a redesign at first-website prices
Comparing a redesign quote to the price of a brand new site is misleading, because a redesign carries line items a first site does not: an audit of the existing site and a redirect map, reworking or rewriting content already published, data migration (customer accounts, order history, blog posts, media), reconnecting the tools wired into the old site (CMI payment gateway, transactional emails, CRM, Google Business profile), a testing period with the old site still live, and training for whoever will publish afterwards.
Here are rough orders of magnitude to test against the quotes you receive, not catalogue prices. For an eight to fifteen page brochure site redesign, expect roughly 25,000 to 70,000 MAD depending on how much content has to be reworked and how custom the design is. For an ecommerce redesign with catalogue, customer account and order history migration, budgets rarely start below 80,000 MAD and can pass 200,000 MAD once an ERP or an external logistics provider is involved. Website redesign cost depends far less on page count than on the volume of existing content and the number of integrations to bring back online. Project-type benchmarks are set out in our guide to what a professional website costs in Morocco.
On timelines, plan six to ten weeks for a properly scoped brochure site and three to five months for ecommerce with data migration. In most projects the bottleneck is not development, it is internal sign-off on content and visuals.
Mistake 4: treating content and legal notices as an afterthought
Two omissions come up again and again. The first is content. The pages that have been working for you for years, often long and a little clumsily written, are the ones Google learned to show. Rewriting them to feel lighter removes the sentences that ranked. Build an inventory instead: for every existing page, its traffic, its main query, and the decision taken (keep as is, rewrite while preserving the topics, merge, delete). Product PDFs, news archives and project pages belong in that inventory too, because they disappear more often than people expect.
The second omission is legal. A redesign means a new form, often a new cookie banner and usually a new measurement tool, so you are changing how you collect personal data. That calls for up-to-date legal notices (company name, RC, ICE, a real address), a privacy policy stating purpose and retention period, cookie consent that genuinely works, and compliance with Law 09-08 for your processing activities. The exact rules and the cases requiring a declaration should be checked on the CNDP website, and we go through them point by point in our article on legal notices and website CNDP compliance. The most mundane error of all: copying the old legal page across unchanged, with an address and a manager that have since changed.
Mistake 5: choosing a supplier on the design alone
An attractive mockup shown for free during the sales process is a commercial argument, not a method. The real signal is elsewhere: what does the supplier ask you before pricing? Anyone who has run redesigns will want your Analytics and Search Console access, your ten best pages, who will write the content, where the site is hosted today, who owns the domain, and which tools are connected to the current site. A supplier who asks none of that is pricing a new site and will bill the surprises as change orders.
A redesign specification does not need to run to forty pages. Five to eight will do: the current situation with its numbers, a measurable objective, the target site structure, the list of pages and features, the constraints (hosting, compliance, brand identity), the content and URL migration plan, and how acceptance testing will work. That document is what makes two quotes comparable. The structure is laid out in our guide to writing an IT RFP in Morocco.
Website redesign Morocco: what a quote must contain
A readable redesign quote runs two to four pages and names the following explicitly. If one is missing, ask about it in writing before you sign.
- scope page by page, including how many page templates will be designed
- the redirect map: who produces it, who tests it, who fixes it after launch
- content migration: who writes, how many pages, who supplies photography
- data migration for ecommerce: customers, orders, stock, reviews, plus bringing payment and delivery back online (the platform choice changes this line considerably, as covered in our comparison of ecommerce platforms for Moroccan retailers)
- measurable technical targets: mobile performance score, browser support, baseline accessibility
- compliance: legal notices, privacy policy, consent management
- hosting, backups, SSL, and who holds the registrar credentials
- tracking reconfiguration: Analytics, Search Console, conversion goals
- acceptance testing and acceptance criteria, with a go-live date and a rollback plan
- ownership of code and accounts on delivery, the contractual defect-correction period, and the post-launch maintenance agreement with its price
Be wary of one-page quotes with a single lump sum, unlimited website packages, and any supplier who mentions neither redirects nor backups. Those are not technical details, they are the lines that decide whether your traffic survives launch day.
The checklist before you go out to tender
- Export twelve months of Analytics and Search Console data and store it separately.
- List your thirty best pages by traffic and by conversions.
- Inventory every form, automated email and tool connected to the site.
- Check the WHOIS record to confirm the domain is in your company name, and recover access if it is not.
- Write the redesign objective in one sentence, with a number and a deadline.
- Agree an internal budget range before proposals arrive.
- Request two or three quotes against the same written specification, never against a verbal brief.
Frequently asked questions
Should we rebuild everything or improve page by page?
If the CMS is still maintained, the site renders properly on mobile and speed is acceptable, a set of targeted improvements (offer page, form, three content pages) costs far less and shows results within weeks. A full rebuild becomes the right call when the theme or CMS is no longer updated, when nobody has access to the code, or when the site structure prevents you from adding what the business needs.
How long does a website redesign take in Morocco?
Six to ten weeks for a scoped brochure site, three to five months for ecommerce with data migration and integrations. Overruns almost always come from content waiting for approval, not from development.
Will we lose our search rankings during the redesign?
A dip of a few weeks is common even with a clean migration, because Google has to recrawl the whole site. What makes the loss permanent is missing redirects, deleting pages that were bringing traffic, or an indexing block left in place. Where you can, keep the existing URLs: it is the best protection available and it costs nothing.
Who should own the domain name and the hosting?
Your company, with the registrar and hosting credentials in your hands. A supplier can manage those accounts technically, but they must be registered in your name, and the handover of credentials belongs in the quote alongside delivery of the source code.
At Arrowlancer we run brochure and ecommerce redesigns in this order: audit of the existing site, written specification, redirect plan, compliance work, then design and build. That sits inside our websites and web applications service line. If you already have quotes on your desk and you are unsure what they actually cover, get in touch: a scope review takes under an hour and saves a round of change orders.