Website Redesign Checklist: What to Check Before and After

A website redesign checklist is the list of checks to run before, during and after rebuilding a site, so the new version does its job better without losing what the old one already did well. It covers goals and baselines, content and URLs, search visibility, accessibility, speed, forms and tracking, launch day and the weeks after. This checklist is part of our website design best practices guide.

How to use this checklist: start at the top before any design work begins, and give each group an owner. The baseline and URL groups are the ones teams most often skip and most often regret. Print it, or copy it into your project plan, and tick items off as the build moves forward.

Set goals and a baseline

Agree what the redesign is for before anyone opens a design tool. If the platform itself is in question, our post Next.js vs Webflow vs Framer covers how we choose.

• Write down two or three measurable goals, such as more enquiries from service pages.
• List who will update the site after launch, and how often.
• Export the last 12 months of Search Console performance data.
• Export analytics for top pages, landing pages and conversions.
• Record current Core Web Vitals results for each page template.
• Note which pages bring in the most enquiries, and why visitors land there.

Audit content and URLs

Every URL on the old site needs a decision before the new one is built. Our post on how long a website takes explains why content is often what holds a project up.

• Crawl the current site and export every URL, including images and PDFs.
• Mark each page to keep, merge, rewrite or remove.
• Keep existing URLs wherever the page still exists in the new structure.
• Map every changed URL to its closest equivalent on the new site.
• Plan a 404 or 410 response for content removed with no equivalent.
• Assign each rewritten page an owner and a deadline.

Protect search visibility

These are the checks that keep a redesign from becoming an accidental site move. If URLs or domains change, follow how to migrate a website without losing SEO as well.

• Carry over titles, meta descriptions and headings that already perform.
• Set a self-referencing canonical tag on every new page.
• Update internal links to point straight at the new URLs.
• Rebuild structured data, and check it matches visible content.
• Generate a new XML sitemap from the final URL list.
• Change one big thing at a time, such as design first, domain later.

Design for accessibility

A redesign is the cheapest moment to fix accessibility, because templates are being rebuilt anyway. This checklist is general information, not legal advice.

• Check text contrast reaches at least 4.5:1 for normal text.
• Make keyboard focus visible on every link, button and field.
• Check sticky headers and banners never cover the focused element.
• Test that pages work at 200 percent zoom and 320 CSS pixels wide.
• Make buttons and links at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or well spaced.
• Give every form field a visible label and clear error messages.
• Keep navigation and help links in the same place on every page.
• Give each page a unique title that describes its topic.

For what the guidelines say, see website accessibility and WCAG.

Build for speed

Set speed targets while designing, not after launch. Our website speed test guide explains how to measure each one.

• Set a target of good Core Web Vitals for every template.
• Reserve space for images, embeds and banners in the design.
• Limit web fonts to the families and weights the design really uses.
• Review every third-party script, and drop the ones nobody uses.
• Test each template on a mid-range phone before sign-off.

Check forms, tracking and integrations

Enquiries are usually the point of the site, so test every path that leads to one.

• Submit every form, and confirm the message reaches the right inbox.
• Check that analytics and conversion tracking fire on the new pages.
• Update ad campaigns and email links to the new landing pages.
• Test integrations such as booking tools, CRMs and chat widgets.
• Confirm cookie consent works before any tracking loads.

Launch day

Launch when traffic is usually lower, and keep the team available for the rest of the day.

• Back up the old site, its database and its redirect rules.
• Remove staging blocks, then check robots.txt and page source.
• Turn on redirects, and test a sample of old URLs.
• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
• Inspect a few key URLs in Search Console's URL Inspection tool.

After launch

The first weeks show whether the redesign worked. Compare everything with the baseline you took at the start.

• Check Search Console every few days for spikes in errors.
• Watch for old URLs that return 404s, and add missing redirects.
• Compare traffic, rankings and enquiries with the baseline each week.
• Collect editor feedback on the CMS, and fix what slows them down.
• Book a review a few months out to judge the goals you set.

If you'd rather have the redesign planned and built for you, our in-house web team designs and develops sites with SEO foundations built in.