Website Redesign Checklist: What to Prepare Before You Start
A website redesign can improve how clearly you explain your services, support mobile visitors and turn interest into enquiries. It can also disrupt search visibility or daily operations if important content, links or accounts are overlooked. This website redesign checklist helps your team prepare the information and decisions needed before design and development begin.
Define the business reason for redesigning
List the problems the project should solve. Are customers missing key services? Is the site difficult to update? Does the mobile layout make forms hard to use? Are several pages outdated or duplicated? Choose a few priorities that can guide decisions and help you assess whether the redesign is successful.
Record a baseline before changes start. Note important page visits, search traffic, enquiries, sales, top landing pages and common support questions. The numbers are not a guarantee of future performance, but they help you understand what the current site already does well and what may need attention.
Identify the pages and journeys that matter
Map the route a visitor takes to complete an important task: find a service, compare options, request a quote, book an appointment or buy a product. Identify pages that support each step and any points where customers get confused. Use sales and support feedback as well as analytics to understand real needs.
Create a page inventory with titles, URLs, owners and status. Mark content to keep, update, combine or retire. This helps prevent an important resource from disappearing during a design change and gives the team a realistic view of content work.
Gather content, brand assets and approvals
Collect current service descriptions, product details, staff information, contact data, policies, images, logos and brand guidelines. Check usage rights for photographs and illustrations. Decide who will write or approve content and allow enough time for review. A design team cannot accurately lay out information that has not been supplied or agreed.
Prepare examples of websites you like, but explain what you like about each one—navigation, tone, layout or functionality. This gives the team useful direction without asking them to copy another company’s work.
Protect search visibility during the change
Keep a record of existing page URLs and identify the pages that attract visits or links. If a URL must change, plan a relevant redirect and verify it after launch. Preserve useful page content and internal links, update metadata where appropriate and check that the new site can be crawled and indexed as intended.
A website migration SEO plan should include redirects, canonical settings, XML sitemaps, indexation controls, analytics and search console access. Search performance can change for many reasons, so no redesign can guarantee that rankings remain identical. Careful planning reduces avoidable technical loss and supports a smoother transition.
Confirm technical ownership and access
List the registrar, hosting, content management system, email, analytics, forms, payment systems and third-party integrations. Confirm who can provide access, who owns each account and whether any credentials need to be updated. Keep the business in control of the domain and administrator accounts.
Ask the designer how staging, backups, security updates and data migration will work. Identify business-critical integrations early; a booking calendar or CRM connection can affect scope and testing.
Plan testing and launch responsibilities
Agree who checks the site on phones, tablets and desktop browsers. Test navigation, forms, calls to action, search, payment or booking flows, accessibility and page performance. Set a process for reporting issues and agree which ones must be fixed before launch.
Create a website launch checklist with owners and timing: backup the old site, prepare the release, confirm redirects, review analytics, test key forms, monitor errors and communicate changes to staff. Decide who can approve the final switch and what recovery plan exists if an essential feature fails.
Plan for life after launch
Arrange training so your team can update content safely. Clarify ongoing hosting, maintenance, support and content responsibilities. Schedule a review after launch to compare the new experience with the goals you set, gather customer feedback and prioritise improvements.
IGotOnline’s professional team can guide a redesign from planning through launch, protecting important content while improving the customer journey. Explore our web design and development service or contact the team to start with a clear plan.
