The short answer
Sometimes. A redesign brings in more inquiries when it fixes what was stopping people: they couldn’t tell what you do, the page was slow, it was hard to use on a phone, or the next step was buried. A new look on its own rarely does it.
No independent study measures what a typical redesign does for a typical business. The numbers you’ll see quoted come from vendors and case studies. Here’s what they actually show, and what decides which way yours goes.
What does the evidence actually show?
- Speed alone, tested properly. Vodafone ran an A/B test on one page, changing only its loading speed. A 31% faster load “led to 8% more sales.”1 That’s the cleanest evidence there is, from one large company.
- A full redesign, measured by the vendor. Revamp, which sells redesigns, split traffic between old and new sites at 22 service businesses. Conversion rose from 3.18% to 3.61%, which works out to “approximately four additional recorded outcomes per 1,000 visitors.” Revamp ran and funded the study itself.2
- A simpler next step. HubSpot says its redesign “doubled the conversion rate” of its own site. The gain came from a simpler sign-up flow and writing the words before the design, not from new visuals.3
The pattern across all three: the wins came from speed, clarity and fewer steps. Even in Revamp’s study, form errors fell by more than half on the new sites.2
Why do some redesigns make things worse?
Nielsen Norman Group, the long-running usability research firm, names the reason behind many redesigns: “I’m bored with it.” Their advice is to make incremental changes “and only resort to a complete redesign if the data tells you to do so.”4
Redesigns can go backwards. After Marks & Spencer relaunched its website in 2014, its online sales fell 8.1% in the following quarter.5 And any redesign that changes page addresses can lose search traffic. Google says to “expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move,” to redirect each old page to its true replacement, and to keep those redirects “generally at least 1 year.”6
Does it matter if people can tell what you do in seconds?
Yes, more than anything visual. Research from Nielsen Norman Group found people often leave a page in 10 to 20 seconds, and “to gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.”7 Their homepage guidance is blunt: “Don’t make people guess.”8
For a high-ticket business, that means the first screen should say who you serve, what you do for them, and what to do next, in words a client would use.
How much does speed really change?
A Google-commissioned study by Deloitte watched 37 large brand sites and found that a 0.1-second mobile speed improvement went with 8.4% more retail conversions.9 It was observational, the sites were big brands, and the speed gain had to hold across every page of the visit, so don’t treat it as a promise.
Google’s own targets are a useful bar. A page’s main content should appear within 2.5 seconds, it should respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and it shouldn’t jump around as it loads.10 Google uses these in ranking, but says good scores don’t “guarantee that your pages will rank at the top.”11
Does looking good still matter, then?
It does, as part of trust. A 2006 study found people rate a page’s visual appeal in as little as 50 milliseconds.12 In a 2002 Stanford study, the site’s “design look” came up in 46.1% of people’s comments about whether a site was credible.13 Nielsen Norman Group adds that real photos of your work and people build trust, while generic stock photos are “more likely to be considered filler.”14
But Stanford’s researchers put it well: “Beautiful graphic design will not salvage a poorly functioning Web site.”15
Why does the next step matter so much?
Because it’s where interest turns into an inquiry, and it’s easy to break without noticing. HubSpot found that flows with fewer steps converted at “2 to 3 times higher” rates than more complex ones.3 In WebAIM’s 2026 scan of a million home pages, 51% had form fields with no label, which makes the form hard or impossible for some visitors to use.16
Before any redesign, fill in your own form on your phone. Count the fields, and check that the message actually arrives.
How do you redesign without losing what works?
- Measure first. Pick one action, such as an inquiry or a booked call, and note its rate for a few months before you change anything.
- Keep the pages that bring traffic. Check Search Console for the pages people find you through, and keep their addresses.
- Redirect every page that moves to its true replacement, not the homepage, and keep the redirects for at least a year.6
- Fix the words and the next step first. Then the speed. Then the look.
- Measure again over the same length of time, and judge the quality of inquiries, not just the count.
If you’re not sure whether yours needs a redesign at all, start with the signs and how to test each one.