The verdict in three sentences
A redesign without a prior technical SEO audit typically costs 30 to 60% of organic traffic in the three months after launch, and recovery often takes a year. In Dublin, the audit costs around EUR 1,800 to 7,000 ex VAT in 2026 depending on URL count (500 to 20,000), and its core output is the inventory of pages that earn money plus the 301 redirect map. Add a 90-day post-launch monitoring package (EUR 900 to 2,300) and a risky migration becomes a controlled one.
Why redesigns destroy traffic
Marketing managers at Irish mid-sized companies know the pattern. The new site looks better, the board signs it off, and three weeks after go-live Search Console shows clicks falling, inbound quote requests drop and nobody can say which pages vanished. The causes are almost always the same: a new URL structure without a mapping, content merged or deleted, title tags overwritten by the theme, broken internal links, faceted pages indexed in bulk or a staging robots.txt left live.
The audit freezes what exists before you break it. It answers three questions: which URLs drive traffic, backlinks and conversions; which technical weaknesses must be fixed in the new build; and which destination URL each old page should point to.
| Redesign mistake | Observed traffic loss (2026 ballpark) | Recovery time |
|---|---|---|
| No 301 redirects | 40 to 70% | 6 to 12 months, sometimes never |
| Everything redirected to the homepage | 25 to 45% | 4 to 9 months |
| Content shortened or deleted | 15 to 35% | 3 to 6 months |
| Title and H1 tags rewritten unchecked | 10 to 25% | 2 to 4 months |
| Staging robots.txt left live | Up to 90% | 2 to 6 weeks after the fix |
| Degraded Core Web Vitals (LCP > 4 s) | 5 to 15% | 1 to 3 months after optimisation |
What a serious technical SEO audit includes
A proper audit is more than a tool export. It combines a full crawl (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or similar), 16 months of real Google Search Console data, page-level analytics and a human review of templates. Expected deliverables: URL inventory ranked by value (traffic, conversions, backlinks), error map (404s, redirect chains, conflicting canonicals, duplicate content), Core Web Vitals analysis per template (LCP, INP, CLS), structural recommendations for the new site and an old-to-new URL mapping file.
Dublin pricing sits slightly above the French market, reflecting senior SEO day rates of roughly EUR 600 to 900. Specialist Irish SEO agencies and independent consultants usually quote fixed fees for the audit and a monthly fee for monitoring.
| Site size | Audit price (2026 ballpark, ex VAT, Dublin) | Duration | Key deliverable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 URLs (B2B brochure site) | EUR 1,800 to 2,600 | 2 weeks | Full 301 map, 15 to 25 actions |
| 1,000 to 3,000 URLs | EUR 2,600 to 4,000 | 2 to 3 weeks | 301 map + template priorities |
| 3,000 to 8,000 URLs | EUR 4,000 to 5,500 | 3 weeks | Semi-automated map, regex rules |
| 8,000 to 20,000 URLs (catalogue, multi-country) | EUR 5,500 to 7,000 | 3 to 4 weeks | Redirect rules + hreflang audit |
| 90-day post-launch monitoring | EUR 900 to 2,300 | 3 months | Weekly reports, 404 fixes |
| Pre-launch SEO QA on staging | Often included or EUR 600 to 1,400 | 3 to 5 days | Signed-off checklist before go-live |
Price depends mainly on the number of distinct templates and the quality of available data. A site with 15,000 product URLs generated from three templates is faster to audit than a 2,000-page corporate site written by hand over ten years.
How to fit the audit into the redesign budget
Commission the audit before the specification, not after the mock-ups. It should shape the site structure, templates and CMS choice. At Kolonell, the audit is part of redesign scoping. For a B2B brochure site, our packages run from 800,000 to 1,200,000 FCFA (EUR 1,220 to 1,830) for Starter, 1,200,000 to 2,000,000 FCFA (EUR 1,830 to 3,050) for Growth and 2,000,000 to 3,500,000 FCFA (EUR 3,050 to 5,340) for Premium. Corporate and institutional sites are quoted on request. Monthly SEO follow-up after launch is 100,000, 200,000 or 350,000 FCFA depending on intensity.
See our SEO service and a sector example with the training provider website in Dublin.
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Aoife, marketing manager at a Dublin engineering services firm (180 staff), is preparing to redesign a 2,400-URL site that gets 16,000 organic visits a month and 40 quote requests. Her quote-to-order rate is 20% and the average order is EUR 10,000 ex VAT.
Without an audit, a 40% traffic loss for six months means roughly 16 lost quote requests per month, so 3.2 orders, or EUR 32,000 in monthly revenue and about EUR 192,000 over six months. The audit (EUR 3,600) plus 90-day monitoring (EUR 1,700) costs EUR 5,300. Even if the audit only limits the loss to 10%, it protects around EUR 144,000 of revenue: a return above 25 times the spend.
FAQ
How long before the redesign should the audit start?
Ideally 6 to 10 weeks before launch, before the sitemap is frozen. The audit takes 2 to 4 weeks and its findings must be able to change the new structure.
Is a free automated audit enough?
No: an automated report lists 200 to 500 warnings with no hierarchy and no redirect plan. The value lies in the URL mapping and prioritisation, which take 10 to 40 hours of human analysis.
What traffic dip is acceptable after a well-run redesign?
A 5 to 10% dip for 2 to 6 weeks is normal while Google recrawls. Beyond 15% after 8 weeks, look for missing redirects or deindexed pages.
Should we keep the same URLs?
Where possible, yes: keeping 70 to 80% of URLs sharply reduces risk. If the structure changes, every valuable old URL needs a 301 to its closest equivalent, never a bulk redirect to the homepage.
Do Core Web Vitals really matter in a redesign?
Mainly as a safety net: an LCP above 4 seconds on mobile hurts both rankings and conversion. The audit sets target thresholds per template, for example LCP under 2.5 s and CLS under 0.1.
Let's scope your project. Send us your current site URL and target relaunch date, and we will scope the audit, redirect map and post-launch monitoring. Detailed quote within 48 h. WhatsApp +221 77 596 93 33.
Mohamed Bah
Fondateur, Kolonell
Passionate about digital and entrepreneurship in Africa, Mohamed has been helping Sénégalese businesses with their digital transformation since 2020. Founder of Kolonell, he believes every SME deserves a professional and accessible online présence.
