Maintaining Website Performance through a Redesign with a Little Help from SEO

Divinity Clergy Wear wanted to redesign their website so as to make it more brand integrated, offer a better UX and appeal to more contemporary shoppers as well. They wanted to reap the benefits of an enhanced design but they were concerned about drops in website performance as a result of the changes that would be made to their website.

This concern is one of the most common — and most legitimate — reasons established retailers delay a redesign. A clergy and ecclesiastical apparel brand like Divinity Clergy Wear depends on shoppers being able to find specific garments by name, fabric, and occasion. A visual overhaul that changes URLs, page templates, internal linking, and content structure can disturb the signals search engines have spent years associating with a domain. The brief was therefore not simply “make it look modern” — it was to modernize the storefront experience while protecting the organic visibility the business already relied on.

1Digital^® redesigned and developed a new BigCommerce website for them and tailored an SEO campaign to their needs to grow their keyword rankings and maintain their website performance through the changes.

How a redesign-with-SEO engagement like this works

When 1Digital takes on a redesign for an established BigCommerce store, the SEO discipline begins before any new design is shipped. A typical engagement of this type involves baselining the site as it exists today — cataloguing the URLs that earn organic visits, the templates that rank, the internal link paths that distribute authority, and the on-page elements (titles, headings, structured data) tied to existing rankings. That baseline becomes the contract the redesign has to honor.

The design and development work then proceeds on BigCommerce with that map in hand. Practically, this means preserving or 301-redirecting URLs rather than silently dropping them, carrying forward metadata and on-page content that supports ranking terms, keeping crawlable navigation and clean templates, and re-validating structured data on the rebuilt category and product pages. The parallel SEO campaign covers keyword research aligned to how clergy-apparel shoppers actually search, on-page optimization of the new templates, and ongoing monitoring so any movement after launch is detected and addressed quickly rather than discovered months later.

Why performance continuity matters for an apparel catalog

For a specialized apparel retailer, organic search is often where high-intent shoppers first arrive — someone searching for a specific clergy garment is far down the buying funnel. Losing visibility for those terms during a redesign is not a cosmetic setback; it is lost demand. Treating the redesign and the SEO program as a single coordinated project, rather than a design handoff followed by a separate cleanup, is what lets a brand modernize its storefront without trading away the equity that took years to build.

What a brand should expect during a protected redesign

A redesign run this way is sequenced deliberately. The discovery phase produces the inventory of ranking URLs, templates, and on-page signals that the rebuild must preserve. Design and development then happen against that inventory rather than in isolation, so decisions about navigation, URL structure, and template content are made with their search consequences understood up front. Around launch, redirects and metadata are verified rather than assumed, and the parallel SEO campaign continues monitoring rankings and organic traffic so the transition is observed closely rather than left to chance. For a clergy and ecclesiastical apparel brand whose customers search by specific garment, fabric, and occasion, this sequencing is the difference between a modern storefront that keeps its hard-won visibility and one that quietly loses it. The objective throughout is continuity: a better experience for contemporary shoppers without sacrificing the organic demand the business already depends on.

If your store needs a redesign but you depend on organic traffic to drive revenue, 1Digital^® can plan the rebuild and the SEO program together. Contact us to discuss your project.