A restaurant owner decides to redo his website. While the work is underway, his old homepage is replaced by a plain visual: "Site being redesigned, thank you for your patience." Three weeks later, he notices that lunch reservations have dropped and that two regulars have asked him whether he had closed down. The page showed no phone number, no address, no opening hours. To a visitor in a hurry, a frozen website looks like a business that has stopped trading.
This mistake is common because it seems logical: you don't want to show a building site. Except that an invisible building site where people can still reach you always beats a shuttered storefront.
First rule: don't take your site down
In the vast majority of redesigns, there is no technical reason to take the old site offline. The new site is built elsewhere, on a protected working address, and you switch over the day it's ready. The old one keeps running, keeps receiving calls, keeps capturing searches for your name.
An under construction page should only be considered in two specific situations:
- Your old site is so degraded that it is actively working against you (wrong content, a hack, outdated prices, a homepage broken on mobile).
- You had no site at all and you're preparing a launch.
Outside of those cases, leaving what you have online is almost always the right call. Often all it takes is fixing two or three critical pieces of information on the old site while the work goes on: opening hours, prices that have changed, phone number. Those are a few minutes of touch-ups, not a redesign.
If you're unsure about the scope of the project and what needs to stay accessible, the approach to starting a redesign without breaking everything helps you sort it out.
If you really do need an under construction page
When it's unavoidable, that page becomes your website. It has to do the job of a minimal storefront, not announce an inconvenience. A page like this fits on one screen and includes:
- The business name, the logo and one sentence saying what you do and who you do it for.
- The phone number, tappable on mobile, front and center.
- The email address or a short form.
- The street address and opening hours if you welcome customers in person.
- Links to your social profiles and your Google listing, which stay active.
- An approximate return date, worded cautiously ("new site live sometime in March").
- One or two real photos of your business, not a hard hat stock image.
What to avoid: the countdown timer that expires with nothing changing, the complete absence of any way to get in touch, and repeated apologies. Nobody holds it against you for redoing your website. What's annoying is not knowing how to reach you.
One detail that often gets overlooked: check that this page displays properly on a phone. That's where most of your visitors will see it, and a transition page that's badly framed on mobile makes the business look abandoned.
The right technical setting
Tell your provider not to use a permanent maintenance code. If the site has to be temporarily unavailable, the server should return a temporary maintenance status, not a permanent error. That distinction stops search engines from treating your pages as deleted. Also ask for the development environment to be blocked from indexing, so an unfinished version of your future site doesn't start showing up in Google.
What you tell your existing customers
Your current customers don't need a press release. They need to know that nothing changes for them during this period.
A short message is enough, sent by email or posted on your social page:
"We're rebuilding our website, it will be live in a few weeks. Nothing changes on our end: orders, quotes and appointments work as usual at 0X XX XX XX XX."
Three points to cover, always the same ones: what's happening, what isn't changing, how to reach you. No need to detail the technology or the project stages, that only interests you and your provider.
If you have a B2B client base with regular contacts, let them know individually. A salesperson sending a link to a dead page in the middle of a negotiation is an awkward moment, and it's solved with a ten-line email sent ahead of time.
The channels not to forget
Your website isn't the only place people look for you. While the work is underway, update:
- Your Google listing, with accurate hours and phone number.
- Your email signatures, if the link points to a page that's about to disappear.
- Your social profiles, where the link in bio needs to lead somewhere useful.
- Your printed QR codes, menus, flyers and vehicle graphics, if they point to pages whose address is going to change.
That last point takes planning: if a page printed on a thousand business cards is going to change URL, tell your provider so a redirect is in place on switchover day.
Turning the wait into an asset
A redesign is a story worth telling. Not a technical topic, a signal that you're investing. You're improving your tools because your business is growing.
A few simple ways to talk about it without heavy-handed self-promotion:
- Post a photo of the new logo or of a page in progress, with one sentence about what it will change for the customer (easier booking, a browsable catalog, online quotes).
- Announce a new feature arriving with the site: online payment, appointment booking, a pricing section.
- Send the link as a preview to your best customers a few days before launch. They feel involved and they'll flag typos for you.
If your redesign goes along with a change in positioning or identity, the story tells itself even better. This is the moment to explain why you're changing, as covered in the article on redesigning after a repositioning.
One word of caution: don't promise a public date until the project is in its final phase. Announcing "new site on the first of the month" and then slipping by three weeks produces the opposite of the effect you were after.
Switchover day and the week that follows
Going live is the moment when customers will tell you what's wrong. You may as well be ready.
Before you switch over, check these points with your provider:
- The old addresses redirect to the equivalent new pages.
- The contact form actually lands in your inbox, tested from a phone and from a computer.
- The phone number is tappable on mobile.
- Legal information, opening hours and prices are up to date.
- The security certificate is active on every page.
- The old pages that were bringing you visits still exist in one form or another.
That last point deserves attention: a poorly prepared redesign can wipe out pages that had been generating traffic for years. The subject is covered in detail in the article on what to do with old SEO pages during a redesign.
In the days that follow, actively ask for feedback. Three or four customers you trust, a simple message: "we've put the new site live, can you tell me if anything looks off?" The most common problems always surface this way: a broken link, a typo on a service page, a photo that doesn't load on an old phone.
Also keep an eye on your calls and incoming inquiries for two or three weeks. A sudden drop is almost always the sign of a technical problem, not a design problem. A form that stops sending anything can go unnoticed for a very long time if nobody tests it, which makes designing a reliable contact form all the more important.
Conclusion
The best message to get across during a redesign is the absence of any interruption. Your customer should never have to wonder whether you're still in business, or spend two minutes hunting for your number. Everything else, the design, the structure, the new features, gets discovered on launch day.
If you're preparing a project like this, first define how your site will stay reachable, and only then the mockups. It's the part of the project that costs the least and protects your revenue the most. At tomcom, redesigns of existing sites are built alongside the old site, which stays online until switchover, and you can even request a free preview to see what your new site would look like before committing.
To see how these redesigns turn out in practice, take a look at a few recent projects.
