Quick Summary: Before beginning a website redesign use an outline of 12 items to assist you in completing this task. These include: review your present (and past) analytics data; run a technical crawl; document your URL structure; set specific and measurable goals; complete a content audit; plan how to migrate your SEO; and test completely prior to launching the site. Skipping many of these steps – particularly mapping URLs and migrating SEO – generally results in destroying years of building rankings and traffic.
Designing a website is fun – new layout, new features, new beginning. However, redesigns which go straight to designing and never plan first cause as much destruction as they build. Rankings fall off the map. The number-one pages on your site are accidentally deleted. Your conversion pathways get broken. And while it takes several months to correct the damage done, traffic falls through the floor.
That’s why we created this check list. Use these twelve steps before touching an ounce of code; and your redesign will be improved upon instead of set back.
Before You Start Messing Around With Everything: Audit What You Currently Have
Step 1: Audit Your Current Analytics
Go into Google Analytics (now GA4) and find out what is currently working. Get a year’s worth of data pulled and note your top twenty pages by traffic, your major conversion pathways (i.e., how users come from entering your site to filling out your contact form or making a purchase), your best converting pages (these are holy cows – keep them safe), your top traffic sources, and the benchmark values for your bounce rate and average session length.
Your redesign should make improvements over these numbers – not ignore them. What you don’t measure, you can’t improve. What you don’t define, you can’t protect.
Step 2: Run a Technical Scan
Run a technical scan using tools such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Sitebulb or others. Identify all the broken links (404 errors) on your site, redirects that could result in lost traffic due to having too many redirects chained together, pages that are missing meta titles or meta descriptions, duplicate content, slow loading pages, and orphaned pages where there are no internal links linking to the page.
There are some items here that are problems that need to be fixed during the redesign process. There are other items here that are warnings — If you have a page with a broken link and that same page is also your #3 most trafficked page, then you need to address those two items very cautiously.
Step 3: Note Down Your Current URLs
This is probably the biggest mistake people make with redesigns. This is the item that results in the most damage. Export every single URL on your existing site. Every one of them. In addition to exporting the URL itself include the title of each page, how much traffic each receives, and any external backlinks pointing to each page.
When you change any part of a URL — regardless of whether it is slight — you need to have a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL. If you miss a redirect and lose the search engine optimization (SEO) value that the original page has established over years, then you will regret it.
Set Up Your Goals: Not Just “Make It Modern”
Step 4: Establish Quantifiable Objectives
We want a modern looking website” is NOT a goal. That is a preference. Goals should look something like this: Increase Contact Form Submissions by 30% within Six Months; Reduce Bounce Rate On Service Pages From 65% To Below 45%; Improve Mobile Conversion Rate By 25 Percent; Achieve A Page Speed Score Of Above 90 For All Key Pages.
If you cannot quantify it, then you cannot prove that the redesign was worth investing in. Before you begin the project establish measurable success criteria.
Step 5: Review Your Target Audience
Is your target audience different today than it was when your last site redesign took place? Perhaps you’ve expanded into new markets. Or perhaps your customers’ profiles have changed. Different audience segments may require different approaches to meet their different device requirements, different expectations. Do not design based on who your target audience was three years ago when the last site was launched.
Step 6: Evaluate Your Competition
What does your top three to five competitors do particularly well online? What opportunities exist for you to capitalize on the areas where they fall short? Take a closer look at their site architecture, their overall approach to content creation, their calls-to-action, and their design quality. You do not wish to replicate their actions; rather, you seek to determine the baseline expectations in your industry and surpass them.
Plan the Redesign
Step 7: Conduct a Content Audit
Content is the #1 most neglected aspect of a redesign. Take a look at every page and classify every piece of content into categories; keep as-is (still works well, still good information), keep but update (topic was good, just needs some freshness), merge (there were multiple poor pages that can now make one solid page), remove (is outdated, has no relevance, has little to no value as a performer).
Design should be built off the content and not the opposite. Decide on the content you will use, what the content will say, and organize the content BEFORE opening any design tools.
Step 8: Plan Information Architecture
Now take your categorized content and build a new sitemap. Develop the primary navigation, secondary navigation, footer links, and how do pages connect to each other. Next, develop user flows for your key conversion paths – how many clicks does it take for a user to go from the homepage to completing a contact form in the least number of, most intuitive steps possible?
Step 9: Determine What Technology to Use
Do you want to stay on your existing CMS? Do you need to move to a different CMS? Should you remain on WordPress but completely rebuild the theme from scratch? Are you going to go with a headless architecture?
Your choice of technology should be made based on your specific needs: editing capabilities for your content, desired performance levels, integrations required, budget, and what kind of future maintenance will be involved. For a side-by-side comparison of various technology stacks see our article on choosing the right technology stack.
Step 10: Plan Your SEO Migration
Non-negotiable. Your SEO migration plan should outline a complete URL mapping document (old URL > new URL), implement 301 redirects for every URL that is changing, establish a plan for maintaining meta titles and descriptions on those pages that perform well, determine your canonical URL strategy, and plan for when you will submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console upon launching.
If your agency does not have an SEO migration plan included in their redesign proposal ask them why they did not include one – and view it as a warning sign if they dismiss it.
Execute Without Breaking Anything
Step 11: Construct on a Staging Site
You should never redesign a live site. Always construct your new site in a staging environment — a private version of your site which is not available to either search engines or the public. A staging environment gives you the opportunity to build, test and perfect your new site without having any risk to your current site’s traffic or function.
Staging sites should be prevented from being crawled by search engines (using robots.txt and meta noindex) so that once you start building your pages, they cannot find and index your incomplete pages.
Step 12: Run a Pre-Launch Checklist
Prior to your staging site going live, check everything. Does every page load properly on desktop, tablet and/or mobile. Do all forms submit and send notifications. Do all links function (no 404s)? Have you verified that all redirects are in place and functioning. Do all tracking codes fire in analytics on every page. Has your page speed reached the performance metrics you established? Is your SSL certificate enabled? Are favicon and social sharing image settings correct? Do accessibility basics pass an automatic scan? And backup of your original site safely stored.
Post-Deployment: There Is Still More To Be Done
The first 30 days post-launch require regular attention. Monitor Google Search Console for crawl errors, indexing issues, and any rank drops. Review analytics daily during the first week to detect any unexpected shifts in traffic. Verify all forms and conversion paths operate properly under actual user conditions. Address any gaps in redirects that surface in 404 logs.
Create an ongoing maintenance program to ensure your newly redesigned site continues to run optimally. Security patches, performance enhancements, content refreshes, and ongoing technical checks are mandatory – these activities are necessary to preserve the integrity of your redesign investment over time. Our sister service Deutrix Care handles exactly this.
Need help planning your redesign? We will audit your current site, identify what to protect, and build a redesign plan that improves performance instead of risking it. Talk to our team →
For the complete picture on custom web design, read our Complete Guide to Custom Web Design in 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
A typical redesign usually takes anywhere from eight to sixteen weeks after the project has been launched. The time frame is based upon the site’s level of complexity, whether or not the site’s content is ready to be put into production, and the approval process. Brochure-style websites are typically easier and less expensive than e-commerce or custom applications.
If your redesign includes a properly planned SEO migration then no, you should not lose your search engine ranking. However, there could be slight fluctuations in rankings over the first two to four weeks while Google is crawling through your newly designed site. If done correctly though, your rankings should recover within thirty days of the launch date and often improve due to improved performance and other factors related to your redesigned site.
A phased redesign is lower-risk but slower. A phased design approach would make sense if you have a large and/or complex site and want to redesign it section-by-section. Most business sites are best served by a single launch after proper testing.
