A website that is eight years old has something a new one does not: it is known. Search engines have recorded its addresses, customers have bookmarked individual pages, trade directories and review profiles link to it, and quotes sent out over the past years carry its link. This accumulated standing is what most often gets lost in a relaunch – not because of the new look, but because old addresses point nowhere once the switch is made. This article sorts out the decision for a landscaping business: when a relaunch pays off and when ongoing upkeep is enough, what carries over from the old site and what deserves replacing, how redirects for old addresses are built properly, and what timeframe to plan for. If you are looking for the relaunch service itself, you will find it there – this piece is about the decision and the places where things go wrong.
Key takeaways
- A relaunch is justified when the substance no longer holds: no usability on a phone, no dedicated address per trade and town, no way to make changes without outside help.
- Dated text, missing references and former contacts are maintenance work of hours to days and on their own do not justify rebuilding the entire site.
- Loss of visibility in a relaunch comes almost entirely from one place: old addresses that end on an error page after the switch instead of a permanent redirect to a matching target.
- A complete address list is compiled before the build from three sources: the server access logs, the existing sitemap and every inbound link from directories, profiles and quotes.
- Roughly six weeks from order to switch-over are realistic, followed by about twelve weeks of monitoring – which is why the move belongs between November and February, not into the season.
When a relaunch is due and when upkeep is enough
The wish for a new website rarely comes from a measurement. It comes when a customer says on the phone that they could not find any prices, when an applicant asks whether the firm still takes on apprentices, or when there is time in January and the site suddenly looks dated while clicking through it. Those are signals worth taking seriously, but they do not answer the decisive question: does the problem lie in the content or in the substance? That distinction determines whether an afternoon of work will do or whether a project of several weeks is ahead.
Content problems can be maintained away. Dated text, missing references, a service offered for two years that appears nowhere, a contact person who has left the firm, opening hours from before the last change – all of that is hours to days of work. If the site is properly usable on a phone, loads promptly, can be edited without outside help and the form reliably reaches the inbox, a relaunch is the expensive answer to a cheap question. Ongoing maintenance is then the more economical route, and the budget stays free for photos, town pages or job ads.
Problems of substance cannot be maintained away. That includes a site that forces you to zoom on a phone even though most enquiries arise there in the evening (project experience). It includes a structure in which paving, tree care, grounds maintenance and winter services all sit on a single services page, so none of the trades has an address of its own for a search result to point at. It includes a building system that no longer receives updates. And it includes the most awkward case of all: nobody in the firm has access to the files, the domain settings or the mailbox the form sends to.
| Observation in the firm | Upkeep is enough | A relaunch is the answer |
|---|---|---|
| Text and references are dated | Update content, add images | only if the structure is missing too |
| Customer cannot find a service | Add the service as its own section | if no trade has a page of its own |
| Handling on a phone | Individual elements can be adjusted | if zooming is required to operate it |
| Changes take weeks | Clarify access, agree a process | if only the former developer can edit |
| Enquiries do not arrive | Shorten the form, show the phone number | if the form technically fails to deliver |
| The site loads slowly | Resize images, remove ballast | if the building system itself is the brake |
What carries over and what gets replaced
A relaunch is not a start from zero, it is a move. Anyone moving house sorts things first: what holds value that cannot simply be bought again, and what will be replaced at the new address anyway? That sorting happens before the first draft, not after it. Skip it and the new site is built from whatever happens to be at hand, while several years of accumulated standing stay behind.
Everything that took time and cannot be reproduced at will carries over. The addresses of the existing pages belong in that group, because recognition is attached to them. Text containing genuine expertise – the explanation of a sub-base, the description of a maintenance cut, the list of what a fixed price includes – belongs there too, even if it gets rewritten for style. Site photos from several years belong there, because they cannot be staged again in a week. And reviews together with directory entries belong there, because they sit on profiles that survive the move unharmed as long as the stored web address is updated.
Carry over: addresses
Every reachable address of the old site is recorded and given a target in the new structure. This list is the single most important document of the whole project and is written before the build.
Carry over: expert text
Sections with real expertise on sub-bases, drainage, cutting seasons or maintenance intervals are taken over and reworked rather than invented again.
Carry over: image stock
Site photos, before-and-after pairs and detail shots from several seasons are the stock that carries a landscaping site. They are secured before anything is switched off.
Replace: structure
One catch-all services page is replaced by one page per trade and per town. Only then do addresses exist for a search result to point at in the first place.
Replace: handling
Menu, type sizes, tap targets and phone number are built for one-handed use in the evening. This is where effort and enquiry numbers actually meet.
Replace: the form path
The enquiry form is rebuilt, with required fields for town, trade and order of magnitude, with image upload and with a delivery path that has been tested inside the firm.
Images deserve a second look. The good shots often are not on the website at all but on the site managers' phones and in the office archive, while the old site has illustrated every service with the same four motifs for years. A relaunch is the right occasion to gather and sort that stock once – how it works without a photo studio is covered in our article on photos for your website. Whatever does not appear in the stocktaking will not appear on the new site either.
The stocktaking before the first draft
Stocktaking is the least spectacular and at the same time the most consequential part of a relaunch. It answers three questions: which addresses exist today, who holds access to which component, and which content is actually being viewed? The third question can only be answered with figures collected before the switch – afterwards the yardstick is gone. If you do not know which ten pages drew the most views, you cannot tell after the launch whether anything was lost.
A firm such as Viktor Waldbauer Garten- und Landschaftsbau in Nordstemmen covers sand-set slabs, terraces, cisterns and complete garden installations. Those are four subjects that have to appear separately in the stocktaking if they are to be found separately later. If the old site squeezes them into one paragraph, that is exactly where a relaunch delivers more than any amount of upkeep: one paragraph becomes four pages, each with its own address, its own images and its own enquiry path.
- Pull a complete address list: from the server access logs, from the existing sitemap and from every known inbound link
- Record views per page for the last twelve months so a comparison is possible after the launch
- Clarify access: domain settings, server login, building system, the form's mailbox, review and directory profiles
- Secure every file that is not part of the page structure: full-size images, price sheets, information sheets, application documents
- Mark the text passages with real expertise that will be taken over and reworked rather than written from scratch
- Collect external links: directories, association profiles, supplier pages, review profiles, printed material carrying the web address
- Review the legal pages: legal notice, privacy policy and consent in the form are carried into the new structure and reviewed professionally case by case
- Decide which pages disappear without replacement – and determine the closest matching target for each of them
That last line is easily overlooked. Pages disappear in every relaunch, and that is normal: a campaign from 2019, a service the firm no longer offers, three news items without substance. What matters is not whether they go but where their address points from now on. A deleted page without a target is an error page, and an error page is the one exit a visitor does not come back from.
Redirects: this is where visibility is lost
When a relaunch costs visibility, it almost always happens here. The new site is better built, faster and more complete – and views still drop, because hundreds of old addresses point nowhere. Search engines find nothing there any more, directory entries lead to an error page, and the customer who bookmarked the terrace page two years ago ends up with nothing. The value built up over years is attached not to the text but to the address the text was reachable under.
The remedy is the permanent redirect. Technically that is a response with status code 301: this address has moved permanently, and the new target is this. Search engines transfer the accumulated standing to the new address, and visitors notice nothing of the detour. Status code 302, by contrast, means only a temporary redirect and is not used for a relaunch, because the old address remains the authoritative one. That single digit is the difference between a move and a fresh start.
The mapping is written as a table, row by row, and is finished before the switch. Every old address gets exactly one target, and that target is the closest matching new page – not the home page by default. A blanket redirect to the home page is convenient and looks harmless from inside the firm, but from a search engine's point of view it is barely distinguishable from an error page. Sending the old tree care address to the home page throws away that page's standing.
old_address;new_address;status;note
/index.php;/;301;home page
/leistungen.html;/services/;301;overview page stays
/leistungen.html#pflaster;/services/paving/;301;own trade
/leistungen.html#baumpflege;/services/tree-care/;301;own trade
/leistungen.html#winterdienst;/services/winter-services/;301;own trade
/referenzen.php?id=12;/references/terrace-nordstemmen/;301;project carried over
/aktion-fruehjahr-2019.html;/services/grounds-maintenance/;301;campaign gone, topic fits
/team.html;/about/;301;merged
/kontakt.html;/contact/;301;new form
/bilder/terrasse-gross.jpg;/img/references/terrace-01.jpg;301;image address in directories
/preisliste-2018.pdf;/pricing/;301;PDF gone, content on pageThree rules turn such a table into a redirect setup that holds. First: no chains. If A points to B and B points to C, then A is set directly to C, otherwise effect is lost at every hop and loading time grows. Second: redirect not only pages but files – images, information sheets and price sheets from earlier years sit in directories and in quotes already sent out. Third: the list is checked row by row after the switch, not by sampling. How local visibility is rebuilt and held after the move is covered in the article on local visibility in landscaping.
Do not switch off the old site straight away
The most common mistakes during the move
Relaunch mistakes are remarkably uniform. They rarely come from ignorance but from time pressure on the day of the switch: the date is fixed, the site is ready, the list is not quite. What gets decided in half an hour then costs months afterwards. The list below contains the points that show up most often in practice.
A relaunch does not lose visibility on the day of the switch but in the weeks before it, when nobody finished the address list.
- A blanket redirect of all old addresses to the home page instead of to matching targets
- The blocking instruction from the test phase stays active, leaving the new site invisible to search engines
- Redirect chains across two or three hops, created by several moves one after another
- The form was designed but never tested with a real enquiry sent from inside the firm
- Images and price sheets referenced in old quotes were not redirected and end on an error page
- Directory and review profiles still link to old subpages because nobody updates them
- Internal links in the text still point at old addresses and run through a redirect for no reason
- The move falls into March, when every lost enquiry costs revenue straight away
The last point is not a technical one, but it is the most expensive. In landscape gardening a considerable share of the year's business is decided between March and June. A move in that period hits exactly the window in which a short-term dip in visibility feeds directly into the order book. The suitable period runs from November to February: enquiries are calmer, there is time in the firm for choosing images and agreeing text, and by the start of the season the redirects are checked and the new structure is recorded.
Note two figures before the switch
Process and duration of a relaunch
A relaunch for a landscaping firm with a dozen or so pages takes roughly six weeks from order to switch-over (project experience). More extensive sites with dedicated pages per trade and per town, a portfolio gallery and a careers section take longer. The time is distributed differently from what most people expect: the build itself is the shorter part, while stocktaking and content take the longer stretches – choosing photos, agreeing text, settling price information.
The decisive factor for the schedule is therefore not the agency but the response from the firm. A draft text that lies on a desk for two weeks pushes the entire plan back by two weeks. It helps to name one person in the firm who decides and to set fixed appointments for review – two hours in the calendar achieve more here than any acceleration elsewhere.
Week 1: stocktaking
Pull the address list from logs and sitemap, secure twelve months of view figures, clarify access, back up images and files completely. By the end of this week it is settled what carries over and what gets replaced.
Week 1 to 2: structure and mapping
The new page structure is defined: one page per trade, one page per town served, plus references, careers and contact. In parallel the mapping table is written, giving every old address its new target.
Week 2 to 5: build and content
Building the pages, working in the text, selecting and preparing the images, setting up the enquiry form with required fields and image upload. Legal pages are carried over and brought up to date.
Week 5: acceptance in the firm
A run-through on the phone and on a computer, test enquiries through the form sent from inside the firm, checks of phone numbers, opening hours and service area. Only once a test enquiry demonstrably lands in the right mailbox is the date confirmed.
Week 6: switch-over
The domain points to the new site, all redirects go live, the blocking instruction from the test phase is removed, the new sitemap is submitted. The date sits on a weekday morning, not on a Friday evening.
Week 6 to 18: monitoring
Error pages are reviewed weekly and missing targets added, directory and review profiles are set to the new addresses, views and enquiries are held against the baseline figures.
The relaunch is not finished once the switch is done. The weeks that follow decide whether the redirects take hold and whether addresses are missing that nobody thought of beforehand. That follow-up work is manageable, but it has to happen – within the first three months, not next winter.
The first weeks after the switch
In the first days after the move the figures fluctuate. Search engines need time to record the new addresses and evaluate the redirects; a drop in views over the first two to three weeks is usual and no cause for concern yet. There is cause for concern if no recovery is visible after six to eight weeks, or if the error page report keeps showing addresses that are missing from the mapping table.
In practice that means going through the list of not-found addresses once a week and either redirecting each entry or deliberately confirming it as retired. After the first week this check rarely takes longer than a quarter of an hour, and it is the single most effective measure after the launch.
The follow-up also covers what lies outside your own site. Directory entries, the business profile, association pages, supplier listings and review profiles frequently carry old subpages as their link. Those entries do not update themselves. An hour of going through them in the month after the move clears most of it and means the redirects do not have to do permanently what a corrected link does better.
What the relaunch costs and what waiting costs
For a landscaping business a new website starts at 1,490 euros net (own price list); more extensive sites with dedicated pages per trade, town pages and a portfolio gallery start at 2,900 euros net (own price list). On top come ongoing maintenance and hosting from 39 euros per month (own price list) and, if the image stock is to be prepared, photo editing from 290 euros (own price list). The full breakdown is on the pricing page. The effort for stocktaking and redirects is not an extra item but part of the move.
Against that stands the question of what waiting costs. It cannot be presented as an invoice, but it can be narrowed down: how many calls last year began with a question that could have been answered on the website? How many enquiries came from towns that have no page of their own? How often was an application never sent because the careers section consists of a PDF from 2021? Those figures exist in the firm, they are simply written down nowhere.
A relaunch is a winter project