Notes for owners · Websites and conversion
A website redesign checklist for business owners
Before you redesign, find out what the current site produces, then protect your rankings, pages and enquiry tracking through the change.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
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Before you change anything, find out what the current site actually produces: which pages bring visitors, which pages produce enquiries, what people search to reach you, and where they leave. Redesign against those facts. Then protect three things through the change: every page address, every piece of text that is already ranking, and your enquiry tracking. Most redesigns that go wrong lose traffic and enquiries not because the new design is worse but because someone deleted pages and forgot the redirects.
Before you begin: find out what you have
Spend a week on this and the redesign gets easier and cheaper.
Pull a list of every page on the current site and the traffic each one received in the last twelve months. Most businesses discover that a handful of pages, often an old article or a specific product page, carry most of the visitors.
Pull the search terms bringing people in. These tell you the words your buyers use, which should become your page names.
Count the enquiries by route: form, phone number tapped on the site, WhatsApp link, email. If you cannot count them, that is the first thing the redesign must fix.
Find the pages people leave from. A high exit rate on a product page usually means the page does not answer the price or the specification question.
Ask your sales team which page they send prospects to. If the answer is "the homepage", you have a structure problem rather than a design problem.
Decide what the site is for, in one sentence
Write it down and hold the project to it. "Bring enquiries for our four machine models from purchase managers in south India." "Get patients to book a consultation for implants and aligners." "Let apartment associations understand our AMC and call us."
Everything else, the team photographs, the awards, the mission statement, is secondary. A redesign without this sentence becomes an argument about colours.
The checklist
| Stage | What to do | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Measure | Export page traffic, search terms, enquiry counts by route | You cannot judge the new site without a baseline |
| Inventory | List every existing page address in a sheet | This becomes your redirect map |
| Structure | Decide the page for each thing you sell, named as buyers say it | Structure produces enquiries, layout does not |
| Content | Write or rewrite the text before any design work | Design built around real text does not need filler |
| Proof | Gather real photographs, named people, customer names you may use, reviews | Proof is what makes a page credible |
| Enquiry paths | Decide the form fields, the phone number, the WhatsApp link, who owns each | Otherwise the new site leaks enquiries quietly |
| Redirects | Map every old address to its closest new one, one to one | This is where rankings are lost |
| Technical | Mobile layout, speed under three seconds, correct titles, sitemap, HTTPS | Machines and phones both judge these |
| Tracking | Analytics, conversion events per enquiry route, call tracking if you use one | Without it you cannot tell whether the redesign worked |
| Test before launch | Every form, every phone link, every page on a real phone on mobile data | Most launch faults are found in five minutes of this |
| After launch | Check for broken links and missing pages weekly for a month | Problems show up in week two, not on day one |
| Judge | Compare enquiries by route against the baseline at 60 and 90 days | Traffic can dip while enquiries rise, which is a success |
The three things that go wrong most often
Pages deleted with no redirect. An old address that ranked for a specific search now returns an error, and both the ranking and the visitors go. Every old address needs a destination, even if it is a close relative rather than an exact match.
Content thinned for visual cleanliness. A designer replaces eight hundred words of specification with a headline and an icon. The page looks better and stops appearing in search, because the detail that earned it was the specification.
Tracking not carried over. The new site launches without analytics or with conversion events missing, so nobody can say whether the redesign worked and the argument runs on opinion for a year.
What does this look like in practice?
For example, a machine tool accessories maker in Peenya, Bengaluru with an old site of about forty pages, including eleven product pages with detailed specifications that had accumulated rankings over years. The owner wanted a modern site and an agency proposed a clean eight-page structure.
Checking the traffic first changed the plan. Nine of the eleven product pages were producing the enquiries, mostly from purchase managers searching for a part specification, and the homepage was producing almost none. The redesign kept all eleven pages, kept their addresses, kept every specification table, and improved the layout and the speed. Four new pages were added for products that had no page at all.
The visual change the owner wanted was delivered. The enquiries, an illustrative average of around forty a month, held through the launch week instead of collapsing, because nothing that was working had been removed. The 90-day comparison showed enquiries up, driven by the four new pages rather than by the new look.
What to do next
Before you brief anyone, export your page list, your traffic and your enquiry counts, and write the one sentence saying what the site is for. Take both into your first meeting. If the person proposing the redesign does not ask for them, that tells you something useful.
