Website Redesign Checklist: 20 Steps Before, During, and After Launch

A new website should bring in more calls, more quote requests, and more sales than the old one. Plenty of redesigns do the opposite. Rankings slip, old links break, a contact form quietly stops sending email, and nobody notices for a month. This website redesign checklist walks through 20 steps that prevent those problems, split into what to do before, during, and after launch.

We build and rebuild business websites from our office in Lexington, Kentucky. The steps below are the same ones we follow on client projects. You can use them whether you hire an agency, work with a freelancer, or do the work yourself.

Signs It’s Time for a Redesign

Not every tired website needs a full rebuild. Sometimes new photos and rewritten copy are enough. A redesign makes sense when the problems run deeper than looks:

• The site is hard to use on a phone. Menus are tiny, text needs pinching, and buttons sit too close together.
• Your business has changed. You’ve added services, dropped others, moved, rebranded, or started selling to a different kind of customer.
• You can’t update it yourself. Every small change means an email to someone and a wait.
• It’s slow. Pages take several seconds to show anything useful.
• It doesn’t produce leads. People visit, but few of them call or fill out a form.
• You don’t control it. A past vendor owns the hosting, the domain, or the login, and getting changes made is a fight.

If two or three of those sound familiar, a redesign will probably pay for itself. If only one does, fix that one thing first and see if it’s enough.

Redesign or refresh?

A refresh changes how the site looks and reads: new images, new copy, a cleaner layout on the same structure. A redesign changes how the site works: new structure, new pages, often a new platform. A redesign carries more risk because URLs, page content, and code all change at once. That’s why the website redesign checklist below spends so much time on planning and on protecting what already works.

Website Redesign Checklist, Part 1: Before You Start (Steps 1–9)

Most redesign problems start before anyone opens a design file. The first nine steps on this website redesign checklist cost little and save the most trouble.

1. Write down why you’re redesigning

“The site looks old” is a reason, but it’s a weak goal. Write down two or three outcomes you want and how you’ll measure them. For example:

• More quote requests from the website each month.
• More calls from people searching for your main services in your area.
• Fewer phone calls asking questions the website should answer.
• An easier way for your team to post jobs, events, or news.

These goals settle arguments later. When someone wants a full-screen video on the homepage, you can ask whether it helps get more quote requests. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t.

2. Benchmark the current site

You can’t prove the new site works better without numbers from the old one. Before anything changes, record:

• Monthly visitors and where they come from (search, ads, social, direct).
• The pages that get the most traffic.
• Form submissions, calls, and other leads from the site.
• The search terms you rank for and the pages that rank.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console hold most of this. If you don’t have Analytics installed, Google’s guide to setting up Analytics for a website takes about fifteen minutes. Install it now so you have at least a few weeks of data before launch.

Save a copy of these numbers somewhere outside the website. You’ll want them in step 19.

3. Get access to everything

This step sounds boring and causes more delays than any other. Before the project starts, make sure someone inside your business has owner-level access to:

• The domain registrar (where you bought your domain name).
• DNS settings, if they’re managed somewhere other than the registrar.
• Your current hosting account and website admin login.
• Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Tag Manager.
• Your Google Business Profile.
• Email marketing, CRM, booking, and payment tools connected to the site.

Logins held by a past vendor or a former employee are the usual snag. We ask about domain access early because it’s the piece people most often discover they don’t control. If a past vendor registered your domain under their own account, get it transferred to yours before you do anything else.

4. Inventory every page and file

List every URL on your current site. That includes pages, blog posts, PDFs, images that get search traffic, and landing pages from old ad campaigns that people may still have bookmarked.

Your sitemap (usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) is a good start. Your CMS can usually export a list of pages, and Search Console shows pages Google has indexed and pages other sites link to. Google’s guide to site moves recommends starting with your most important URLs: the ones in your sitemap, the ones with the most traffic, and the ones with links from other sites.

Put it all in a spreadsheet. This inventory is the backbone of the whole website redesign checklist, and you’ll use it again in step 16.

5. Decide what stays, what merges, and what goes

Go through that spreadsheet and mark each page:

• Keep: it’s accurate, useful, and gets traffic or leads.
• Update: the topic is right, but the content is thin or out of date.
• Merge: two or three pages cover the same thing and should become one stronger page.
• Remove: it’s no longer true, no longer relevant, or nobody visits it.

Be careful with pages that look unimportant but get steady search traffic. An old blog post may bring in more visitors than your homepage. Check the numbers from step 2 before you delete anything.

6. Figure out what visitors need to do

List the three to five things most visitors come to your site to do. For a contractor it might be: see past work, check the service area, and request a bid. For a restaurant: see the menu, check hours, and order or book a table.

Ask the people who answer your phones and email. They know which questions come up every day. If the same question keeps coming up, the answer belongs on the website, and probably near the top of a page.

7. Collect examples of sites you like

Pictures beat descriptions. Send your designer links to sites you like, and say what you like about each one. It can be one detail: the way a menu works, how a company shows its projects, the feel of a homepage. We ask every redesign client for these because they save rounds of revisions. Sites from outside your industry count too.

Collect a few examples of what you don’t like as well. They’re just as useful.

8. Choose the platform

Decide whether you’re staying on your current platform or moving. WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and Webflow each fit different businesses. Think about who will update the site, what features you need now and in two years, and whether you want to own the site outright or rent it. Our comparison of WordPress vs. Squarespace for small business covers the trade-offs in detail.

One more rule of thumb: keep your domain. If customers know you at yourcompany.com, the new site should live there too. Changing the domain adds a whole second layer of risk. Your search history, links, and repeat visitors are tied to that address.

9. Set the budget, timeline, and decision-makers

Agree on three things before work begins:

• Budget, including what happens after launch (hosting, maintenance, content, and marketing).
• Timeline, with a target launch date that accounts for your busy season.
• Who approves what. One person should have final say on design and content. Committees slow projects down more than any technical problem.

Collect your content (photos, team bios, service details, testimonials) early. Waiting on content is the most common reason launch dates slip, on our projects and everyone else’s.

Website Redesign Checklist, Part 2: During the Build (Steps 10–16)

With a plan in place, the build itself goes faster. This part of the website redesign checklist protects your current traffic while the new site takes shape.

10. Build on a staging site and leave the live site alone

Build the new site in a separate, private location (a staging site) while your current site keeps running. Customers keep finding you and calling you the whole time. When the new site is ready, it replaces the old one at the same address.

Keep the staging site out of search results. Block it with a password or a noindex rule so Google doesn’t index a half-finished copy of your site. Write down every setting you used to hide it. Google’s site-move guidance specifically warns about this: if you block crawling or use noindex during development, prepare the list of what to undo when you launch.

11. Approve a prototype before building every page

Before the full build, agree on a small set of key pages: usually the homepage, one service page, and the contact page. That’s how we start our own projects. Once both sides agree on direction, look, and structure, the rest of the site follows the same pattern.

Reviewing three pages carefully is easier than reviewing thirty pages at once. It also catches big disagreements early, when they’re cheap to fix.

12. Write the content before you finish the design

Design built around placeholder text often breaks when real text shows up. A headline that fit as “Lorem ipsum” wraps onto four lines. A section designed for two sentences gets two paragraphs.

Write or rewrite your key pages early, using the keep/update/merge list from step 5. Lead each page with what the customer gets. Keep sentences short. Use the words your customers use, which aren’t always the words your industry uses.

Long pages are fine when visitors need the detail. Break them up with clear headings, short paragraphs, and images so they’re easy to scan. On a call with one nonprofit, we looked at a program page they felt was too wordy. Most of the problem was formatting. Headings and spacing made the same information far easier to read.

13. Design for phones first and keep it fast

Many of your visitors will see the new site on a phone before they ever see it on a desktop. Design for the small screen first, then expand. Test with real thumbs: can someone tap the phone number, open the menu, and fill out a form without zooming?

Speed matters just as much. Google’s Core Web Vitals give you three numbers to aim for. According to web.dev, a good experience means:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) within 2.5 seconds: the main content loads quickly.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) of 200 milliseconds or less: the page responds quickly when someone taps or clicks.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) of 0.1 or less: the page doesn’t jump around while it loads.

The usual fixes are properly sized images, fewer plugins and scripts, good hosting, and a content delivery network. Check speed on the staging site, not after launch.

14. Build accessibility in from the start

An accessible site works for people who use screen readers, navigate with a keyboard, or have low vision or color blindness. It’s also easier for everyone else to use.

The standard most sites follow is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The W3C’s WCAG overview notes that WCAG 2.2 is the current version, published in October 2023 and updated in December 2024. The basics for a redesign:

• Text has enough contrast against its background.
• Every meaningful image has alt text that describes it.
• Headings follow a logical order (one H1, then H2s and H3s).
• Forms have clear labels and error messages.
• Everything works with a keyboard alone.
• Links say where they go instead of “click here.”

Fixing these during the build costs far less than fixing them after launch.

15. Carry over the SEO basics on every page

Search visibility you’ve earned over the years lives in your page titles, headings, content, and links. Make sure the new site keeps it:

• Write a unique title and meta description for every page.
• Use one clear H1 per page that says what the page is about.
• Keep the content that ranks. If you rewrite a page that brings in search traffic, keep the topic and the key phrases.
• Link related pages to each other so visitors and search engines can find them.
• Give each page a self-referencing canonical tag (most SEO plugins handle this).
• Add structured data for your business name, address, and phone number.

Every site we build includes these on-page basics. Whoever builds yours should be able to tell you exactly how they handle them.

16. Map every old URL to a new one

This is the step that protects your rankings. Go back to your inventory from step 4. For every old URL, write down where it should send people on the new site.

• If a page keeps the same URL, no redirect is needed.
• If a page moves or gets a new name, redirect the old URL to the new one.
• If pages merge, redirect each old page to the combined page.
• If a page is gone with no good replacement, let it return a 404 (not found) or 410 (gone).

Use permanent, server-side redirects. Google’s documentation on redirects and Google Search recommends them whenever possible, and its site-move guide says 301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank.

Avoid the shortcut of redirecting every old page to the homepage. Someone who clicked a link to your roofing page expects a roofing page. Send them to the closest match.

Website Redesign Checklist, Part 3: Launch and After (Steps 17–20)

Launch day isn’t the finish line. The last four steps on this website redesign checklist catch problems while they’re still small.

17. Run a full pre-launch check

This is the step on any website redesign checklist that people rush, and it’s where broken forms slip through. Go through the staging site page by page before it goes live. Better yet, have someone who didn’t build it do the check. Look at:

• Forms. Submit every form and confirm the email arrives where it should. Check that entries still reach your CRM or email list.
• Integrations. Booking tools, payment buttons, chat, maps, and third-party embeds. For payments, we usually recommend a trusted processor like PayPal, Square, or Stripe over building checkout from scratch.
• Links. No broken links, no links pointing back to the staging address.
• Tracking. Google Analytics, Tag Manager, ad conversion tracking, and your Search Console verification all carried over.
• Devices and browsers. iPhone, Android, Chrome, Safari, Edge, and at least one older laptop.
• Content. Spelling, phone numbers, addresses, hours, and prices. Read every page once.
• Indexing settings. Remove the noindex rules and password protection from step 10 so search engines can crawl the new site.

18. Launch at a quiet time and turn on redirects

Google suggests timing a site move for a period when traffic is lower, if your business has one. For most businesses that’s a weekday morning outside your busy season, never the Friday before a holiday. Pick a time when the people who built the site are around to fix anything that comes up.

At launch:

• Switch the site over and turn on the redirect map from step 16.
• Test a sample of old URLs and confirm each one lands on the right new page.
• Submit your new XML sitemap in Search Console. Google’s guide to building and submitting a sitemap covers the details.
• Update your Google Business Profile, social profiles, and directory listings if any URLs changed.
• Tell your team the new site is live so they can watch for customer questions.

19. Watch the numbers for the first 30 to 90 days

Some movement in search results after a redesign is normal. Google’s site-move guide says to expect ranking fluctuation while it recrawls, and that for medium-sized sites it can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to replace the old ones.

What you’re watching for is a drop that doesn’t recover. Check weekly for the first month:

• Search Console: the Pages report for new errors, and the Performance report for clicks and impressions.
• 404 errors: any old URL you missed in the redirect map. Add a redirect for each one.
• Analytics: traffic and leads compared with your benchmark from step 2.
• Forms and calls: are leads still coming in at the usual pace?

We often run Google Ads for a few months after a new site launches. Paid traffic brings visitors right away while organic search catches up, and the ad data shows which search terms turn into leads.

20. Keep improving after launch

A website starts aging the day it launches. Plugins need updates, content goes stale, and Google keeps changing what it rewards. Plan for:

• Maintenance: software updates, security monitoring, and daily backups with a backup before every update.
• Content: new blog posts, project photos, and updated service pages a few times a month.
• Reviews of the numbers: look at traffic and leads monthly and make one or two improvements based on what you see.

A site that gets steady attention rarely needs another full rebuild. Small, regular improvements keep it current for years.

Common Redesign Mistakes to Avoid

Even with a website redesign checklist, a few mistakes show up again and again. Watch for these:

• Changing everything at once. Google’s own advice is to change one thing at a time where you can. A new domain, a new platform, and a new structure in one move make it hard to tell what caused a problem.
• Deleting pages that rank. A page that looks outdated may be bringing in steady search traffic. Check before you remove it.
• Skipping redirects. This is the single most common cause of a traffic drop after a redesign.
• Forgetting to remove noindex. One leftover setting can hide your whole new site from Google.
• Designing for the boardroom. The site is for customers. If a feature looks impressive but doesn’t help them find information or contact you, cut it.
• No plan after launch. A beautiful site that nobody updates looks tired again sooner than you’d expect.

Your Website Redesign Checklist at a Glance

Print this list or copy it into your project plan:

Before you start

1. Write down why you’re redesigning and how you’ll measure it.
2. Benchmark traffic, leads, and rankings.
3. Get owner-level access to your domain, hosting, and accounts.
4. Inventory every page and file.
5. Decide what stays, merges, and goes.
6. List what visitors need to do.
7. Collect examples of sites you like.
8. Choose the platform and keep your domain.
9. Set the budget, timeline, and decision-makers.

During the build

1. Build on a staging site and keep it out of search.
2. Approve a prototype of key pages.
3. Write content before finishing the design.
4. Design for phones first and hit Core Web Vitals.
5. Build in accessibility.
6. Carry over SEO basics on every page.
7. Map every old URL to a new one.

Launch and after

1. Run a full pre-launch check.
2. Launch at a quiet time and turn on redirects.
3. Watch the numbers for 30 to 90 days.
4. Keep improving after launch.

Ready to Redesign Without Losing What Works?

A redesign is a chance to turn your website into your best salesperson. The planning on this website redesign checklist is what makes that happen: clear goals, a full inventory, a redirect map, and a plan for after launch.

That’s how we handle every project at Tunnel Vision Design. We build custom WordPress sites in Lexington, Kentucky, for businesses across the state and around the country, and we keep the rankings and leads you’ve already earned. To talk through your redesign, see how our web design process works or call us at (859) 951-8412.