Website redesign checklist for business owners

1. The goal is written as an outcome: more enquiries of a specific kind, faster, from a specific audience — not “modern look and feel”. 2. The audiences are named, and their first question on arriving is known — the purchase engineer wants capabilities and tolerances, the patient wants the doctor and the number, the distributor wants the range and the margin. 3. The pages that must exist for those audiences are listed, and the first screen of each is described in a sentence before any design. 4. The measure is agreed: the numbers from the readiness step, and the date three months after launch on which you will compare.

A redesign that cannot pass item 1 is a refresh, and a refresh is cheaper: keep the structure, fix the speed, rewrite the first screens.

5. Every page on the current site is listed with its traffic and its enquiries for the last year, so you know which pages earn and which are dead. 6. Every URL that receives search traffic or is linked from elsewhere is recorded, with the page it will become on the new site — and a redirect planned for each one that changes. This is the item that, skipped, loses years of search rankings in a week. 7. Every integration is listed: the enquiry form’s destination, the CRM, the WhatsApp link, the analytics, call tracking, the booking system, the payment gateway. Each must work on launch day, and each needs an owner. 8. The content is audited: what is reused, what is rewritten, what is new — and who writes it, because the developer will not, and content is where redesigns stall for months.

Ask the agency for the redirect plan in writing before the design starts. If they do not know what a redirect plan is, that is your answer.

9. Scope is written down as the list of pages and functions from items 3 and 7, and anything added later is a priced change, not a favour. 10. Approvals happen at three gates — structure, design of two template pages, full build — with a named approver and a two-day turnaround at each, so the project does not wait on the owner’s travel. 11. Migration and testing are planned: the redirects tested one by one, every form submitted and received, every phone link tapped on a phone, the site loaded on a cheap Android on 4G, the analytics and call tracking confirmed live — all before the DNS changes. 12. Launch is on a Tuesday morning with the old site kept ready to restore, and someone watching enquiries and search rankings daily for the first month.

The items in 11 take a day and prevent the two most common post-launch disasters: the form that silently stopped sending, and the rankings that vanished with the URLs.

The mistakes: redesigning because a competitor did; choosing the agency on the mock-up rather than on the redirect plan and the migration checklist; letting design run ahead of content, so the beautiful template is filled with placeholder text for four months; adding features — a chatbot, animations, a portal — that nobody asked for and that slow the site; and declaring victory at launch rather than at the three-month comparison. A safeguard: if the agency has not asked for your analytics and your current URL list in the first meeting, they are designing, not rebuilding.

It worked if, three months after launch, enquiries per hundred visitors are up, search traffic is at or above the old level, the site is faster on a phone, and the team can update a page without a developer. If any of those is down, the checklist tells you which item was skipped. This is the website-redesign work we do; the inventory, the redirect plan and the testing are the parts of it that owners never see and that decide the outcome.