Rebuild the site without throwing away what it already earns.

Most breeders come to a redesign because of how the site looks. Usually, looks turn out to be the least important thing wrong with it, and the most dangerous part of the project is the part nobody mentions in the quote.

What to keep

Before anything is drawn, work out what the current site is already doing for you. Usually there's more than the owner thinks.

• The addresses. Any page that ranks, gets linked to, or appears on a registry listing is an asset attached to its address, not to its design.
• The writing that took you a weekend. The FAQ answers, the health testing explanations, the description of how your waitlist works. Those are the parts buyers read and the parts nobody wants to rewrite.
• The photographs. A decade of litter photographs isn't replaceable and is often the best thing on the site.
• Anything you've kept up to date. If your availability page has been kept up, that habit is worth more than the design.

What to rebuild

The parts Wix or Squarespace wouldn't let you reach, which is most of what decides whether you're found: the hidden top of every page, the facts behind it that machines read, the way pages link to each other, how photographs are sized and served, and whether availability can update itself instead of needing five edits.

And the pages that were never written. When we read twenty-three live breeder sites, sixteen had no FAQ, eleven had nothing explaining what happens between the first email and going home, and only three let a buyer read the contract before committing. A redesign that only moves the furniture leaves all of that missing.

Why redesigns lose rankings, and how not to

A search engine doesn't rank your website. It ranks each address on it. Move the content to new addresses without telling anything where the old ones went, and every page has to be found and judged again while the old links point at nothing.

What it costs against a new build

The same, and anybody telling you a redesign is cheaper is either reusing a template or planning to skip the map. The content still has to be moved, the addresses still have to be handled, and the missing pages still have to be written.

Ours are $2,200, $3,400 and $4,800 with a care plan from $150 a month, published on the prices page. What a redesign does save is the intake: you already know what your program is and what you want to say, which is the part that usually slows the start.

When not to

If the site loads quickly, says who you are and where, publishes a price, and you can update it yourself, you don't have a design problem. You have a few unwritten pages, and that's a much smaller bill.

We would rather tell you that than take the project.

Questions

Will a redesign hurt my Google rankings?

It can, and the reason is always the same: the addresses changed and nothing told search engines where the pages went. Keep the addresses or map every one of them and the risk is small.

How much does a breeder website redesign cost?

The same as a build, because it's one. Ours are $2,200, $3,400 and $4,800. A redesign isn't cheaper than a new site unless somebody is reusing a template and calling it bespoke.

Can I keep my photographs?

Yes, and you should. They come across resized properly, which usually makes a real difference to how fast the site loads.

What if I only hate the home page?

Rebuilding one page is a smaller job, and we would rather do that than sell you a project you don't need.

How long does it take?

Up to two weeks, whatever the number of pages. Your current site stays up the whole time and the switch happens in an afternoon.