How to Scale a Marketplace: Liquidity Before Growth
Decide when to expand a marketplace using liquidity, repeat transactions, operating capacity and bounded acquisition tests—not traffic alone.
Sales drop, people leave the site faster, conversion falls, and someone says “let’s redesign.” Done as one big relaunch, a redesign can make things worse. You change everything at once and can’t tell which change moved the numbers. The project takes months, and search traffic can drop while Google catches up with the new pages.
A good redesign starts from a business problem, changes the parts that cause it, and measures the result. If you’re deciding whether to redesign a website or web product, start with the signs below, then the 2026 rules a redesign has to meet, a step-by-step method and what the design work costs.
Does your site need a redesign?
“It could look better” is not a reason. A redesign makes sense when a specific problem shows up in your numbers or feedback, and the fix needs more than a tweak.
| What you see | Check first | Redesign? |
|---|---|---|
| Many people reach the cart, few finish checkout | The funnel in your analytics, step by step | Fix that step first, not the whole site |
| Support keeps getting the same “where is…” questions | Support tickets, a few user sessions | Navigation and page structure, likely yes |
| Your brand or offer has changed | Whether pages still describe what you sell | Yes, at least the brand and key pages |
| Pages load slowly on phones | Core Web Vitals | Often a technical fix, not a design one |
| The site can’t be changed without a developer every time | The platform and the code | A rebuild, with the design work alongside |
| People with disabilities can’t use key flows | An accessibility check against WCAG 2.2 | Fix the flows; maybe more |
Why the big relaunch fails
The old habit was a full redesign every few years. It often backfires, for four reasons:
- Users don’t like sudden change, even when the new version is better.
- If you change everything at once, you can’t tell what moved the metrics.
- Goals like “fix the UX” are too vague to finish or to measure.
- Research, design and build of a whole new site take so long that the result is out of date at launch.
Smaller, tested changes avoid all four. You keep what works, change what doesn’t, and see the effect of each change.
Three rules a 2026 redesign has to meet
Keep your search traffic
When page addresses change, search traffic can drop. Google’s guidance on site moves with URL changes, updated in August 2026, recommends server-side permanent redirects from every old URL to its new one. Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year. Update internal links and sitemaps to the new URLs. Expect rankings to move up and down for a while: a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move. Pages that keep their old URLs skip this step entirely.
Make it accessible
In the EU, accessibility requirements apply to products and services placed on the market after 28 June 2025, including online shops, ticketing platforms and banking services. Service businesses with fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million in turnover are exempt (Your Europe, European Commission). The common technical yardstick, WCAG 2.2, became an ISO standard, ISO/IEC 40500:2025, in October 2025 (W3C). A redesign is the cheapest moment to build accessibility in. Whether the law covers your business is a question for a lawyer.
Make it fast
Google’s Core Web Vitals targets: the main content appears within 2.5 seconds, the page responds to taps and clicks in under 200 milliseconds, and the layout shifts by less than 0.1 while it loads. Write them into the acceptance criteria, so speed becomes a check that passes or fails.
Redesign in tested steps
A product approach treats each change as a guess to test, not a decision to defend.
- Measure where people drop off. Even a plain funnel helps. When this article first ran, we described a typical case as an illustration: 20% of visitors reach the cart and only 0.02% reach checkout, which points to one broken step, not a broken site. Often the first finding is that analytics was set up by someone long gone and nobody trusts it, so fix that first.
- Read what users already tell you. Support tickets and reviews point at problems for free.
- Watch real people use the site. Ask about ten people from your audience to complete the main task on the current site or a prototype, and note where they get stuck.
- Look at competitors for ideas, then test those ideas on your own users. Sharing a market doesn’t mean sharing customers.
- Change one thing at a time where you can, and compare it with the old version on the live site.
- Keep what works and plan the next step from the result.
What we have done
Biella, a company that makes corporate gifts, came to us with an outdated identity. We designed a new logo, brand and website. To speed up the release, we also proposed a corporate landing page with only the main information about the company and a contact form. We connected analytics and visitor tracking, and tested the site with real users and under load before release. Biella’s lead generation became up to 60% more efficient.
BookWA, a social app for book lovers, came to us with another team’s design. Our first review found serious gaps in the design, the interface and the logic, so we suggested a fresh start instead of patching. The new design went through 9 rounds and was tested with a thousand real users, and the app got 1,000+ downloads in its first 2 weeks.
What a redesign costs
Our UI/UX design work comes in three fixed packages:
| Package | What you get | Price | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| UX audit | The main flows of your live product reviewed, problems ranked by what they cost, sketched fixes for the top ones | $2,500 | 1-1.5 weeks |
| MVP design and clickable prototype | About 15-25 screens for one platform, a prototype tested with people from your audience, 2 rounds of changes, a style guide and Figma files | $5,000-11,000 | 3-5 weeks |
| Full product design | About 50-80 screens, a second platform or the web, admin screens, a Figma design system, a test round and notes for developers | $11,500-25,000 | 8-12 weeks |
Other design work is $39-55 an hour. The UX audit can be bought on its own, so you can find out what to change before you commit to a redesign. If you then build the product with us, the MVP design fee counts toward the build.
When the redesign comes with new features or a new platform, the build is part of the price. A web app first version typically costs $5,000-15,000 and takes 2-4 weeks. Our project estimate turns your brief into user stories you confirm, and every hour traces back to a story you kept, priced at our published rate of $39-55 an hour. To see what your redesign costs to build, describe it in a few sentences.
What we would do
- Write down the business problem the redesign has to fix, with the number you want to move.
- Check the analytics funnel and support tickets before anyone draws a screen.
- Start with a UX audit if you don’t know which part of the site causes the problem.
- Keep old URLs where you can; map and redirect the rest permanently.
- Put WCAG 2.2 and Core Web Vitals targets in the acceptance criteria.
- Release in steps and measure each one.
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FAQ
When does a website need a redesign?
When a specific problem shows up in your numbers or feedback, such as people dropping off at one step or a brand that no longer matches what you sell, and the fix needs more than a tweak. “It could look better” is not enough.
How do you redesign a website without losing SEO?
Keep URLs where you can. Where they change, use server-side permanent redirects from each old URL to its new one, keep them for at least a year, and update internal links and sitemaps. Google says to expect temporary ranking changes during the move.
How much does a website redesign cost?
With us, a UX audit costs $2,500, MVP design with a clickable prototype costs $5,000-11,000 and full product design with a design system costs $11,500-25,000. Other design work is $39-55 an hour.
Should a redesign be done all at once?
Usually not. Changing one part at a time lets you see what each change does to your numbers, keeps what users like and lowers the risk of a launch that makes things worse.