Redesigning a 13-Year-Old Website: How to Refresh Everything Without Breaking a Thing

September 28, 2026

Plenty of companies have a website that was once their pride and joy and now looks like a postcard from the previous decade. Rebuilding it feels risky: there are years of content, hard-won search rankings, user habits — and code nobody wants to touch. We’ve just wrapped up exactly that kind of project — a complete redesign of the SuperSnimki.ru photo community — and here’s how it went.

SuperSnimki after the redesign

Where it all started

We launched SuperSnimki in 2013. Since then the site has built up more than 200,000 photos from over 4,700 photographers, plus thousands of articles and forum threads. The platform ran reliably, but the interface was stuck in its era:

styles were compiled right on the server by an outdated tool;

icons lived in three different icon fonts;

the main JavaScript file weighed 674 KB — and roughly half of it was libraries that hadn’t been used in years;

there was no dark mode and no convenient mobile navigation;

some problems were invisible: the RSS feed had been broken since late 2024, and deleted photos returned a redirect instead of an honest 404.

The key decision: don’t rewrite the platform

The most expensive and risky route is “let’s rewrite everything on a new stack.” We said no to it. The Perl engine, the MongoDB and MySQL databases, the URL structure and the data all stayed exactly as they were. We changed what users see — and whatever was stopping the site from being fast.

That’s why the redesign never turned into a migration: not a single link broke, search rankings didn’t suffer, and users simply opened a familiar site one day to find it transformed.

Before and after: the forum

A design system on top of legacy code

First, we defined the design system as tokens: colors for the light and dark themes, a type scale, spacing on a 4 px grid, corner radii and animation durations. All 183 of the site’s templates were moved onto these tokens — which is why dark mode worked everywhere at once, not just on the home page.

One small trick saved a lot of time: the 130 new SVG icons got the same class names as the old icon-font glyphs. We didn’t have to rewrite a single template for the icons — they simply started looking new.

Before and after: the magazine

A mobile experience that feels like an app

These days most of the audience browses photos on their phones. So we added a bottom navigation bar with an upload button in the center, a slide-out menu and a new full-screen viewer with pinch-to-zoom, swipes and double-tap. The site can be added to the home screen, just like an app.

Mobile version

Speed: remove more than you add

Redesigns often make a site heavier. Ours did the opposite:

the main JS bundle shed 68% — from 674 KB down to 213 KB;

51 legacy libraries were removed, while the editor, maps and charts now load only when needed;

phones get medium-size photos, and while an image loads, its average color holds its place;

article search, which used to take up to 30 seconds on common words, now runs as a single fast query.

The result: the codebase is 27,000 lines smaller — even though it gained features.

New reasons to come back

A good redesign isn’t just about looks. Along with it, we added the things people come back for:

a moderated magazine with an author dashboard and a comfortable reading experience — complete with a table of contents and a progress bar;

a camera gear catalog linked to real photos via EXIF: you can see what the site’s photographers actually shoot with;

Year in Review — a page with a photographer’s stats and best shots that begs to be shared;

AI tools: photo analysis, article translation, auto-filled product cards in the shop and importing new cameras.

Before and after: the camera gear catalog

Security and SEO along the way

When you go through every template, you also spot what has gone unnoticed for years. We closed XSS vulnerabilities in search, comments and the forum, protected deletions with CSRF tokens, brought back proper 404s, fixed RSS, extended the JSON-LD markup and added images to the sitemap.

Dark mode

What your project can take from this

A redesign isn’t a reason to rewrite everything. If the platform works, refresh the interface on top of it: faster, cheaper and with no risk to your SEO.

Start with a design system. Tokens make dark mode, a consistent style and future changes almost free.

Delete boldly. Old libraries and unused code are the easiest way to speed up a site.

Use the redesign as an audit. It’s the best moment to find vulnerabilities and features that quietly broke.

Give people reasons to come back. A new look grabs attention; new features keep it.

The full case study with screenshots is in our portfolio, and you can see the updated site live at supersnimki.ru.

If your site is overdue for a refresh but touching it feels scary, tell us about your project and we’ll put together a redesign plan where nothing gets lost.