There's an old saying that the cobbler's children have no shoes. For a while, that was us. We spend our days designing websites and getting businesses found on Google, while our own site had quietly grown the way most do: a page added here, a section bolted on there, until it said a lot without saying much.
On 21 October we launched its replacement, built from scratch. Being our own client turned out to be a useful test of whether we practise what we preach. Here's what we learned.
Stop answering questions nobody asked
The first thing we did was throw out the old structure and start from the questions people ask us before they book. They barely change: how much will it cost, how long will it take, will it show up on Google, do I own it once it's done, and will you look after it afterwards?
Our old site answered plenty of things, just not those, at least not quickly. The new one is built around them. At launch that meant one clear page for each of our two main services, websites and SEO, with pages for hosting and local SEO added since. Every page has one job.
It sounds obvious. It's also the step almost everyone skips, because it's far more fun to start with how a site should look.
Show your workings
When a potential client lands on an agency's site, they're asking one thing: have you done this before, and did it work? So the new site puts the answer front and centre.
There are now 18 case studies, spanning the public sector, engineering, retail, hospitality, health and more, and a page for each of the 12 sectors we work in, from property and security to transport and the arts. Several case studies go further and show clients' real Google Search Console figures. One online shop we built and look after has had five times more clicks from Google than in the same months a year earlier.
Putting real numbers on a public page is a bit nerve-racking. It's also far more convincing than any adjective we could write about ourselves.
Drop the words that don't fit
Our old site leaned heavily on the word "affordable". It was there for search reasons, and it didn't describe us at all.
Our focus is on delivering a great, bespoke service, where no two projects are the same. Every site is designed around the business it's for, its customers and what it needs to do. "Affordable" told people to judge us on price before they'd seen any of that, so it went, even though it meant giving up a couple of searches that used to bring in visits.
Price still matters, of course, so rather than hide it we wrote a plain-English guide to what a website really costs, including where our own projects typically start. Being upfront beats being cheap.
Don't let Google forget you
The biggest risk in any rebuild is losing your place on Google. A new site starts with none of the old one's history unless you deliberately carry it across.
The page Google showed most on our old site was an old SEO packages page: more than 679,000 appearances in search over 16 months. Losing that without a redirect wasn't an option. So before launch we built a redirect map from Search Console, sending every old address with search history to the new page that answers the same question.
It nearly went wrong in a way we hadn't expected. One rule carried over from the old site would have bounced our new SEO page back and forth between two addresses until it failed to load at all. We caught it because we wrote every redirect fresh instead of copying the old list across. On launch day we checked 253 addresses, old and new, one by one.
Fast on a phone, not just on a big screen
A website that looks great on a designer's monitor can still be slow on a phone over a patchy connection, which is how plenty of people will see it first. After launch we made sure images further down each page only load when someone scrolls to them. On our homepage, in testing, that cut what a phone downloads before you scroll from 825KB to 115KB.
Nobody will ever compliment you on that. They'll just stay.
A Saturday night surprise
It's too early to judge rankings properly; we'll compare results against our pre-launch baseline once the site has had eight weeks to settle. But one early moment stood out.
Three days after launch, at 9.17 on a Saturday night, someone arrived on our homepage from ChatGPT. They looked at our websites page and our work, went to the contact page and sent an enquiry, all in about two minutes. Google isn't the only place people look for a business any more, and clear pages that answer real questions now get picked up by AI search too.
Five things worth stealing
If you're planning a rebuild, here's what we'd do again:
- Write down the questions customers ask before they buy, and answer every one plainly.
- Put your best work and real results where nobody can miss them.
- Cut any word that doesn't describe how you actually work.
- Map every old address with search history before launch, and test them all on the day.
- Check every page on a phone over a slow connection before you call it finished.
We're based at Campfield on Lower Byrom Street and always up for talking websites and SEO with other Manchester Digital members. Come and have a look around the new site at The Social Bay.
