Website redesign checklist for marketing managers

Your website's one of your biggest marketing tools. When it's underperforming, every day you wait costs you traffic, conversions, and credibility.

A website redesign checklist helps marketing managers keep the project on track and avoid costly mistakes. It also helps deliver results without blowing the budget or missing deadlines.

Over the last 12 years, we've worked on hundreds of website projects. The ones that succeed always have one thing in common: a solid plan from the start.

This guide covers the full process, from setting goals and auditing your current site to planning SEO migration and monitoring performance after launch.

We've included steps we use with our clients, plus the questions that help you dodge common issues like content bottlenecks, stakeholder overload, and silent launches that waste months.

Whether you're managing your first redesign or your fifth, this checklist keeps the focus on what makes a difference. You'll know what to prepare, who to involve, when to launch, and how to measure success once the site goes live.

Set goals and baselines

Your redesign needs clear targets and a way to measure if you hit them. Without numbers from before the redesign, you can't prove what changed or if it worked.

Define measurable outcomes

Start with what the business needs the website to do. A property developer might need 15 qualified enquiries per month.

A membership organisation might want 50 new signups per quarter. A museum could need ticket sales to cover 40% of operating costs.

We worked with Southampton Athletic Club to increase member signups through their website. They needed 30 new memberships per month to justify the redesign cost.

That number shaped every decision about forms, navigation, and content priority. Write each goal with a number, a timeframe, and a way to check it.

"Increase organic traffic by 25% within six months" works. "Improve the website" doesn't. Pick three to five goals max, or you lose focus.

Document baseline metrics

Record where you are before anything changes. Pull the last six months of analytics data.

Export conversion rates, traffic sources, bounce rates, form completions, and revenue from the website. Note which pages get the most visits and which campaigns drive conversions.

Look at mobile versus desktop performance. Save screenshots of your analytics dashboard, dated and labelled.

We measure baseline metrics for every redesign project. One client thought their contact form worked well just because it looked professional, but the data showed an 89% abandonment rate.

Without that number, they would have rebuilt the same broken form.

Identify KPIs

Choose key performance indicators that connect directly to your measurable outcomes. If lead generation matters, track form submissions, phone calls from the website, and email enquiries.

If sales matter, track transaction volume, average order value, and conversion rate by traffic source. Organic traffic shows if search visibility improved, while bounce rate indicates if new visitors find what they expected.

Time on page suggests if content holds attention. Pages per session shows if navigation helps people explore.

Household Cavalry Museum tracks ticket purchases, gift shop revenue, and exhibition bookings as their primary KPIs. Their baseline showed 12% of visitors bought tickets online. After redesign, that figure reached 31%.

The KPI proved the redesign paid for itself within four months.

Align stakeholders and teams

Getting the right people involved early and keeping them aligned matters more than most teams expect. Website redesigns often stall because of internal conflicts, unclear ownership, or feedback loops that never close.

Form project lead and committee

You need one person with decision-making authority who can filter competing requests and keep the project moving. This person should be senior enough to make calls when stakeholders disagree and available enough to respond to questions within a day or two.

Without clear ownership, your redesign will become design-by-committee, where every department pushes for equal weight and the site ends up bloated.

Build a small steering committee around your lead, limited to five to seven people. Include reps from marketing, sales, customer service, and IT.

Each person should have a defined role: one owns content approval, another owns technical requirements, another represents the customer perspective. We worked with a property client whose redesign stalled for six weeks because three directors all thought they had final approval. Once they assigned a single project lead, decisions that took weeks started taking days.

Document who reviews what and by when. If someone misses their review window, the lead should have authority to proceed.

Stakeholder alignment workshops

Run a workshop within the first two weeks to surface conflicting priorities before they derail the project. Bring your committee together for 90 minutes and ask each person to list their top three goals for the new site.

You'll likely find that sales wants more lead capture, marketing wants brand storytelling, and IT wants easier content updates. None of these are wrong, they just need prioritising.

Use a simple scoring exercise to rank goals by business impact and effort required. Goals that score high impact and low effort go first. Goals that score low impact and high effort get deferred or cut.

This process forces honest conversation about trade-offs early, when you can still act on them. Record the outcome and share it back to the full group within 48 hours.

When someone later pushes for a feature that didn't make the cut, you can point back to the documented decision.

Gather user feedback and insights

Your internal stakeholders don't represent your users. We've seen executives assume visitors care about company history and awards, but data shows they skip straight to pricing or case studies.

Interview at least eight to twelve actual users before you start designing. Ask them what they came to your current site to do, where they got stuck, and what information they needed that wasn't there.

Build lightweight user personas based on these interviews, one page each. Include their primary goal, their biggest frustration with your current site, and the questions they need answered.

A training provider we worked with discovered their main persona wasn't HR managers as they assumed, it was individual employees looking for personal development, which completely changed the site structure.

Use these personas to settle internal debates. When someone insists on adding a feature, ask which persona needs it and why. If the answer is vague or it only serves internal needs, cut it.

Audit the current website

Before you change anything, you need to know what's working and what's costing you leads. The audit stage gives you baseline metrics, shows where competitors are pulling ahead, and builds a proper case for the redesign scope.

Run a website audit

Start with Google Analytics to pull traffic, conversion rates, and bounce rate for the last six months. Look at which pages drive enquiries and which ones get visited then abandoned.

Run your site through Screaming Frog to find broken links, missing meta descriptions, and pages that return errors. This usually uncovers 20 to 40 quick fixes that nobody knew existed.

Use Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check load times. If your homepage takes longer than three seconds to load on mobile, you're losing people before they see anything.

Google Search Console will show you which pages rank, which keywords bring traffic, and where Google sees technical problems. SEMrush or a similar tool can audit SEO health, flag duplicate content, and show you backlink quality.

Pair this with Hotjar heatmaps to see where people click, scroll, and drop off. When we rebuilt the Household Cavalry Museum site, heatmaps showed visitors were missing the booking form entirely because it sat too far down the page.

Competitive analysis

Pick three competitors who rank for the same keywords or target the same audience. Visit their sites and note what they do well.

Check their homepage messaging, service pages, proof points, and calls to action. Look at page speed, mobile experience, and how they structure their main journeys.

Use SEMrush to see which keywords they rank for that you don't, and where their backlinks come from. This isn't about copying, it's about spotting gaps in your own site and understanding what the market expects.

If every competitor has live chat and case study pages and you don't, that's useful information.

Document analytics and insights

Pull everything into one document that the whole team can reference. Include baseline metrics like monthly traffic, conversion rate, top landing pages, and bounce rate for key pages.

Add notes from heatmaps, user testing, and quality assurance checks. Write down which pages perform well and which ones need scrapping or rebuilding.

List technical issues that need fixing during the redesign. This document becomes the brief and gives you something to measure against after launch.

Develop content and structure strategy

Getting your content and structure right determines whether users find what they need and whether Google can index your site properly. This means auditing what you already have, deciding what stays or goes, and building a clear map of how everything connects.

Content audit and migration

A content audit lists every page, asset, and document on your current site. You need this inventory before you can decide what to migrate, what to update, and what to delete.

Start by crawling your existing site with Screaming Frog or a similar tool. Export the results into a spreadsheet with columns for URL, page title, meta description, word count, last modified date, and traffic data from Google Analytics.

Add a column for your decision: keep, update, merge, or remove. Review each piece based on performance data.

If a page gets no organic traffic in six months and serves no conversion purpose, delete it. If it ranks well but the content is outdated, mark it for an update.

For example, we found that one client had 340 blog posts but only 60 generated any meaningful traffic. Plan your redirects now.

Every URL you're removing or changing needs a 301 redirect to the most relevant new page. Missing this step tanks your search rankings.

Content strategy

Your content strategy sets out what you’ll publish, who it’s for, and the reason behind it. It links your business goals to real pages and copy that actually do something for those goals.

Map content to what users need at different points. Someone researching a problem wants educational content.

Someone comparing options looks for case studies and feature comparisons. People ready to buy want clear pricing and places to get in touch.

Set requirements for each page type. Product pages should have specifications, benefits, social proof, and a strong call to action.

Service pages need to explain the process, show outcomes, and include client examples. The Household Cavalry Museum saw a 60% jump in online bookings after we restructured their content around visitor questions instead of department names.

Define your voice, reading level, and what formats you’ll use. Decide if you want video, downloadable resources, or interactive tools.

Write these decisions down so everyone making content sticks to the same standards.

Sitemap and information architecture

Information architecture puts your content into logical categories and hierarchies. A sitemap shows this structure visually, making it simpler for users and search engines to get around.

Start with card sorting. Write each main topic on a card, then group related topics together.

Test this with real users to check if it matches how they think. Sometimes you might choose “Solutions” as a label, but users could look for “Services” or specific problems instead.

Build your sitemap with clear parent-child relationships. Keep key pages within three clicks of the homepage.

Use straightforward category names that explain what’s inside, not clever or vague labels. Create an XML sitemap for search engines, listing all indexable pages to help Google crawl efficiently.

Include the XML sitemap in your robots.txt file and submit it through Google Search Console. Add structured data markup where it fits—product schema, article schema, and local business schema all help search engines understand your content and can result in richer search listings.

Design UX and UI foundations

Good UX and UI start with structure, then move on to systems and visuals. Test each layer against real user behaviour and accessibility standards before launch.

Wireframes and prototypes

Wireframes show content placement and hierarchy before you get into visuals. We build these in greyscale to focus on layout, navigation logic, and content priority without colour or branding getting in the way.

Start with low-fidelity wireframes for major templates: homepage, service pages, product pages, blog posts, contact forms. Test these with stakeholders to check if the information architecture feels right.

Once everyone’s happy, move to interactive prototypes that simulate user flows. Tools like Figma or Sketch let you create clickable prototypes, showing how navigation works and where users land after each action.

We always test these with actual users before finalising the visual design. A prototype for Southampton Athletic Club revealed members couldn’t find the booking system in our first navigation structure, so we changed it before development started.

Interactive prototypes help developers understand how things should work, cutting down on guesswork and revision cycles later.

Visual identity and design system

Your design system documents every reusable component—buttons, form fields, cards, navigation patterns, and spacing rules. This keeps the site looking consistent and makes future updates easier.

Start by defining your colour palette. Choose primary, secondary, and accent colours that fit your brand and meet accessibility contrast requirements.

Document these colours with hex codes and usage rules. Next up is typography.

Pick typefaces for headings and body copy, then set up size scales, line heights, and weights. A clear type system boosts readability and keeps your brand looking the same across every page.

Build component libraries in Figma or Sketch for everyone to use. When we redesigned GAN Global’s site, the design system had 12 core components used across 40+ templates, cutting design time for new pages by about 60%.

User journeys and flows

User journeys show how different personas move through your site to get things done. Map these out before you finalise page layouts or content placement.

Start with user research. Figure out your main audience segments and what each group needs from the site.

For Purpose Homes, we mapped separate journeys for first-time buyers, investors, and housing partners because each group had different goals and questions. Document the path for each journey: entry point, pages visited, actions taken, exit point.

Look for spots where users get stuck or drop off. Test these journeys with real users through task-based usability testing.

User flows also highlight content gaps. If a journey needs information that’s missing from your current site, you’ll spot it here instead of after launch.

Usability and accessibility

Usability testing shows how real people use your site. Run sessions with 5-8 users from your target audience and give them specific tasks.

Watch where they hesitate, click the wrong thing, or give up. Record these sessions and look for patterns.

If several users can’t find the pricing page, your navigation needs fixing. If mobile users struggle with form fields, your touch targets are probably too small.

Accessibility isn’t optional. Your site has to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards at a minimum.

This means proper colour contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text for images, and form labels that screen readers can read. Test with automated tools first, then check manually.

We use axe DevTools to catch obvious issues, then test with real assistive tech. The Household Cavalry Museum site passes WCAG 2.1 AA because we built accessibility into wireframes and prototypes from the start, fixing issues before design began.

Plan for SEO and technical migration

If you don’t plan for SEO during a redesign, you can lose months of ranking progress in one go. The work happens in three stages: document what you have, map every URL to its new spot, and make sure the new site loads faster than the old one.

SEO migration checklist

Crawl your existing site with a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to capture every live URL, along with metadata, canonicals, and status codes. This becomes your reference for redirect planning and post-launch checks.

Track baseline performance in Google Search Console and Google Analytics at least four weeks before launch. Record organic traffic, conversion rates, keyword positions, and Core Web Vitals scores.

Without these benchmarks, you won’t know if the migration worked. Identify priority pages that drive the most traffic or revenue, pulling this data from Google Analytics or Semrush.

These pages need special attention during redirect mapping and post-launch monitoring. Set up the staging environment with proper tracking codes, make sure robots.txt blocks search engines from indexing it, and test your XML sitemap structure before moving any content over.

Run a second crawl on staging to compare URL structures, canonical tags, and hreflang implementation against the live site.

301 redirects and redirect map

Every URL on your old site needs a permanent 301 redirect to the most relevant page on the new site. A 301 tells search engines the page moved permanently and passes link equity to the new location.

Build your redirect map in a spreadsheet with three columns: old URL, new URL, and status code. Match each old URL to its new equivalent based on content similarity and user intent.

If a page has no direct match, redirect it to the closest category or parent page. Avoid redirect chains, as they dilute link equity and slow load times.

Test every redirect before launch using staging or a tool like Screaming Frog’s redirect checker. Make sure to account for URL parameters in paid campaigns, email tracking, and social links, so your redirects preserve UTM codes and other query strings after launch.

Site performance optimisation

Core Web Vitals are ranking factors now. Test your new site’s Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift using Google PageSpeed Insights before launch.

Aim for green scores on both mobile and desktop. Compress images without ruining quality, use lazy loading for below-the-fold content, and minify CSS and JavaScript files.

These changes usually speed up pages by 30-50% without changing design or functionality. Run GTmetrix tests on your top 10 landing pages to spot render-blocking resources and oversized assets.

Fix these issues on staging so the new site launches faster than the old one. Set up server-side caching and enable compression through your host or CDN.

Test mobile performance separately, since most traffic comes from phones and Google indexes the mobile version first.

Prepare for launch

The last stretch before your site goes live means testing in different environments, securing everything, and planning the actual switch. We run through device compatibility, security protocols, and a sequence of steps that help avoid launch-day chaos.

Create a launch plan

Your launch plan sets the date, assigns responsibilities, and maps out what happens in the hours before and after you go live. Pick a launch time when traffic is usually low and your team is available in case something goes wrong.

Schedule the DNS change or server switch with clear timing. We usually launch mid-morning on a Tuesday or Wednesday, steering clear of Mondays when things pile up and Fridays when support is thin.

Document who updates DNS records, who flips the switch on hosting, and who watches analytics right after. Build in a soft launch period where the new site runs on a temporary URL for final stakeholder review.

This helps catch last-minute content errors or missing pages before real visitors show up. Set up a communication plan for your team, like a Slack channel or group chat for launch day coordination.

Prepare rollback instructions in case serious issues pop up. Know how to revert DNS, restore the old site from backup, and let users know if you need to pause the launch.

Device and browser testing

Test your redesigned site on real devices—not just browser resize tools. Mobile responsiveness can look very different on an actual iPhone compared to Chrome’s device simulator.

Borrow phones and tablets from your team, or use a testing service with real hardware. Check core user journeys on at least three mobiles, two tablets, and three desktop browsers.

We focus on Safari and Chrome for mobile, Chrome, Safari, and Edge for desktop. For the Household Cavalry Museum site, mobile testing caught a donation form issue that would’ve blocked 60% of traffic.

Test forms, navigation, images, and speed on each device. A mobile-first design should load quickly on 3G, with text that’s readable without zooming.

Click through your main conversion paths—contact forms, product pages, checkout flows. Document any issues in a spreadsheet with device type, browser version, and screenshots.

Fix critical bugs that block key functions before launch. Minor visual quirks can wait if they don’t affect usability.

SSL and site security

Install an SSL certificate before launch to avoid browser warnings that scare visitors off. Most hosting providers now include free SSL through Let’s Encrypt, which renews automatically.

Your site should serve all pages over HTTPS, with no mixed content warnings. Set up 301 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS across your site.

Check that your redirect chain doesn’t create loops or send users through multiple hops. Update any hardcoded HTTP links in your content, scripts, or stylesheets.

Verify your SSL setup with a tool like SSL Labs, aiming for an A rating. This checks cipher strength, protocol support, and certificate chain validity.

Update your Google Search Console and Analytics properties to the HTTPS version of your domain. Enable security headers like HSTS, X-Frame-Options, and Content-Security-Policy through your hosting panel or .htaccess file.

These headers protect against common attacks and improve your security posture without needing code changes.

Launch checklist

Run through a pre-launch checklist that covers technical setup, content, and analytics. Start with broken links, using Screaming Frog or a similar crawler to find 404 errors, redirect loops, and orphaned pages.

Fix or redirect every broken internal link before you switch DNS.

Verify all forms submit correctly and send emails to the right addresses. Test contact forms, newsletter signups, and any lead capture tools with real submissions.

Check that form data reaches your CRM or email system.

Confirm tracking codes are live, including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, and any other marketing tools you use. Set up goal tracking for key conversions so you can measure performance from day one.

Set up event tracking in Git before deployment to catch any code conflicts.

Complete a quality assurance pass on key pages like the homepage, main service pages, blog posts, and conversion paths. Check image alt text, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, and page titles.

Make sure your XML sitemap is generated and submitted to Google Search Console.

Test your 404 page displays correctly and includes navigation back to your main site. Verify your robots.txt file allows search engines to crawl important pages while blocking admin areas.

Check that your favicon appears in browser tabs and bookmark lists.

Post-launch monitoring and optimisation

Launching your redesigned site is only the beginning. You need to track what's changed, test what's working, and keep improving based on real user behaviour and performance data.

Analytics and conversion tracking

Set up Google Analytics 4 properly before launch day so you can compare like-for-like data. Create custom events for key actions such as form submissions, phone clicks, downloads, and newsletter signups.

Tag every campaign parameter so you know where traffic comes from.

Check your conversion rates weekly for the first month. We saw one client's enquiry forms drop by 40% in week one because a required field wasn't visible on mobile.

Set up goals or conversions for every action that matters to your business. Track micro-conversions too, like scroll depth on service pages or time on product pages.

These tell you if people engage with your content before they convert.

Compare new site performance against your pre-launch baseline. Look at bounce rate, session duration, pages per session, and conversion rate by traffic source.

Monitor SEO rankings daily for the first two weeks, then weekly, since rankings often shift during the first 30 days after a redesign.

A/B and user testing

Run A/B tests on high-traffic pages once you have baseline data. Test one element at a time, like headlines, call-to-action buttons, form fields, or page layouts.

You need at least 250 conversions per variant for reliable results.

Use heatmaps to see where people click, scroll, and spend time. We found that one client's main CTA was being ignored because users stopped scrolling before they reached it.

Moving it up the page increased conversions by 23%.

Collect user feedback through exit surveys, on-page feedback widgets, or user testing sessions. Ask specific questions about what stopped people completing a task or what confused them.

Generic surveys just produce generic answers.

Continuous improvement and updates

Monitor Core Web Vitals weekly, since Google uses them as ranking factors. Fix any pages with poor Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, or Cumulative Layout Shift scores.

These metrics affect both SEO and user experience.

Review your KPIs monthly and prioritise fixes based on impact. If blog traffic dropped but product page conversions improved, you might need to rework your content strategy.

Make changes based on data patterns across at least four weeks.

Update underperforming pages before creating new ones. We helped Purpose Homes increase enquiries by 180% by optimising existing property pages rather than adding new sections.

Small changes to working pages often outperform large updates to pages nobody visits.

Keep your site secure and fast with regular plugin updates, security patches, and performance audits. Schedule content reviews quarterly to remove outdated information and refresh pages that rank on page two of Google.

Frequently asked questions

Marketing managers planning a redesign face recurring decisions about sign-off authority, analytics configuration, SEO protection, content ownership, performance benchmarks, and pre-launch testing. The answers shape whether the project protects existing rankings, delivers measurable improvements, and launches without conversion regression.

What should be agreed before the discovery workshop, including who signs off decisions?

The discovery workshop needs a decision-maker in the room who can approve scope, budget changes, and design direction without referring back to a wider committee. Projects stall when every structural choice needs sign-off from stakeholders who weren't part of the initial strategy conversations.

Before the workshop, agree who owns final approval on the sitemap, who can sign off design comps, and who has authority to approve content changes that affect messaging or positioning. We've seen projects extend by three months because the person attending discovery workshops couldn't actually approve the decisions being made.

Budget for scope changes also needs agreement upfront. If the workshop reveals that the contact form needs CRM integration or that the site requires an additional language version, you need a named person who can approve that addition and its cost implication within 48 hours.

Which analytics and tracking need setting up before launch, including GA4, Consent Mode and key events?

GA4 configuration must be complete and verified in staging before launch day. You need baseline conversion data from the old site to compare against post-launch performance, which means the new site's tracking needs to measure the same events in the same way.

Set up key events for every conversion action: form submissions, phone number clicks, brochure downloads, chat widget opens, pricing page views. We configure these as custom events in GA4 with clear naming conventions so you can track whether your paid landing page conversion rate actually improved from 2% to 3% as planned.

Consent Mode v2 is now required for sites with EU or UK traffic. This needs implementation before launch, with cookie banners configured to trigger the correct consent signals for analytics and advertising cookies.

Sites that launch without proper consent management lose weeks of accurate tracking data whilst they retrofit compliance.

How do you carry over SEO value during a rebuild, including 301 redirects, canonicals and sitemap updates?

The redirect map is the single document that protects your rankings. It lists every URL on the current site, the corresponding URL on the new site, and confirms that each redirect is a direct 301 with no chains.

Common mistakes destroy rankings, like redirecting old service pages to the homepage instead of equivalent new pages or creating redirect chains where A redirects to B which redirects to C.

Launching without redirects for pages that have backlinks causes trouble. We've recovered sites that lost 60% of organic traffic in the first month after launch because redirects weren't tested before go-live.

Canonical tags, XML sitemaps, and structured data all need verification in staging. Your top five organic landing pages and any page with more than ten backlinks must be explicitly protected in the migration plan with like-for-like content and URL structure where possible.

What content needs rewriting, what can be migrated, and who owns each page end to end?

Create a content brief during discovery that assigns ownership of every page to a named person on your team. That person writes or approves the content, sources images, and delivers final copy by the agreed deadline.

Content from the old site can often be migrated if it's still accurate and performing well in search, which you'll know from the analytics audit. Pages that rank in positions 1-10 for valuable keywords need their content preserved or enhanced.

Pages with high bounce rates or low time-on-page are candidates for a complete rewrite. The development team can't build pages without final content.

We assign content delivery deadlines two weeks before each page enters development, which gives time to chase late copy without delaying the build schedule.

Which pages and journeys should be prioritised for marketing goals, for example improving a paid landing page conversion rate from 2% to 3%?

Prioritise pages that drive revenue or qualified leads. If 80% of your demo requests come from two landing pages, those pages get designed first, tested most thoroughly, and measured most carefully post-launch.

For a client running paid search campaigns, we prioritised the paid landing page that was converting at 1.8% with the goal of reaching 3% through clearer value propositions and reduced form friction. That single page justified the redesign investment because a 1.2 percentage point improvement on £15,000 monthly ad spend delivers an additional 18 leads per month.

Set numeric targets for your priority journeys before design begins. Increase organic leads by 30%, reduce checkout abandonment from 68% to 50%, improve mobile conversion rate to match desktop. These targets shape what gets tested and what gets optimised post-launch.

What needs testing before launch, including forms, checkout, accessibility and performance on mobile networks?

Test every form on the site with real submissions. Make sure each one triggers the full chain: form submission, CRM entry creation, confirmation email, thank you page redirect and GA4 event tracking.

Sometimes a form shows a success message but fails to send data to the CRM. That’s easy to miss if you only check the visible outcome.

Test checkout flows on actual mobile devices using 4G connections. Desktop testing on office wifi hides performance issues that can make real customers drop out.

Accessibility testing should include keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility. Check colour contrast ratios to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards.

For performance, look at Core Web Vitals scores on mobile. Aim for LCP under 2.5 seconds, CLS under 0.1, INP under 200 milliseconds.

Sites that pass these benchmarks on desktop often fall short on mobile networks, where connections run slower and devices have less power.