Website Redesign Checklist: Everything You Need Before You Start

A website redesign is not just a cosmetic exercise. Done well, it’s an opportunity to improve user experience, increase conversion rates, and strengthen your search engine performance. Done poorly, it can wipe out years of organic traffic and leave you with a site that looks better but performs worse.

This checklist covers everything you need to have in place before briefing a designer or agency. Working through it systematically will save time, reduce risk, and produce a much better outcome.

Audit What You Have Before You Touch Anything

Before any redesign, document what currently exists. Use Google Analytics or a similar tool to identify your top-performing pages by traffic and conversions. These pages need to be handled with particular care during the redesign — their URLs, content structure, and internal links should be preserved or redirected correctly.

Crawl your existing site using a tool like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs. Export a list of all URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, and heading structures. This becomes your baseline for the new site and your redirect map if URLs change.

Note which pages are currently ranking for valuable search terms. Any page ranking on page one of Google should be treated as a high-priority asset to be maintained, not discarded.

Prepare Your Content and Assets

The number one cause of redesign delays is unready content. Before briefing an agency, decide: which existing copy will carry over, which needs updating, and which pages are being added or removed. Write a content inventory.

Gather your brand assets: logo files (SVG and high-resolution PNG), brand colours and fonts, any photography or illustration assets you own the rights to. If your photography is poor quality or outdated, plan a photoshoot before the redesign kicks off — retrofitting photography into a finished design is always awkward.

If you’ll need new copy written, decide now whether you or the agency will write it. Professional copywriting typically costs £150–£400 per page depending on length and research required. Budget for it explicitly rather than hoping it can be done without cost.

Plan for SEO, Technical Handover, and Launch

Create a redirect plan for any URLs that are changing. Every old URL that has inbound links or ranking history needs a 301 redirect to its new equivalent. Failing to do this is one of the most common — and most damaging — redesign mistakes.

Clarify who will own the hosting, domain, and CMS access after launch. Confirm the new site will be on a platform you can manage, that analytics tracking will carry over, and that any form submissions, CRM integrations, or third-party services will be reconnected.

Plan a staged launch where possible. Test the new site on a staging URL before going live. After launch, monitor Google Search Console for crawl errors, index coverage issues, and ranking changes. A post-launch review two to four weeks after going live is worth scheduling in advance.