Website redesign checklist: what to do before, during and after

A website redesign should make a business more money. Too often it just makes the site look different, and sometimes it makes things worse: enquiries dip, Google rankings slide, and the old contact form that quietly worked is replaced by one that does not.

Nearly all of those problems are avoidable with a bit of preparation. This website redesign checklist covers what to do before, during and after a redesign, for a small local business or a larger company. Use it whether you are doing it yourself or working with a designer.

Before: decide why you are redesigning

“It looks dated” is a fair reason, but on its own it leads to a prettier version of the same problems. Write down what you want the new site to change. Useful goals are specific and measurable:

• More enquiries, calls or bookings from the same traffic.
• Ranking for services or areas you currently do not appear for.
• Fewer time-wasting enquiries through clearer prices and scope.
• Being able to update the site yourself.
• Faster, mobile-friendly pages that pass Core Web Vitals.
• Supporting a new service, location or business direction.
• Getting off a platform or contract that no longer suits you.

Before: record your baseline

You cannot tell whether the new site is better unless you know how the old one performed. Before anything changes, collect and save:

• Monthly visits and top pages from your analytics for the last 12 months.
• Search queries, clicks and top pages from Google Search Console, exported to a spreadsheet.
• Enquiries, calls and bookings per month, however you count them.
• Rankings for your ten most important searches, noted by hand if you have no tool.
• Your Google Business Profile insights, since website changes can affect it.
• A full list of every URL on the old site, from your sitemap or a crawl tool.
• A complete backup of the old site, kept safely after launch.

Before: audit what already works

Some pages on your old site are quietly doing a lot of work: a service page that ranks well, a blog post that brings in visitors every month, a pricing page people read before calling. Identify them from your analytics and Search Console exports and mark them as “keep and improve”, not “start again”.

Also list what customers ask about most on the phone. Those questions are gaps the new content should fill.

Look at the old site’s weak spots with the same care. Which pages have visitors but no enquiries? Where do people drop off? Which services do you want more of but barely mention? A redesign is the cheapest moment to fix these, because everything is being rewritten anyway. Write the findings into the brief so the designer is solving real problems rather than just restyling.

During: content and structure

• Plan the page list first: homepage, one page per main service, area pages where relevant, about, reviews or work, prices, contact.
• Write or rewrite the words before the design is finished, so the design fits the content rather than the other way round.
• Keep the content that ranks. Improve it, but do not throw away the topics and phrases Google already associates with you.
• Map every old URL to its closest new equivalent in a spreadsheet: old address, new address, and whether it stays the same or needs a redirect.
• Write titles and meta descriptions for every page.
• Collect real photos and up-to-date reviews.
• Check the legal basics: business details, privacy notice, cookie setup, accessibility.

During: design and build

• Design mobile first. Most small business visitors arrive on phones.
• Put the main call to action in the first screen of every key page.
• Keep URLs the same wherever you sensibly can; it removes most migration risk.
• Build on a staging address that search engines cannot index.
• Compress images and check page speed before launch, not after.
• Set up analytics and conversion tracking on the new site in advance.
• Build to WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility from the start.

Launch day checklist

After: the first eight weeks

Some movement in rankings after a redesign is normal while Google recrawls the site. What matters is the trend and whether errors are being fixed. For the first two weeks, check Search Console every few days for crawl errors, pages returning 404 and pages dropping out of the index, and fix any missing redirects as you find them.

After four to eight weeks, compare traffic, rankings and, most importantly, enquiries against your baseline. If a page that used to bring visitors has dropped away, compare the old and new versions: often useful content or a key phrase was removed in the rewrite.

Keep redirects in place for the long term. Google’s own guidance is to keep them for at least a year, and ideally indefinitely, because old links elsewhere on the web keep pointing to the old addresses.

The one-page redesign checklist

A redesign is the moment most businesses either gain or lose ground in search, and it is mostly down to process. When Nerdsharks redesigns a site, the URL map and redirects are agreed before launch, so the new site starts with everything the old one had earned.

• Written goals for the redesign.
• Baseline exported: analytics, Search Console, enquiries, rankings.
• Full list of old URLs and a backup of the old site.
• Pages that work identified and kept.
• Content written before design is final.
• Every old URL mapped to a new one or kept the same.
• Built on a non-indexed staging site.
• Speed, accessibility and mobile checked before launch.
• Launch-day checks completed.
• Search Console monitored for eight weeks and results compared with baseline.