Website redesign: the checklist.

Why planning matters

Most redesign problems are decided before any design work begins: unclear goals, missing content, and old pages that quietly disappear along with the search traffic they earned. A short planning phase prevents all three.

Before you start (steps 1–5)

1. Set measurable goals. More enquiries, more sales, faster pages, fewer support questions — pick two or three and write down today’s numbers.
2. Record your baseline. Save current traffic, top pages, conversion rate and page speed so you can compare after launch.
3. Audit your content. List every page and mark it keep, improve, merge or remove.
4. List the pages that bring traffic. Your analytics and search console show which URLs earn visits and links — these must survive the redesign.
5. Talk to your users and team. Sales and support know exactly what customers ask; their answers should shape the new structure.

Protect your SEO (steps 6–8)

6. Keep URLs where you can. Changing a URL resets some of what it has earned.
7. Map 301 redirects from every old URL that changes to its closest new page — never just to the home page.
8. Carry over the essentials: page titles, meta descriptions, headings, image alt text and structured data.

During the build (steps 9–10)

9. Design mobile-first and test on real phones, not only a resized browser.
10. Budget for speed: compress images, limit heavy scripts and check page performance before launch.

After launch (steps 11–12)

11. Test everything on launch day: forms, redirects, tracking, payment flows and broken links.
12. Monitor for 30–60 days: compare against your baseline, watch for crawl errors and fix issues quickly.