Rebranding a live SaaS: identity, website and keeping your traffic

Rebranding a live product is different from branding a new one. You already have customers who know the old name, pages that rank, links in other people’s articles and an interface that runs to hundreds of screens. The new identity has to land on all of it at roughly the same time, without breaking what already works.

Teams usually rebrand after a pivot, a move into AI, or a push upmarket where the old look no longer matches the buyer. The reason matters, because it decides how much has to change.

Should we refresh the brand before redesigning the website?

Usually yes. Positioning first, then identity, then the website, because the site has to express a brand that already exists. The exception is when the brand is fine and only the site is broken; then you’re doing a website redesign, not a rebrand.

A quick test: write down what has changed since the current brand was made. If the answer is who you sell to, what the product is or who you want to be compared with, it’s a rebrand. If the answer is that the pages are slow, confusing or hard to edit, it’s a website project, and the brand can stay.

Either way, start with what the company is for now, not with how it looks. Why most redesigns fail covers the difference between a restyle and a real change.

What changes in a SaaS rebrand?

• 01Identity: name (sometimes), logo, type, color, voice.
• 02Website: messaging, structure, visuals, and often the domain.
• 03Product UI: colors, type and components through design tokens. This is the part most rebrands forget, and why the app ends up looking like the old company.
• 04Everything else: emails, docs, billing pages, social profiles, the favicon.

The product UI is where rebrands quietly fail. The marketing site gets the new colors and type in a few weeks. The app keeps the old ones for months because nobody planned for it, and customers log in to something that looks like a different company. If the identity ships as design tokens, the named values for color, type, spacing and radius that the product’s code reads, the app changes when the tokens change. Nobody has to repaint screens one at a time.

Everything else is a long list, not a hard one. Write it early and give each item an owner: transactional emails, the help center and docs, invoices and billing pages, the status page, app store listings, social profiles, the favicon and the share images that appear when someone posts a link.

The order that works

• 01Positioning: what’s changed and who you’re for now.
• 02Identity system, including tokens for the product.
• 03Website structure and copy, and a URL map from old pages to new ones.
• 04Build the new site and update the product tokens.
• 05Launch both close together, then announce.

Two details in that order matter more than they look. The URL map sits with the structure and copy, because deciding which pages survive is a content decision, not a developer task for launch week. And the product tokens sit with the identity, so the system is designed for an interface with tables, forms and empty states, not only for a homepage and a deck.

Launching the site and the product close together avoids the stretch where the website promises one company and the app shows another. Announce once both are live, so the people who click through from the announcement see the finished thing.

Treat the URL map as design work. Deciding which pages survive is a content decision.

How do you keep search traffic and AI visibility?

• 01Map every old URL to a new one, with one 301 redirect each and no chains.
• 02If the domain changes, use Search Console’s change of address tool and keep the old domain redirecting for good.
• 03Keep the content that ranks; restyle it, don’t delete it.
• 04Update structured data (name, logo) and llms.txt so assistants pick up the new name.
• 05Watch Search Console daily for the first weeks.

Redirects are where most of the risk sits. A chain, where an old page redirects to an interim page that redirects again, slows crawlers down and adds a point of failure at every hop, so point each old URL straight at its final address. Send it to the closest equivalent page, not to the homepage. When hundreds of old pages all land on the homepage, search engines tend to read that as the old content being gone.

AI assistants add a second layer. They learned your old name from years of pages, reviews and directory listings, and they won’t forget it the day you launch. Update the name and logo in your Organization structured data, add a line to your llms.txt that says what you used to be called, and update the profiles you control so they all tell the same story. A short page or FAQ entry that says the old name is now the new one gives assistants something clear to quote while the rest of the web catches up.

Then watch. In the first weeks, check Search Console every day for crawl errors, pages dropping out of the index and queries where the old pages used to rank. Most problems at this stage are a missing redirect, and they’re cheap to fix if you catch them early.

A rebrand checklist

Before launch:

• 01Positioning written in one or two sentences the founders agree on.
• 02An identity system with logo, type, color, voice and design tokens.
• 03Every old URL listed with its new address, including pages you’re merging.
• 04Redirects tested on a staging site, with no chains and no blanket redirects to the homepage.
• 05Structured data, llms.txt, favicon and share images updated.
• 06Emails, docs, billing pages and profiles on a list, each with an owner.
• 07Product tokens updated and checked on the busiest screens, not only the dashboard.

After launch:

• 01Search Console checked daily for the first weeks.
• 02Change of address submitted if the domain changed, and the old domain renewed and redirecting.
• 03Old name mentioned once, clearly, where customers and assistants will find it.

How we approach it

We plan the identity, the website and the product tokens as one project, because each of them goes wrong when it’s done without the other two. Brand, site and product design are all on our services page.

If you’re planning a rebrand and want the identity, the site and the product done as one project, send your brief.

• Identity
• Strategy
• GEO