What I Learnt from Rebuilding My Website
The new website design unwrapped in December 2025 after 3 months of planning, preparing and designing.
My website was due for a major overhaul. This idea had been sitting around in my mind for a long time and it became more concrete in 2024 when I took a course on Digital Marketing and Branding at the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (FHNW). To obtain my Certificate of Advanced Studies, I had to focus on two study projects and during the second one, I wrote about updating my website in the context of business rebranding. After completing the course and receiving my degree in May 2025, I started with the renaming of my business; and finally, in late autumn, I tackled the problem of the website.
Here’s the process I followed, step by step.
Initial Position
My website was on WordPress. WordPress is an excellent piece of open-source software and there are very good reasons why it powers over 40% of websites globally. However, maintenance is a must: the platform itself, plugins, PHP and other odds and ends. This turned out to be a far bigger responsibility than I had thought it would be for a small business website like mine. Furthermore, bugs would crop up after updates, which my website developers had to fix.
The first thing I did was audit my website: what could I overhaul, what could I keep and what were the risks?
Goals
With the passage of time and business growth, my goals had changed, including those for my website. My theme would require major re-writing or quite possibly a new theme altogether; and who knows how many bugs future updates would bring? I concluded that WordPress was too complex and maintenance-heavy for me.
There were many alternatives out there, which made things even more complex. How was I supposed to pick one? Firstly, I had to be clear about my goals and choose based on what would fit my needs. Secondly, a big reason why people choose a product or service is based on recommendations from people they know. It can be family, friends, colleagues, or acquaintances.
Finally, after asking around, I decided to try Squarespace. I was not starting entirely from scratch. I already had my brand colours, business logo and everything that was necessary for the redesign.
Planning
Clear planning was the biggest time-saver in this entire project.
After researching and studying Squarespace’s templates, watching YouTube tutorials and asking a friend who was on Squarespace, I gathered my materials before opening an account with Squarespace and starting my 14-day trial version. I wanted to use those days as productively as possible.
I brainstormed (including with ChatGPT and Gemini), rewrote the content, decided on the kind of design and hero images I wanted, and finally, when all my materials were ready, I went ahead.
Redesign
Finding the time matters. And if that’s not possible, finding someone who can step in for you does. I had challenged myself to redesign and relaunch my website before Christmas and decided to handle it myself. Having my materials ready was a huge help. Otherwise, I would have risked wasting the trial days. Being a complete newbie, I first had to familiarise myself with the interface, make mistakes, learn from them and do some thorough testing in different browsers and on different devices. I was also careful to implement SEO best practices.
I worked on the redesign at night and on weekends.
But the work was not over after I had published the website. I still had to point my domain to the website, which meant logging into the DNS settings of my registrar and updating the entries there. Afterwards came an exercise in patience: waiting for the updated DNS to propagate and for the generation of the security certificate.
Once this was done, I went to Google Search Console, deleted my old sitemap and submitted the new one. I also connected Google Analytics.
Small, non-priority details I had left aside before publishing were implemented afterwards. This included tweaking, fine-tuning and testing across browsers and devices, and in one case applying small CSS snippets with the help of YouTube tutorials and the Squarespace community to style hyperlinks and pagination font size. And: I was able to meet my pre-Christmas deadline.
Conclusion
An important thing I want to add is that each website platform has its strengths and its weaknesses, whether it’s WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Jimdo, etc. In the end, it’s down to the user to choose what suits them. Also, a small website does not automatically equate to less time for preparation or designing — I was very glad that I had those trial days at my disposal and had prepared everything beforehand.
It’s safe to say that preparation and clear goals are key to a successful website transfer and redesign, and I hope this experience will be helpful for other small business owners who are planning to move their websites.
