Website redesigns are typically judged on visual appearance at delivery. The client signs off on the design, the team celebrates, and six months later no one can say whether the project was profitable.
The problem is not the design. It is the absence of KPIs defined before the first wireframe.
Without indicators agreed upon contractually upfront, it is impossible to prove, or disprove, the ROI of a website redesign. This gap is systemic in the Moroccan market: agencies deliver a polished site, clients watch organic traffic drop for 60 days, and everyone looks for someone to blame. This guide gives you the framework to avoid that scenario. It is written for Marketing Directors and CIOs of mid-market companies with revenues between 20 and 200M MAD (~$2M to $20M), those who must report to a General Manager with numbers, not impressions.
The 3 Levels of Website Redesign Metrics
A redesign affects three distinct performance layers. Conflating them, or measuring only one, is the primary source of misunderstanding between a client and their agency.
Level 1 : Technical Metrics: The Foundation
Technical metrics validate that the delivered site is functional and performant on your users’ actual network conditions. They must be measured at delivery, before any official launch.
Google Core Web Vitals thresholds that must be met:
| Metric | ”Good” Threshold | What It Measures | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) | < 2.5 s | Speed at which the main content renders | PageSpeed Insights |
| INP (Interaction to Next Paint) | < 200 ms | Responsiveness to user interactions | Chrome UX Report |
| CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) | < 0.1 | Visual stability during page load | PageSpeed Insights |
In Morocco, median 4G speeds run around 20 to 25 Mbps during urban peak hours. Test your mobile LCP by simulating a slow 4G connection, not the fiber connection at your Maarif office.
Two additional indicators to track at delivery:
- Indexation rate: verify in Google Search Console that 95% or more of your strategic pages are indexed within 30 days of going live.
- 301 redirects: every old URL must redirect cleanly to its equivalent on the new site. A broken redirect plan is the leading cause of organic traffic drops after a redesign, and it is unfortunately common on projects managed without technical discipline in Morocco.
Level 2 : UX and Behavioral Metrics
These metrics answer a straightforward question: do visitors understand your offering, and do they navigate as intended?
| Metric | B2B Benchmark | Tool |
|---|---|---|
| Bounce rate | < 60% | GA4 |
| Average session duration | > 2 min | GA4 |
| Pages per session | > 2.5 | GA4 |
| Scroll depth (key pages) | > 60% past the fold | Hotjar / Microsoft Clarity |
Bounce rate alone tells you nothing. A blog article read for four minutes and then closed produces a 100% bounce in Universal Analytics, and strong engagement in GA4. Configure your engagement events correctly and stop using bounce rate as your sole UX indicator.
Session recordings (Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity, which is free) surface issues that aggregated numbers conceal: the form no one submits because a field is mislabeled, the CTA button that mobile users never see above the fold.
Level 3 : Business Metrics: What the GM Wants to See
This is the layer that justifies the investment. If your site does not drive concrete actions, the quality of the design has no financial value.
| Metric | Formula | B2B Brochure-Site Benchmark | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall conversion rate | (Actions / Visits) × 100 | > 2% | GA4 Goals |
| Leads generated / month | Forms + tracked calls | Depends on baseline | CRM + GA4 |
| Blended organic CAC | SEO budget / Organic leads | < equivalent paid lead cost | GA4 + accounting |
| Conversion rate by source | Source conversions / Source visits | Organic > social | GA4 |
For e-commerce sites, add: average order value, cart abandonment rate (benchmark: 70 to 75% in MENA), and monthly GMV.
The KPI Grid to Contractualise BEFORE Launch
This table is to be completed during the scoping phase, before the first wireframe. Target values marked “X” are to be defined against your baseline, see the next section.
| Domain | KPI | Target | Tool | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technical | Mobile LCP | < 2.5 s | PageSpeed Insights | Delivery + monthly |
| Technical | Indexation rate | > 95% of key pages | Search Console | Monthly (M1–M3) |
| Technical | Active 301 redirects | 100% of migrated URLs | Screaming Frog | Delivery |
| UX | Bounce rate (B2B) | < 60% | GA4 | Monthly |
| UX | Session duration | > 2 min | GA4 | Monthly |
| SEO | Organic traffic | + X% vs baseline | GA4 | Monthly |
| SEO | Target keyword rankings | Top 10 on ≥ 5 queries | Search Console | Monthly |
| Business | Conversion rate | > 2% (B2B brochure site) | GA4 Goals | Monthly |
| Business | Leads generated | X leads / month | CRM or GA4 | Monthly |
The “X” targets are not oversights, they require a baseline. An agency that proposes targets without auditing your current state is inventing numbers.
If you want to align these website redesign KPIs with your broader digital strategy before launching the project, we offer a dedicated scoping session.
Planning a redesign? Before signing off on any creative brief, let’s define your success KPIs together. Contact our team for an upfront working session, 90 minutes that will save you six months of uncertainty.
How to Define Your Baseline Before the Redesign
The baseline is a snapshot of your current site’s performance, captured over three consecutive months before the project begins. Without it, every target is arbitrary and every post-redesign report is contestable.
The 6 Metrics to Capture Without Exception
Open Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, both tools are free and sufficient to establish a solid baseline. Export the last three complete months:
- Average monthly organic traffic, number of sessions from Google (GA4, filter source/medium = google/organic)
- Rankings for your 10 primary queries, Search Console, “Performance” report, filtered by query
- Current conversion rate, number of form submissions / click-to-call events divided by total sessions
- Current mobile load time, PageSpeed Insights on your three highest-intent pages
- Monthly leads via the site, cross-reference GA4 with your CRM where possible
- Average bounce rate, GA4, engagement report
Why the Baseline Is More Valuable Than the Target
Without a documented baseline, two problems arise. First, you cannot calculate real progression, saying “traffic increased by 40%” only means something if you know the starting point. Second, the baseline is your only defensible argument before the GM to prove the return on investment.
A simple rule: if your agency refuses access to your analytics before starting work, ask why. A studio that measures its own results needs that data to manage the project, not to produce cosmetic reporting.
The baseline also serves to detect false positives after launch. An organic traffic drop in January is not necessarily caused by the redesign, January is structurally weak in many sectors in Morocco. Without seasonal history, you cannot distinguish an anomaly from a normal trend.
Post-Redesign Reporting: What the Marketing Director Should Require
The Monthly Report in 5 Indicators
A good monthly report fits on one page. Twenty uncommented metrics are not a report, they are an abdication of responsibility.
The format we recommend:
- Organic traffic, change vs. prior month and vs. baseline
- Conversion rate, change vs. baseline and vs. contracted target
- Leads generated, absolute number and by source (organic / direct / campaigns)
- Core Web Vitals, LCP, INP, CLS in Good / Needs Improvement / Poor status
- 1 actionable insight, not an observation, a recommendation with a dated next step
Recommended format: 1-page executive summary with the five indicators, raw data in an appendix for the technical team. Frequency: monthly for the first six months, then quarterly once performance has stabilised.
When to Sound the Alarm, and When to Wait
Normal SEO impact timelines after a redesign:
- Day 7 to Day 30: Google re-crawls the site. Fluctuations are normal.
- Day 30 to Day 90: quick wins appear, well-optimised pages, improved Core Web Vitals, branded queries.
- Day 90 to Day 180: competitive queries begin to move if content and links are in place.
- Day 180 to Day 365: stabilisation and compounding gains on long-tail queries.
The real alarm signal is an organic traffic drop of more than 20% over 30 days. In that case, check immediately: (1) the 301 redirect plan, a missed redirect on high-traffic URLs destroys accumulated SEO equity, (2) canonical tags, (3) the robots.txt file for directories accidentally blocked.
One legal point frequently overlooked in Morocco: GA4 must be configured with Consent Mode v2 to comply with Law 09-08 and the CNDP guidelines. Consent Mode v2 is Google’s protocol that allows GA4 to model conversion data for users who decline cookies, using aggregated signals rather than individual tracking. If your site does not have a functional cookie consent banner wired to Consent Mode v2, a portion of your conversion data is not collected, and your actual conversion rate is understated.
Measured Results on Netspace Projects
The metrics below come from real projects delivered by our studio. They illustrate what upfront KPI scoping makes it possible to demonstrate.
Outsourcia, B2B corporate website
Outsourcia is an outsourced services group whose primary audience is decision-makers at large European and Moroccan companies. The pre-redesign baseline showed a form conversion rate below 0.5% and an information architecture that did not guide visitors toward service pages.
KPIs defined in the scoping phase: conversion rate > 1.5%, session duration > 2 min 30 s, LCP < 2.5 s.
Results at Day 90: inbound qualified leads via the site multiplied by 3, session duration up from 1 min 12 s to 2 min 58 s, mobile LCP down to 1.9 s.
Somfy Morocco, institutional site with documentation hub
The challenge was adoption of technical documentation by professional installers. The baseline showed that product data sheet download pages were rarely found organically and were abandoned before completion.
KPIs defined: data sheet download rate, scroll depth on product pages, load time < 2 s on mobile.
Results at Day 180: +40% product data sheet downloads, scroll depth on product pages up from 38% to 61%, pages now indexed and ranked for targeted product queries.
These results are not coincidences. They follow from rigorous upfront scoping, a watertight redirect plan, and monthly tracking of KPIs contractualised at kick-off.
FAQ
How long after a redesign should you wait before measuring SEO results?
Allow 60 to 90 days for the first reliable signals on branded queries and well-optimised pages. For competitive queries (non-branded, high competition), a realistic timeline is 6 to 12 months. Any provider promising SEO results within 30 days of a redesign is making a promise they cannot keep.
Which free tools should I use to measure website performance in Morocco?
The two essential free tools are Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console. They cover 80% of a Marketing Director’s needs. For navigation heat maps and session recordings, Microsoft Clarity is free with no volume limits. PageSpeed Insights for Core Web Vitals is also free.
My site experienced a traffic drop after the redesign : what should I do?
First check: the 301 redirect plan. Export the old site’s URLs from Google Search Console (coverage report), compare against the redirects live on the new site, and fix any missing ones as a priority. Second check: the robots.txt file, ensure no important directories are accidentally blocked. Third check: canonical tags and noindex tags on strategic pages.
Should URLs be kept the same during a redesign?
Where possible, yes. Every existing URL that has accumulated inbound links or organic traffic is an SEO asset. If you must change URLs (domain migration, architecture restructuring), a comprehensive 301 redirect plan is non-negotiable. Any URL without a redirect is lost SEO equity.
How do I justify a website redesign budget to my General Manager?
Start from your current baseline: current cost per lead via the site, monthly lead volume, conversion rate. Project the gain using conservative assumptions (+30% leads, -20% blended CAC). The ROI becomes calculable. This is precisely why the baseline must be documented before launching the project, it is your financial argument, not a technical tool.
To go further on measuring your website SEO performance and structuring a results-driven digital strategy, see also our articles on the cost of a website in Morocco and on how to brief a digital agency in Morocco.
