Website Redesign Case Study: What Changed, What We Kept and the 90-Day Record (USLege)

USLege's sitemap listed 19 URLs in November 2024. In late August 2025, about 100 days after the redesigned homepage first appeared in the Internet Archive, it listed 149. On 21 October 2026 it listed 1,207. Those three numbers are public, dated and checkable, which is more than most website redesign case studies can say.

This is the USLege redesign told from captures anyone can open: the homepage before and after, what stayed the same, what the record shows at 90 days and later, and how to write your own case study so a buyer can check it. We do not publish USLege's conversion or demo numbers. They belong to the client, so every figure here comes from the Internet Archive, the live sitemap or our published case study.

The brief: a small site behind a product going national

USLege is an AI legislative-tracking platform for government-affairs and policy teams. Our published case study describes the problem plainly: the product had changed fast and the marketing site had not. The ask was a redesign of a four-page static site, and the first version shipped in under a month. The product was a Texas product with plans for all 50 states, and a site that small could not carry that.

The archive shows what the site looked like before. The capture of 30 April 2025 has the headline "The New Era of Legislative Tracking", a line describing USLege as a GovTech software company and LLM agent, two section headings, about 740 words including navigation and footer, three "Book a Demo" links and a block of customer quotes from lobbyists. The last sitemap captured before the redesign, in November 2024, listed 19 URLs. Ten were template leftovers: checkout, order confirmation, PayPal checkout, sign-in, sign-up, search and four reference pages, including a style guide and a licences page. The rest were the home, about, features, news, demo, careers, terms, referral and legacy pages. Our case study counts four pages, which reflects the core marketing set rather than everything the sitemap exposed.

Why a redesign, not small fixes. Hoa Loranger's 2015 article for Nielsen Norman Group argues for the least change that solves the problem, and lists the cases where a larger overhaul is justified, including a site architecture that no longer holds together. Our reading is that a four-page site for a product about to cover 50 states had a version of that problem: there was nowhere for state, role or news content to go. The homepage message also had to change, because "a new era" does not say what the product does or who uses it.

Before and after: the homepage, side by side

The table compares three captures: the last old version, the first redesigned version and the version eight months later. The capture dates are when the Internet Archive saved each page, not launch dates.

The headline moved from category to outcome. "A new era" is a claim about the market. "Hours into minutes" is a claim about the reader's week, and a government-affairs professional can test it against their own Monday.

The buyers got named. The old page described the company. The new one named who it was for in a section heading, and later versions named them more precisely.

Proof followed the facts. In May 2025 the page said "SOC 2 Compliance Roadmap". By December it said certified, and by January it said SOC 2 Type II with a clean report issued in November 2025. The proof line was updated when the claim became true, not before.

The page got longer, on purpose. Visible words roughly tripled between April 2025 and January 2026. Each addition answered a question a buyer asks before booking: who uses it, is it secure, what do others say, and what do people usually ask.

What we kept from the old site

Comparing the April and May captures, five things did not change. Each has a reason that applies to any redesign.

1. The platform. Both captures carry Webflow markup. Keeping the platform meant the redesign was not also a migration, so there was no site move for Google to process. Google's own guidance says a small to medium site move takes a few weeks for most pages and can bring ranking fluctuations while it is recrawled.
2. The URL paths. About, features, news, demo, careers and terms kept their addresses. The August 2025 sitemap still lists all six.
3. The main action. "Book a Demo" stayed the one primary button. A redesign that also changes the conversion path makes the before and after impossible to compare.
4. The customer quotes. The lobbyists quoted on the old homepage are quoted on the new one. Real proof is scarce at that stage, and a redesign is no reason to drop it.
5. The Texas focus, for now. The first redesigned headline said "state government work". The September 2025 capture widens it to "government relations work", and the January 2026 hero names all 50 states. The message grew when the product did.

What the public record shows at 90 days

Ninety days after the first redesigned capture is 17 August 2025. The nearest captures are the homepage on 10 August and the sitemap on 28 August, 101 days in.

By then the homepage had an FAQ section, first visible in the 20 June capture, and the title tag had dropped the ".ai" to read "USLege, Home". The sitemap had grown from 19 URLs to 149, and its shape had changed. The ten template leftovers were gone. A contact page, an FAQ page, a New York free-trial page, two pages named for the expansion (/uslege-scales and /uslege-nationwide) and a job listing had appeared. And 135 of the 149 URLs were news articles: the site now published its political news and opinion pieces as indexable pages.

That is what anyone can see at 90 days. What they cannot see is traffic, demo requests or pipeline. Our case study says only that the New York landing page built with Hearst for LinkedIn, Google Ads and X was iterated "until the numbers made sense". We will not put a percentage next to that sentence.

After 90 days: from a redesign to a content engine

The case study describes the work after launch as ongoing conversion work and new pages month after month. The archive shows what that looked like.

Old URLs were kept alive. In November 2025 the sitemap gained 164 URLs, most of them old article paths at the top level plus author, tag, category and dated folders, the pattern a blog platform leaves behind. On the live site today, one of those old paths returns a 301 redirect to the same article under /news/. Google treats a permanent redirect as a signal that the target should be the canonical page, so the old links keep pointing at something.

The title tag started doing search work. By December 2025 it read "AI Bill & Legislative Tracking Software, USLege" instead of "Home". It names the category buyers search for.

State pages arrived in January 2026. The sitemap listed 52 state pages, matching the move from Texas to national coverage. By March the sitemap passed 500 URLs, the "4 pages to 500+" our case study reports.

Duplicates crept in, and came out. From January to April 2026 state pages were listed under both /state/ and /states/. In May the 52 singular paths left the sitemap, which is why the count fell from 515 to 467. A sitemap that grows by hundreds of pages a quarter needs someone checking it, or duplicates pile up quietly.

Then the site moved on. From the July 2026 capture the homepage no longer carries Webflow page markup or our footer credit, so the 1,207-URL site of October 2026, with 432 tracking pages, 168 "best in government affairs" pages and about 70 Spanish pages, is a later stage than the one this case study covers. We looked at that version's first screen in Legal Tech Websites: How to Explain a Complex Product in Five Seconds (USLege Case Notes).

How to write a website redesign case study a buyer can check

Most redesign case studies are a before screenshot, an after screenshot and a percentage with no baseline. Databox's 2024 survey of more than 145 companies found that 40.15% of those holding off a redesign named SEO concerns as the main reason. A buyer with that worry wants dates and a method, not a lift figure. This is how we would build one.

Date every capture. If you have no old screenshots, the Internet Archive's CDX server lists every capture of a URL, and its collapse option shows only captures whose content changed. That turns a year of history into a short list of versions.

Separate public and private numbers. Page count, URL structure, headline, proof and page weight are public. Traffic, conversion and pipeline are the client's. Say which is which.

Name what you kept. Buyers fear losing what works. A list of kept URLs, buttons and proof shows the redesign was a decision, not a reset.

Set the baseline before launch. Search Console's performance report shows the past three months by default, and GA4 keeps exploration and funnel data for two or 14 months on a standard property. Set retention to 14 months before the project starts and note the launch date.

Compare against something that did not change. A before and after comparison mixes the redesign with seasonality, campaigns and news. Google's CausalImpact package estimates an intervention's effect against control series that were not affected by it. For a product tied to legislative calendars, that matters more than usual.

What this means for your own redesign

Change what the evidence says is broken, keep the platform and URLs if they still work, and write the case study as you go: dated captures, a list of what stayed, and a clear line between public and private numbers. At 90 days, the public record should already show whether the structure can grow. The private numbers then tell you whether the growth is paying. Our marketing website service explains how we plan a redesign around that structure.