The website redesign checklist: 14 things to do before you relaunch
Redesigns go wrong in a specific, predictable way: the new site looks better and the phone goes quiet. Here's the checklist that prevents it.
A redesign is not a fresh start. Your current site has history — pages Google trusts, links pointing at specific URLs, and usually one or two suburb or service pages quietly generating most of your calls. Throw that away and you can spend six months climbing back to where you already were.
This checklist keeps what is working, fixes what is not, and gets you through launch without a traffic cliff.
Before you design anything (1–5)
1. Write down what the redesign is for
“It looks dated” is a symptom, not a goal. Pick one or two measurable objectives: more enquiries per month, fewer price-shopping phone calls, the ability to update it yourself, better mobile experience. Every later decision gets judged against these — which is how you avoid a redesign that is merely different.
2. Record your baseline numbers
Export before anything changes, because after launch you will want to prove the direction of travel. Capture:
- Monthly sessions and where they come from
- Your top 20 pages by traffic
- Conversion rate: form submissions and phone taps as a percentage of visits
- Top search queries and average position from Search Console
- Current mobile and desktop PageSpeed scores
Screenshot it all. Baselines have a habit of becoming unavailable exactly when you need them.
3. Crawl the existing site and inventory every URL
You cannot redirect what you do not know exists. A crawler will surface old landing pages, orphaned PDFs, duplicate service pages and a blog post from 2019 that turns out to be your third most visited page.
Put every URL in a spreadsheet with its traffic, rankings and inbound links. This document becomes your redirect map later.
4. Decide keep / rewrite / merge / kill for every page
Go through the inventory line by line:
- Keep: it ranks and converts — carry it across, ideally at the same URL
- Rewrite: the topic works, the execution does not
- Merge: three thin pages on the same subject become one strong one
- Kill: genuinely obsolete — and it still needs a redirect
5. Plan the new structure around how people search
Navigation should mirror the way customers describe their problem, not your internal org chart. One page per service, named the way people actually search, beats a single “Services” page listing nine things. If you serve several distinct areas, plan genuine location pages with real, specific content — not the same paragraph with the town name swapped.
While the new site is being built (6–10)
6. Build the redirect map
Every old URL needs a destination: a permanent 301 redirect to the closest equivalent page. Not the homepage — that is a signal to Google that the content is gone, and it frustrates the human who clicked a specific link.
Keep the mapping in the same spreadsheet: old URL, new URL, redirect type. It is tedious, and it is the single highest-value hour in the whole project.
7. Keep your content's substance, not just its headings
Pages often rank because of depth. If a service page covering ten common questions gets trimmed to three tidy paragraphs, its rankings usually follow it down. Redesign the presentation; keep the substance and improve it.
8. Carry over titles, meta descriptions and structured data
Where a page performs well, keep its title tag close to what it was. Rewrite the ones that were weak, unique per page, describing the page rather than the business. Re-implement structured data on the new build — business details, services, FAQs, reviews and articles — because it rarely transfers automatically.
9. Set performance budgets during the build, not after
Speed is designed in, not bolted on. Agree limits before the build: image sizes, number of fonts, third-party scripts. Every chat widget, tracking pixel and review embed has a cost, and they accumulate silently.
Test on a real phone over mobile data at the halfway point. Fixing a heavy page mid-build is routine; fixing it after launch means rework.
10. Test forms, tracking and accessibility on staging
On the staging site, before launch: submit every form and confirm delivery to a real inbox, check conversion events fire, tab through each page with a keyboard, verify contrast and focus states, and confirm the staging site is blocked from search engines. That last one catches a surprising number of teams.
Launch week (11–14)
11. Take a full backup of the old site
Files, database, everything, stored somewhere you control. If something goes badly wrong, the ability to put the old site back within the hour turns a crisis into an inconvenience.
12. Go live, then immediately test the redirects
Within the first hour, spot-check every high-traffic URL from your map. Each should land on the intended page with a single 301 — no chains, no 404s, no redirect loops. Then re-crawl the live site and fix anything the crawler flags.
13. Submit the new sitemap and request indexing
Upload the fresh XML sitemap in Search Console, submit your most important pages for indexing, and confirm the robots.txt does not block anything you want crawled. Check the live site is not still carrying a “noindex” tag from staging — the single most common launch-day disaster.
14. Verify analytics is recording on every template
Load a page from each template type and confirm sessions appear in real-time reporting. Trigger a form submission and confirm the conversion event registers. Without this, the next month of data is fiction.
The first 30 days after
Expect a small, temporary dip in rankings as Google re-crawls and re-evaluates. Two to four weeks of mild turbulence is normal. A sustained drop is not — and it is almost always redirects or an accidental noindex.
- Week 1: check Search Console coverage daily for new 404s and crawl errors. Watch session recordings if you have them — people use a new site in ways you did not anticipate.
- Week 2: compare conversion rate against your baseline. If it has fallen, look first at form length, page speed and whether the primary call to action survived the redesign.
- Week 4: compare rankings to baseline. Recovery should be visible. Fix any pages that lost position by restoring depth or improving internal links to them.
Three mistakes that cost the most
- Redirecting everything to the homepage. It is fast, and it wipes out the ranking value of individual pages. Map them properly.
- Launching with staging's noindex tag still in place. Sites have vanished from search for weeks over one line of code. Check it on day one, then check again on day three.
- Designing for the owner instead of the customer. The new site will be judged by people who have never heard of you, on a phone, in a hurry. That is the only opinion that converts.
If you are weighing up whether a redesign is even the right call, start with why your website isn't getting leads — several of those fixes cost nothing. And if you want to know what a rebuild should sensibly cost, we broke it down in how much a website costs in 2026.