The Complete Website Redesign Checklist: 47 Steps to a Site That Actually Converts

Here’s what usually happens with a website redesign: a business owner decides the site looks “dated,” hires someone, gets a prettier version of the same problems, and watches traffic drop for six months while everyone figures out what went wrong.

The problem isn’t that redesigns don’t work. It’s that most redesigns skip the steps that actually matter and focus entirely on the steps that feel good. Picking fonts is fun. Auditing your redirect map is not. Guess which one has more impact on your bottom line.

This checklist exists because I’ve watched too many businesses burn $15,000 to $50,000+ on redesigns that tanked their search rankings, confused their existing customers, and produced a site that looked great in a portfolio but didn’t generate a single additional lead. I built this from the mistakes I’ve seen and the recoveries I’ve managed.

Print it. Bookmark it. Send it to whoever is building your next website. If they push back on any of these steps, that tells you something.

Phase 1: Before You Touch a Single Pixel

This is where most redesigns fail. Not in the design phase, not in development, but right here at the beginning when nobody wants to do the boring work.

1. Define what “success” actually means. Not “a modern-looking site.” Real metrics. Leads per month. Conversion rate. Average session duration. Revenue attributed to the website. Write these down. Research from Portent found that a site loading in 1 second converts at 3x the rate of a site loading in 5 seconds. That’s the kind of specific, measurable outcome you should be targeting.

2. Audit your current analytics. Before you tear anything down, document what’s working. Which pages get the most organic traffic? Which ones convert best? Which blog posts still bring in leads three years after publishing? You need this data because your redesign should protect these assets, not accidentally destroy them.

3. Export your full URL structure. Every single URL on your current site. Use Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or even a simple sitemap download. You’ll need this for your redirect map later, and if you skip it, you will lose rankings. That’s not a maybe.

4. Document your top 50 landing pages by organic traffic. These are the pages Google already trusts. Your redesign must preserve the content, URL structure, and internal linking that makes these pages rank. Change a URL without a redirect and you’ve just told Google that page doesn’t exist anymore.

5. Benchmark your Core Web Vitals. Run your current site through Google PageSpeed Insights and web.dev and record your LCP, INP, and CLS scores. Google’s thresholds are clear: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. Your redesign should improve these numbers, not make them worse.

6. Catalog all existing forms and conversion paths. Every contact form, every download gate, every chat widget, every phone number click. Map where they appear and what they connect to. I’ve seen redesigns go live with broken form submissions because nobody tested whether the backend integrations still worked.

7. Review your Google Search Console data. Look at the queries driving impressions and clicks. Look at your indexing status. Check for any manual actions or security issues. This is your SEO baseline.

8. Check your backlink profile. Use Ahrefs, Moz, or Search Console’s link report to identify which pages have earned external links. These pages need special protection during the redesign. If a page with 200 backlinks gets a new URL without a redirect, you’ve just thrown away years of link equity.

9. Interview your actual customers. This one gets skipped constantly. Call five customers. Ask them what’s confusing about your current site. Ask what almost stopped them from contacting you. The insights from five real conversations will be more valuable than any design trend article you could read.

10. Analyze your competitors’ sites. Not to copy them. To understand what your potential customers are comparing you against. If every competitor has pricing on their site and you don’t, that’s information. If they all have case studies and you’re relying on a generic “About Us” page, that’s a gap.

Phase 2: Strategy and Planning

With your research done, now you can make informed decisions instead of guessing.

11. Set a realistic budget and timeline. A quality redesign for a small business site (10-30 pages) typically runs $5,000 to $25,000 and takes 8 to 16 weeks. If someone is promising you a complete redesign in two weeks for $1,500, the result will reflect that. Factor in time for content creation. That’s usually what drags projects out.

12. Choose your platform deliberately. Don’t just default to what you had before. WordPress, Webflow, headless CMS setups, and static site generators all have different strengths. The right choice depends on who will maintain the site after launch, how often you publish content, and what integrations you need. (We wrote an in-depth comparison of WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, and Wix if you want the details.)

13. Map your site architecture before designing anything. Start with a sitemap. Group pages logically. Think about the paths a visitor takes from landing on the site to becoming a lead. Your navigation should reflect how customers think, not how your org chart looks.

14. Plan your content strategy. For every page on the new site, answer: What’s the purpose? Who is it for? What should they do after reading it? If you can’t answer those three questions, that page probably doesn’t need to exist.

15. Write your content before the design starts. This is controversial, and designers sometimes push back. But designing around real content produces better results than designing around lorem ipsum and then cramming in whatever text you have. Content-first design is harder to execute but almost always produces higher-converting pages.

16. Build your redirect map. Take that URL export from step 3 and map every old URL to its new equivalent. Every. Single. One. This is tedious. It’s also non-negotiable. A 301 redirect tells search engines that a page has permanently moved, preserving most of your ranking power. Skipping this step is the single most common cause of post-redesign traffic drops.

17. Define your brand guidelines. Colors, fonts, tone of voice, image style. Even if you’re not doing a full rebrand, documenting these decisions prevents the “I’ll know it when I see it” feedback loop that kills timelines and budgets.

Phase 3: Design

Now we get to the part everyone wants to start with. But because you did the first two phases, your design decisions will be grounded in data instead of personal taste.

18. Design mobile-first. Not mobile-friendly. Mobile-first. Research from Sweor found that 57% of internet users won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. And with mobile traffic accounting for over 60% of web visits across most industries, designing for desktop first and then squishing it down to mobile is backwards.

19. Prioritize page speed in every design decision. That full-screen hero video looks amazing. It also adds 15MB to your page load and tanks your LCP score. Every design element should justify its weight. According to Portent’s research, e-commerce conversion rates drop by an average of 0.3% for every additional second of load time. On a site doing $100,000/month, a 2-second slowdown could cost $7,200/year in lost sales.

20. Make your calls-to-action obvious and consistent. Your primary CTA should be visible within the first viewport on every key page. Use contrasting colors. Use action-oriented language (“Get a Free Quote” beats “Submit”). And don’t give visitors seven different things to click. One primary action per page.

21. Design your forms for completion, not for data collection. Every field you add to a form reduces completion rates. If you’re asking for phone number, company size, annual revenue, and “how did you hear about us” on your initial contact form, you’re filtering out leads before they even start a conversation. Name, email, and a message field. That’s enough to start.

22. Use real photography, not stock photos. Visitors can spot stock photography instantly. If you’re a local business, show your actual team, your actual workspace, your actual products. It builds trust in a way that a generic handshake photo never will. If you need to use stock photography, avoid the clichés. No one trusts a website that shows perfectly diverse teams in glass conference rooms laughing at a laptop.

23. Design for accessibility from the start. This isn’t optional and it shouldn’t be an afterthought. The WebAIM Million report found that 95.9% of the top million homepages had detectable WCAG failures. Accessible design isn’t just the right thing to do, it also improves usability for everyone and protects you from legal risk. Ensure proper color contrast ratios (4.5:1 for normal text), logical heading hierarchy, alt text on all images, and keyboard navigability.

24. Create a design system, not just page mockups. A design system includes reusable components: buttons, cards, form elements, navigation patterns. This ensures consistency across the site and makes future updates faster. It also means the development team isn’t guessing at spacing and sizing for pages that weren’t explicitly mocked up.

25. Get feedback from people outside the project. Show the designs to someone who wasn’t involved in the process. Ideally someone who matches your target audience. Fresh eyes catch things that project teams become blind to after weeks of revision.

Phase 4: Development

This is where your plan becomes a real website. The details here determine whether your site is fast, reliable, and maintainable or a beautiful mess.

26. Set up your staging environment first. Never build directly on a live site. Use a staging URL that’s password-protected and blocked from search engine indexing (robots.txt noindex, or HTTP authentication). This gives you a safe place to build, test, and iterate without affecting your existing site.

27. Implement proper heading hierarchy. One H1 per page. H2s for major sections. H3s for subsections. This isn’t just about SEO. It’s how screen readers interpret page structure, and it signals to Google what your content is about.

28. Optimize every image before it goes on the site. Use WebP format. Compress aggressively. Implement lazy loading for images below the fold. The HTTP Archive reports that images account for the largest share of page weight on most websites. A single unoptimized image can add several megabytes to a page load.

29. Set up structured data (schema markup). At minimum, implement Organization, LocalBusiness (if applicable), BreadcrumbList, and FAQ schema where appropriate. This helps search engines understand your content and can earn you rich results in search listings.

30. Configure your XML sitemap. Make sure it only includes canonical, indexable pages. No redirects, no 404s, no noindexed pages. Submit it through Google Search Console after launch.

31. Implement your redirect map. Remember that spreadsheet from step 16? Now it becomes real. Set up every 301 redirect. Test them. Test them again. Every redirect should point to the most relevant page on the new site, not just dump everything to the homepage.

32. Set up analytics and tracking before launch. Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console verification, any conversion tracking pixels, call tracking numbers, form submission tracking. All of it needs to be in place and tested before the site goes live. If you launch without analytics, you’re flying blind from day one.

33. Test every form submission. Fill out every form on the site. Verify that the data reaches its destination. Check email notifications. Test CRM integrations. Test the confirmation pages and auto-responder emails. Then have someone else do it all again.

34. Test across browsers and devices. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge at minimum. iOS and Android. Multiple screen sizes. Use BrowserStack or similar if you don’t have physical devices. A form that doesn’t work on Safari mobile is a form that doesn’t work for roughly half your mobile visitors.

35. Run a full accessibility audit. Use tools like axe DevTools, WAVE, or Lighthouse’s accessibility audit. But don’t stop at automated testing. Manually test keyboard navigation. Test with a screen reader. Automated tools catch roughly 30-40% of accessibility issues. The rest require human judgment.

36. Verify your page speed scores. Run every major template page through PageSpeed Insights. Compare against your benchmarks from step 5. If your Core Web Vitals are worse than the old site, stop and fix them before launch. A prettier site that’s slower will lose you money.

37. Check your meta titles and descriptions. Every page needs a unique, compelling title tag (under 60 characters) and meta description (under 160 characters). These are your search listing copy. They directly influence click-through rates from search results.

Phase 5: Pre-Launch

You’re almost there. These steps are the difference between a smooth launch and a disaster.

38. Create a launch-day checklist. Write down every step that needs to happen in order: DNS changes, redirect activation, analytics verification, search console updates. Assign each step to a specific person with a specific timeline.

39. Set up uptime monitoring. Use a service like UptimeRobot, Pingdom, or Better Uptime. Configure it to alert you immediately if the site goes down after launch. The first 48 hours are when problems surface.

40. Prepare your 404 page. A custom 404 page with navigation links and a search bar keeps visitors on your site when they hit a dead end. The default server 404 page drives people away.

41. Double-check your SSL certificate. Every page should load over HTTPS. Mixed content warnings (HTTP resources on an HTTPS page) break trust and can trigger browser warnings that scare visitors away.

42. Remove all staging artifacts. Delete test content, placeholder text, “Coming Soon” pages, and development comments. Search for “lorem ipsum,” “test,” “TODO,” and “[placeholder]” across the entire site.

Phase 6: Launch and Post-Launch

Going live is not the finish line. It’s the starting line.

43. Submit your updated sitemap to Google Search Console. Do this immediately after launch. Also use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for your most important pages. Google will recrawl your site naturally, but you can speed up the process for priority pages.

44. Monitor your redirect map for the first two weeks. Check your server logs or use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl the old URLs and verify that every redirect resolves correctly. Look for redirect chains (old URL > intermediate URL > final URL) and fix them so each redirect goes directly to the final destination.

45. Watch your analytics daily for the first month. Compare traffic, conversion rates, and user behavior against your pre-redesign benchmarks. Some fluctuation is normal during the first two weeks as Google reprocesses your site. A sustained drop beyond that window means something is wrong.

46. Test your site with real users post-launch. Not the project team. Real visitors. Watch session recordings (Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity). Look at where people click, where they scroll, where they leave. This data will tell you what to optimize first.

47. Plan your first round of optimizations. A redesign is a foundation, not a finished product. Within 30 days of launch, you should have data showing what’s working and what isn’t. Set up A/B tests on key pages. Adjust CTAs based on actual behavior. Refine the content based on what’s converting.

The Steps Most People Skip (and Regret)

If you take nothing else from this checklist, remember these five:

The redirect map (step 16) protects your search rankings. Skipping it is the most expensive mistake you can make during a redesign.

Benchmarking before you start (steps 2, 5, 7) gives you something to measure against. Without it, you can’t prove whether the redesign helped or hurt.

Content before design (step 15) produces better results than the reverse. Real content drives better design decisions.

Form testing (step 33) seems obvious, but broken forms are shockingly common on newly launched sites. If your contact form doesn’t work, nothing else matters.

Post-launch monitoring (steps 44-47) is where the real ROI of a redesign gets captured. The site at launch is always version 1.0. The improvements you make in the first 90 days based on real data are what turn a good redesign into a great one.

Your Next Step

A website redesign is a significant investment. Done right, it pays for itself many times over through increased leads, higher conversion rates, and better search visibility. Done wrong, it’s an expensive way to learn the same lessons twice.

If you’re planning a redesign and want to make sure it actually moves the needle for your business, get in touch with our team. We’ll walk through your current site, identify the biggest opportunities, and build a plan that’s grounded in data rather than guesswork.