Website redesign checklist

A website redesign can bring more enquiries, or quietly wreck your Google rankings. The difference is usually preparation. Use this website redesign checklist before, during and after your project to protect your traffic and get the most from the new site.

Before the redesign

• Set clear goals: more enquiries, faster pages, easier editing, new services
• Export a list of every URL on your current site
• Note your top pages by traffic, conversions and backlinks in Google Analytics and Search Console
• Record current rankings for your main keywords
• Save copies of your current titles and meta descriptions
• Collect feedback from customers and your team about what does not work

This baseline is what lets you measure success later, and it tells you which pages you must protect.

Planning the new site

• Decide which pages to keep, merge, improve or remove
• Plan a clear sitemap and navigation
• Map every old URL to its new URL
• Plan new content for gaps in your current site
• Choose the right platform for your needs
• Agree who writes and approves content

The URL map is the most important item on this website redesign checklist. Every old page that gets traffic or links should redirect to the most relevant new page.

During design and build

• Design for mobile first
• Keep headings, titles and content that already rank well
• Make calls to action clear on every page
• Add reviews, case studies and trust signals
• Build on a staging site, not the live one
• Set up schema, sitemaps and SEO plugin settings

Before launch

• Test every redirect from your URL map
• Check every form sends to the right inbox
• Test on real phones and several browsers
• Run PageSpeed Insights on key pages
• Make sure the staging site was not set to block search engines
• Set up Google Analytics and Search Console on the new site

That fourth-from-last point catches out more redesigns than anything else. Many staging sites are set to noindex, and forgetting to switch it off can remove your whole site from Google.

After launch

• Submit your new XML sitemap in Search Console
• Watch the Pages and Crawl reports for errors
• Check your top pages rank and load correctly
• Fix any 404 errors with new redirects
• Compare traffic and enquiries with your baseline after 4 and 12 weeks

Should you redesign or refresh?

Not every site needs a full redesign. Sometimes updating key pages and improving speed gets most of the benefit. If you are unsure, a free website audit is a good place to start.

Common redesign mistakes

• Launching with the staging site still blocking search engines
• Deleting old blog posts that quietly brought traffic
• Changing every URL without redirects
• Removing text from key pages to make the design look cleaner
• Forgetting to move tracking codes and form notifications

Each of these is easy to avoid with the checklist above, and each can cost months of lost traffic if missed. Keep the list handy and tick items off with your developer.

A realistic timeline

For most small and medium business sites, allow one to two weeks for planning, two to three weeks for design, two to four weeks for build and content, and a week for testing and launch. Rushing the planning stage is the most common cause of problems later.

Who should be involved

A redesign goes more smoothly when the right people are involved from the start. Someone who knows your customers well, someone who can approve content and design quickly, and someone who understands your analytics and SEO. In small businesses this might be one or two people, and that is fine, as long as decisions do not stall.

Agree how feedback will be given, who has the final say and how quickly you can respond to design rounds. Clear roles often save more time than any tool or process.

Content inventory: what to keep, merge or drop

Before any design work starts, list every page on your current site with its traffic, rankings and links from other websites. Pages that bring visitors or have links pointing to them should be kept or merged into a better page, never simply deleted. Thin or outdated pages can be combined or removed, with a redirect to the closest relevant page. This one spreadsheet is the backbone of a safe redesign.

• Export all URLs from your sitemap or a crawler
• Add traffic from Google Analytics and clicks from Search Console
• Mark each page: keep, improve, merge or remove
• Note the new URL for every page that moves

Redirects: the part you cannot skip

Every old URL that changes needs a permanent 301 redirect to its new home. Without redirects, visitors and search engines hit error pages, and rankings built over years can drop within weeks. Google explains the process in its guide to site moves with URL changes. If you are also changing platform, our website migration SEO checklist covers the extra steps.

Measure before and after

Record your key numbers before the redesign: organic traffic, top ranking pages, enquiries per month, conversion rate and page speed. Compare them two, four and eight weeks after launch. A short dip is normal while Google recrawls the site, but a steady drop means something is wrong, usually missing redirects, blocked pages or lost content.

Use the redesign to fix the basics

A redesign is the perfect time to fix problems that are hard to fix later: slow page templates, a confusing menu, missing service pages and weak calls to action. Build speed in from the start by following the advice in our guide to Core Web Vitals, and plan pages around what customers actually search for. If you want a team to handle the whole process, our website redesign service includes content mapping, redirects and post-launch monitoring, and our web design process is built to protect your rankings.

Questions to ask your agency

• How will you protect our current rankings?
• Who creates the redirect map, and can we see it?
• How will you test speed before launch?
• What happens if something breaks after launch?
• Who owns the site, domain and logins when the project ends?

Clear answers to these questions are a good sign. Vague answers are a warning. Our guide to website costs has more questions to ask before you hire anyone.

If you would rather hand the whole checklist to someone else, our website redesign service follows every step, including the redirect map and launch monitoring. Moving platforms at the same time? See our website migration SEO checklist.

Ready to budget? Read how much a website redesign costs, try the website redesign cost calculator or see our website redesign services.

Frequently asked questions

Key takeaways

The businesses that do well here are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that get the basics right, measure what changes and keep going month after month. If you would like a second pair of eyes on your own site, get a free website audit or talk to us.