The Website Redesign Checklist We Actually Use With Clients

Here's a redesign that fails almost every time: someone decides the site "looks dated," a designer refreshes the colors and fonts, and six weeks later the exact same conversion problems are wearing a new outfit. A redesign has to change more than what people see. It has to fix why they're leaving.

This is the checklist we actually walk through with clients before touching a single pixel.

1. Get everyone aligned on the actual business job first

• What's the primary conversion: a demo booked, a call scheduled, a purchase, an application?
• Which audiences matter most, ranked by revenue impact, not by who complains loudest internally
• What has to be true within the first screen someone sees
• What does "this redesign worked" actually mean, 90 days after launch

2. Audit before anyone opens Figma

• Analytics: which pages actually bring people in, which pages lose them, how the device split looks
• Search Console: queries you already rank for, and the ones you're one push away from winning
• A content inventory: what to keep, what to merge, what to kill outright, what needs a full rewrite
• Technical debt: old plugins, scripts nobody remembers adding, anything causing layout shift
• What competitors own in search results that you currently don't

3. Map information architecture and SEO redirects before design freezes

Every important URL needs a mapped destination before the visual design is finalized, not after. Plan your 301 redirects, update internal links across the whole site, and don't retire a page with real search equity unless you have something genuinely better to put in its place.

4. Content and the design system, together

• Write real page outlines before artboards start multiplying in Figma
• Lock down type, spacing, reusable components, and CMS modules early
• Design the empty states and error states too, not just the pretty hero shots

5. Set performance and accessibility budgets up front

• Set real LCP, INP, and CLS targets, tested on a mid-tier phone, not your dev machine
• Decide your image policy now: sizing rules, formats, what gets priority loading
• Check keyboard navigation paths and color contrast before launch, not after a complaint

Treat these as revenue targets, because that's what they are. Google's Core Web Vitals case studies record Vodafone improving LCP by 31% and taking 8% more sales, with no design or content changes at all. If your redesign ships slower than the site it replaced, which happens more often than agencies like to admit, you've paid good money for a downgrade with a nicer typeface.

It cuts the other way too. Lindgaard and colleagues, in a paper cheerfully titled "Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression" (Behaviour & Information Technology, 2006), found that visual appeal judgements form in roughly 50 milliseconds and then barely shift. Both halves of that matter. The page has to arrive fast, and what arrives has to look credible straight away.

6. Build, QA, and actually launch it properly

• Staging should match production integrations exactly, not a simplified version of them
• Test every redirect, every metadata tag, the sitemap, and robots.txt before going live
• Confirm analytics and conversion events are firing correctly, not just installed
• Have a rollback plan and watch things closely for the first week

Common questions

How long does a website redesign actually take?

Usually 6 to 14 weeks for a mid-market marketing site, assuming content shows up when it's supposed to. It rarely does, which is why this range is wide.

Will a redesign hurt my SEO?

It can, if URLs change carelessly and nobody maps redirects. Done properly, with a redirect map and real content continuity, redesigns tend to improve search performance rather than hurt it.

Planning a redesign you cannot afford to get wrong? The redirect map and content audit are where most rebuilds quietly lose their rankings. We handle replatforming and migrations with that built into the plan rather than bolted on after launch. Talk through your rebuild.