♞Websites
Website Redesign Checklist: What to Do Before, During and After Launch
Short answer: A website redesign checklist covers three stages. Before: set goals, record baseline traffic and enquiries, and export every URL. During: audit content, plan structure, design mobile first and test on a private staging site. After: launch with 301 redirects, submit the sitemap and monitor Search Console, forms and speed for 30 days.
Most redesigns that go wrong do not fail because of the design. They fail because something small was missed: a contact form that stopped sending, a popular page that now returns a 404, tracking that was never reinstalled. Each one quietly costs enquiries for weeks before anyone notices.
This is the checklist we use on our own website redesign projects, split into before, during and after launch. Work through it in order and you protect what already works while you improve what does not.
Before you start: set goals and take a baseline
Write down why you are redesigning
Be specific. "It looks dated" is a reason, but "people visit the services page and leave without enquiring" is a goal you can design for and measure. If you are not sure the site needs a full redesign, our list of signs a website needs a redesign helps you decide between a redesign and a set of targeted fixes.
Pick two or three outcomes, such as more quote requests, fewer support emails asking the same question, or faster pages on mobile. Everything later in the project should serve those outcomes.
Record your baseline numbers
You cannot prove a redesign worked without a before picture. Export at least the last 12 months of:
- Sessions and top landing pages from your analytics tool (in Google Analytics 4, also export your key events such as form submissions or purchases).
- Top pages and top queries from Google Search Console, with clicks and impressions.
- Enquiry or sales volume by month from your inbox, CRM or shop.
- Core Web Vitals and mobile speed for your main templates.
Export every URL on the current site
Crawl the site with a crawler tool, and combine that list with URLs from your XML sitemap, Search Console and analytics. Crawls miss orphaned pages that nothing links to, but those pages can still have traffic and backlinks. This combined list becomes your URL map later.
Audit your content: keep, improve, merge or remove
Go through the URL list page by page and give each one a decision. This is the step most teams rush, and it is the one that shapes both the sitemap and the SEO plan.
| Decision | When to use it | What happens to the URL |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | Page gets traffic or enquiries and the content is still accurate | Keep the same URL if you can; if not, 301 redirect to its new address |
| Improve | Page ranks or gets visits but the content is thin or out of date | Rewrite on the new site, keep or redirect the URL |
| Merge | Several weak pages cover the same topic | Combine into one stronger page and redirect the old URLs to it |
| Remove | No traffic, no links, no business value | Return a 404 or 410, or redirect only if a genuinely relevant page exists |
While you audit, note which pages earn backlinks from other sites. Those URLs need a redirect to the closest matching page, never a dead end.
Plan the structure and the pages that matter
With the content decisions made, sketch the new sitemap. Keep navigation short and name pages the way your customers search, for example "Kitchen fitting in Leeds" rather than "Solutions". Our guide to essential small business website pages covers what each core page should contain.
Then wireframe the key templates before any visual design: homepage, service or product page, about, contact, and blog post. Decide what goes in the first screen of each. Our post on what to put above the fold walks through the headline, proof and call to action that should appear there.
Gather what the build needs
- Brand assets: logo files, colours, fonts and photography. If the brand itself is inconsistent, fix that first with a light brand identity pass so the new site is not built on shaky foundations.
- Final copy for every page, written before design rather than poured in afterwards.
- Access details: domain registrar, DNS, hosting, analytics, Search Console, email provider and any third-party tools.
During design and build: what to check
Design checks
- Design mobile first. Check your own analytics for the share of visits on phones, then design the layout for that screen first and scale up.
- Check text contrast. WCAG 2.2 level AA asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Our guide on choosing brand colours explains how to test this.
- Make buttons and links easy to tap. WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum target size of 24 by 24 CSS pixels, and bigger is kinder.
- Keep one clear primary action per page, styled the same way across the whole site.
Build checks
- Build on a staging site protected by a password. Password protection is the reliable way to keep a staging site out of search results; a robots.txt rule alone does not guarantee it.
- Compress and size images properly, and use modern formats such as WebP where your platform supports them.
- Test every form end to end: submission, confirmation message, the email that arrives and the spam folder.
- Reinstall analytics, tag manager, cookie consent, pixels and chat widgets, then confirm each fires on staging.
- Write a unique title tag and meta description for every page you are keeping or rewriting.
How do you protect SEO in a website redesign?
If URLs stay the same, the risk is mostly content and internal links. If URLs change, Google treats it as a site move, and its Search Central documentation is clear on the essentials:
- Map every old URL to a new one. Start with the pages that get the most traffic and links.
- Use server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308) and point each old URL straight to its final destination, with no chains.
- Do not redirect everything to the homepage. Google advises against sending many old URLs to an irrelevant page.
- Keep redirects in place for a long time: Google says generally at least one year, and we leave them indefinitely where possible.
- Update internal links, canonical tags and the XML sitemap so they use the new URLs directly.
Search engine guidance changes from time to time. Check Google Search Central’s current site move documentation before you launch.
Launch day checklist
Launch early in the week, at a quiet time, with someone available to fix problems. Avoid launching just before a holiday or a big sale.
- Take a full backup of the old site, files and database, and keep it.
- Remove the staging password and any noindex settings from the live site. It is easy to miss and it can keep the whole site out of search results.
- Switch on the redirects and test a sample of old URLs, including the top 20 by traffic.
- Confirm HTTPS works on every page and that the www and non-www versions redirect to one version.
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
- Submit a real enquiry through every form and place a test order if you sell online.
- Check the site on at least one iPhone, one Android phone and a desktop browser.
After launch: the first 30 days
Google warns that rankings can fluctuate while it recrawls a moved site, and that for a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more for new URLs to show. Expect some movement, and watch for problems you can fix.
What to monitor
- Search Console: the Pages report for new 404 errors and pages that dropped out of the index, plus the Performance report compared with your baseline.
- Analytics: traffic to your top landing pages and whether key events are still recording.
- Enquiries: compare weekly enquiry counts with the same weeks before launch.
- Speed: Core Web Vitals for your main templates.
| Metric | What it measures | Good threshold |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | How quickly the main content loads | 2.5 seconds or less |
| INP | How quickly the page responds to taps and clicks | 200 milliseconds or less |
| CLS | How much the layout jumps while loading | 0.1 or less |
Google assesses these at the 75th percentile of page loads, so a page should hit the threshold for most visitors, not only on your fast office connection.
From our projects: keep a shared launch log. Every redirect added, every form tested and every fix made goes in one list with a date. When a client asks why a page dipped in week two, the answer is usually already written down.
Checklist: website redesign at a glance
- Goals written down, with two or three measurable outcomes
- 12 months of analytics, Search Console and enquiry data exported
- Complete list of current URLs from crawl, sitemap, Search Console and analytics
- Every page given a keep, improve, merge or remove decision
- New sitemap and key page wireframes signed off
- Final copy written before visual design
- Designs checked for mobile, contrast and tap target size
- Staging site password protected
- Forms, tracking and integrations tested on staging
- URL map complete, with 301 redirects to relevant pages only
- Old site backed up
- Noindex and staging password removed at launch
- New sitemap submitted in Search Console
- 404s, rankings, enquiries and Core Web Vitals checked weekly for 30 days
Questions
How long does a website redesign take?
For a small business site with 10 to 30 pages, a redesign commonly takes several weeks to a few months. The biggest variables are how quickly copy and feedback arrive, how many custom features are needed, and how much content has to be rewritten or migrated.
Will a website redesign hurt my SEO?
It can if URLs change without redirects, if pages that ranked are removed, or if the new site launches with noindex still switched on. With a full URL map, permanent 301 redirects, preserved content and post-launch monitoring, the risk is small. Google notes that some ranking fluctuation is normal while it recrawls a moved site.
Should I keep the same URLs when I redesign?
Yes, wherever the current URLs are clean and sensible. Keeping URLs removes the biggest SEO risk in a redesign. Only change them when the old structure is genuinely confusing, and then redirect every old URL to its closest new equivalent.
What should I do immediately after launching a new website?
Test the top old URLs to confirm redirects work, submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console, send a test enquiry through every form, check analytics is recording, and confirm the site is not set to noindex. Then review Search Console for errors weekly for the first month.
When is a redesign better than small fixes?
A redesign makes sense when problems are structural: the site is hard to update, does not work well on mobile, no longer matches your brand or services, or the navigation confuses visitors. If only a few pages underperform, targeted fixes are usually faster and safer.