Developer Genome
One page → a ten-page bilingual site built to satisfy a payments underwriter.
- Web
- Hand-built
- EN + ES
- SEO
London fintech studio · ~8-request first load · 0 third-party calls · WCAG AA
Website redesign that keeps the SEO you already have.
Most redesigns quietly throw away the one asset the old site had actually earned. This one carries it across.
Start a project Book a 15-min intro call
A rebuild is the riskiest thing you can do to a site that already works. Not because the design is hard — because a site is a set of addresses that other people have written down, and a redesign changes all of them at once. Search engines, old emails, someone's bookmarks, a supplier's directory listing: they all point at the old shape.
Handled, that costs you nothing. Unhandled, you lose ground you spent years earning, and the new site gets blamed for it.
| What changes | What goes wrong when nobody plans it | The rule |
|---|---|---|
| Addresses | Old URLs stop resolving. Every link pointing at them — from a search result, from another company's site — lands on a 404. | every URL redirected |
| Titles & descriptions | Rewritten from scratch by whoever builds the new page, so the wording a page was found for quietly disappears. | carried across |
| Content | Pages that were doing real work get cut for looking dated. The ones that earn traffic are rarely the ones that look best. | audited, not guessed |
| Internal links | The pages you most want found lose the links that used to point at them, and drop out of sight from the inside. | mapped before the cut |
| The sitemap | Search engines keep crawling a map of a site that no longer exists, and take weeks to notice. | rebuilt, resubmitted |
None of this is exotic. It is just work that has to happen before the new design is signed off, not after it is live.
// how it carries across
Five steps, in this order.
The order matters more than any single step. Every one of these happens before the old site is switched off.
01
Inventory every address
Before anything is designed. Every URL the current site answers on, listed — including the ones nobody remembers publishing.
02
Write the redirect map
Each old address points at its closest new equivalent. One hop, never a chain, and never a lazy catch-all to the homepage — that reads as a dead page to a search engine and as a shrug to a person.
03
Move the metadata with the page
Titles, descriptions and canonicals travel with the content they belong to. Where the wording is genuinely weak it gets improved on purpose, not replaced by accident.
04
Rebuild the sitemap and robots
Generated from the structure that actually shipped, and submitted the day it goes live rather than the week after.
05
Watch it settle
The fortnight after launch is when a missed redirect shows itself. That is when someone should be looking, and it is included rather than quoted separately.
Not sure how
bad the risk is?
Talk it through
bad the risk is?
// what the new site inherits
Built so the SEO is structural.
The reason a rebuild here does not need an SEO retrofit afterwards is that there is nothing to retrofit. It is static, hand-authored HTML — the crawler and the visitor are served the identical thing.
- Every word is in the HTML. No client-side rendering to wait on, so nothing depends on a crawler executing your JavaScript correctly.
- Per-page title, description, canonical, Open Graph and JSON-LD. Written per page, not generated from a pattern.
- Sitemap and robots from the structure. Not a plugin's guess at what your site contains.
- Fast because there is nothing to load. No framework, no build step, self-hosted fonts, zero third-party calls.
- You own the code outright. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript any developer can pick up — no builder to be locked into, and no licence to keep paying.
// fit
Is this you?
The situations this is actually built for. If two or three of these land, we should talk.
→
The site undersells the business
- the work is serious and the site does not say so
- a partner, a client or an underwriter will look you up first
- you find yourself explaining it away in meetings
→
You cannot get at it
- built on a builder you cannot export from
- the agency that made it has stopped replying
- a small copy change needs a purchase order
→
You have something to lose
- pages that bring in enquiries today
- years of accumulated links pointing at old URLs
- a previous redesign that already cost you traffic
And when it is the wrong call: if the site is honestly fine and the enquiries still are not coming, a redesign is an expensive way to avoid the real question. That is usually positioning, pricing, or that nobody knows the site exists — and none of the three is fixed by new typography. If that is what I find, I will say so, and you will not have spent anything to hear it.
// two rebuilds, in full
Both are client engagements, both are written up end to end — the brief, the build, and what was actually delivered.
CityRoamer
An ageing builder template → twelve hand-built pages they own outright.
- Web
- Hand-built
- Brand
- Handover
Riga IT consultancy, senior since 2016 · 7 self-hosted fonts · 0 third-party calls
The same SEO-from-the-stack approach on a build of my own: a marketing site taken from no name to nine indexed pages inside a day.
“Ed rebuilt the site start to finish and handled the whole thing without fuss. Clean, fast, properly thought through — every page holds together and it works the way it should. What stood out was the handoff: a full interactive walkthrough of everything that was done, not the usual two-line email. Done well, done quickly. No complaints.”
“The new site looks and feels far more professional than the old one — clean design, nice touches throughout, and everything just works. Took care of it end to end and the quality shows. Very happy with it.”
// straight answers
The questions I actually get.
Q
Will I lose my rankings?
That risk is real, and it comes from one thing more than anything else: addresses changing with nothing pointing the old ones at the new. The five steps above exist to remove it. What I will not do is quote you a percentage — nobody who has not seen your Search Console can, and a redesign pitch with a traffic graph on it is usually selling the graph.
Q
How long does it take?
Pace is set by your feedback more than by the build. Clients who turn comments around the same day go live in days rather than weeks. You get one fixed number for scope and timeline before anything starts.
Q
Do I own it afterwards?
Yes, outright — plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no framework and no builder account. If you never speak to me again it keeps working, and any developer can pick it up.
Q
Can you do part of it?
Often the honest answer is yes. A redirect map and a metadata carry-over for a rebuild someone else is doing is a small, well-defined piece of work, and I would rather do that than sell you a rebuild you do not need.
Q
What happens to my content?
Nothing is deleted on the grounds of looking dated. Pages come across, get merged, or get cut deliberately — and anything cut still gets a redirect, because someone out there has the link.
Q
Who actually does the work?
I do, start to finish. There is no account manager between you and the person building it, and nothing is passed to a junior once the contract is signed. That is the whole model — more on how I work.
Send me the address of the site you are thinking about replacing. I will tell you what is worth keeping.
As a guide, a credibility rebuild starts around €3,500 and a straight website build around €2,000. Every project is priced on its own complexity and the work actually in it. See the offers
Remote across the EU and UK, in English. Reply within one business day.
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Also on offer: custom software · working with London firms