Website Redesign Checklist: 9 Things to Fix Before You Relaunch

A website redesign has a way of becoming a much bigger project than planned — new pages get added mid-build, “let’s also fix this” creeps in, and somewhere in the middle the original goal gets lost. Before you brief a designer or developer, it’s worth running through this checklist. Every item on it is something we’ve seen skipped on a real project, and every skip caused a problem later.

1. Write down what the site actually needs to do

Not “look more modern.” A specific job: generate a certain number of qualified enquiries a month, support a new product line, cut support tickets by answering common questions on-page. A redesign without a stated goal tends to get judged on taste alone, which is the least useful way to evaluate a business asset.

2. Audit what’s actually working on the current site

Redesigns often throw out pages that were quietly generating most of the traffic and leads, simply because they looked dated. Before anything gets rebuilt, pull your analytics and find out which pages rank, which convert, and which get the most organic traffic — then make sure whatever replaces them keeps (or improves on) those signals rather than resetting them to zero.

• Export your top 20 landing pages by organic traffic from the last 12 months.
• Note which pages have the most backlinks — those need 301 redirects if URLs change, not a fresh start.
• Flag your highest-converting page as the benchmark the new design has to beat.

3. Decide on the platform before the design, not after

WordPress, Shopify and a fully custom build all have different constraints, and designing first without knowing which one you’re building on leads to rework. E-commerce almost always points to Shopify or WooCommerce; a content-heavy marketing site usually points to WordPress or a custom stack. Pick the platform based on what the site needs to do long-term, not which one a friend recommended.

4. Plan your content before the wireframes

Designing pages around placeholder “lorem ipsum” text and then trying to fit real copy in afterwards is one of the most common causes of a redesign running over schedule. Headlines get cut short, sections get squeezed, and CTAs get lost in the scramble to make real content fit a layout designed for filler text. Write the actual copy — or at least a detailed outline — before wireframing starts.

5. Set a Core Web Vitals target, not just a “make it fast” wish

Every redesign brief says “it needs to be fast.” Few set an actual target. Decide upfront what load time and Core Web Vitals scores you’re aiming for, and hold the design and development team to it — because unoptimised images, unnecessary animation libraries and bloated page builders are usually added late in a project, exactly when nobody is watching performance anymore.

6. Don’t skip mobile testing on real devices

The majority of traffic to most sites is now mobile, but a lot of design review still happens on a widescreen monitor. Test on an actual mid-range Android phone and an iPhone, not just a resized browser window — tap targets, font sizes and load time all behave differently on real hardware than in a desktop simulator.

7. Get SEO foundations right from day one

Meta titles and descriptions, semantic heading structure, image alt text, schema markup — these are far cheaper to build in from the start than to retrofit after launch. A site that ships without them will need a second project just to catch up on SEO basics a few months later.

8. Map every redirect before you flip the switch

If URLs are changing, a full old-URL-to-new-URL redirect map is non-negotiable. Missing redirects are one of the most common causes of a sudden traffic drop after launch, and they’re entirely avoidable with an hour of planning beforehand.

9. Have a support plan for after launch

Launch day is never actually the finish line. Analytics need checking, forms need testing across browsers, and something small always needs a fix in the first few weeks. Agree on a support arrangement before launch, not in a panic afterwards when something breaks.

The best-looking redesigns we’ve seen fail commercially were the ones that treated the visual refresh as the whole project. The ones that succeeded treated design as one part of a bigger plan.

Putting it together

None of this is complicated, but it’s easy to skip when everyone is excited to see new designs. Run through this list before your next relaunch, and you’ll avoid the most common — and most expensive — mistakes we see in website redesign projects.