Website Redesign Checklist: 100+ Items for Before, During, and After Launch
Jeremy Kenerson
Website Redesign Checklist: 100+ Items for Before, During, and After Launch
Why Most Website Redesigns Are Disasters Waiting to Happen
Getting your website redesign checklist right from the start saves you time, money, and headaches. Three months into a website redesign project, I got a panicked call from a client. Their organic traffic had dropped 70%. Their conversion rate was in the toilet. Their “modern, sleek redesign” had turned their profitable website into expensive digital art that nobody could find or use.
📋 Table of Contents
This wasn’t some rookie mistake. This was a smart business owner who hired a reputable agency, spent $40K, and followed their advice. The problem? No checklist. No process. No understanding that a website redesign isn’t about making something pretty — it’s about making your business more profitable.
After 12+ years and hundreds of website projects, I’ve seen every way a redesign can go wrong. More importantly, I’ve figured out how to avoid the disasters. Here’s the complete playbook.
Phase 1: The Foundation Work Nobody Wants to Do
Most businesses skip this phase because it’s not fun. No pretty mockups, no exciting reveals, just boring spreadsheets and data analysis. But this phase is why some redesigns drive massive growth while others kill businesses.
Define Success or Fail Guaranteed
I ask every client the same question: “What does success look like six months after launch?” If they say “it needs to look modern” or “we want better user experience,” we’re starting over. Vague goals produce vague results.
You need specific business goals tied to numbers. Increase qualified leads by 30%. Reduce bounce rate from 60% to 40%. Boost newsletter signups by 50%. Get average session duration above three minutes. These aren’t marketing vanity metrics — they’re business outcomes that matter.
Document your current baseline from Google Analytics. Traffic, conversion rates, top-performing pages, bounce rates by channel. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure improvement without knowing where you started.
Pro tip: Set a realistic timeline with firm milestones and stick to it. The redesigns that drag on for eight months always end up worse than the ones completed in eight weeks. Scope creep is the enemy of good websites.
Audit What’s Actually Working
Here’s where businesses make the biggest mistake: they redesign everything without understanding what’s already working. I’ve watched companies kill their best-performing landing pages because they didn’t fit the new design aesthetic. Don’t be that business.
Run a complete Google Analytics review. Which pages drive the most qualified traffic? Which ones convert best? Which blog posts bring in the most organic traffic? That page with the ugly design but 15% conversion rate? You’re keeping that structure and optimizing, not replacing.
Map every existing URL because you’ll need this for redirects. Check Google Search Console for crawl errors and indexing issues. If you have heatmap data from Hotjar or session recordings, review those too. Gather feedback from your sales team about what questions customers ask most — that’s content gap intelligence.
If your current site is driving results, document exactly how and why. Those mechanisms get preserved or improved, never eliminated. Check out our website redesign cost guide for a deeper dive into what to analyze during this phase.
Content Inventory: The Unglamorous Essential
Create a spreadsheet of every page on your site. Yes, every page. Categorize each one: keep as-is, update and improve, merge with another page, or delete entirely. This sounds tedious because it is. Do it anyway.
Most websites accumulate digital clutter over years. Outdated service pages, duplicate content, blog posts from 2019 that nobody reads. A redesign is spring cleaning, but you need to know what you’re throwing away and what you’re keeping.
Identify content gaps while you’re at it. What pages should exist but don’t? What questions do customers ask that your site doesn’t answer? Plan new content creation now, not after launch when you realize you’re missing critical pages.
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SEO Migration: Where Redesigns Go to Die
This section should be printed in red ink and highlighted because ignoring it will cost you six months of traffic recovery. Maybe longer. SEO migration planning isn’t optional — it’s the difference between a successful redesign and an expensive mistake.
Map every old URL to its new URL. Create a complete redirect map before development starts. Plan 301 redirects for every URL that changes, even slightly. If your current URL is /services/web-design/ and the new one is /web-design-services/, you need a redirect. No exceptions.
Preserve high-performing page titles and meta descriptions. If a page ranks on the first page of Google, don’t rewrite the title because you think you’re being creative. You’re gambling with traffic that’s already working. Maintain your internal linking structure. Keep the existing heading hierarchy on pages that rank well.
Plan for XML sitemap generation and submission to Google Search Console. If your domain is changing, set up Search Console for the new domain before launch. The goal is zero surprises for Google when your new site goes live.
Technical Requirements: The Boring Stuff That Breaks Everything
Choose your CMS platform based on business needs, not designer preferences. WordPress powers 40% of the internet for a reason — it’s flexible, SEO-friendly, and integrates with everything. Webflow is great for design-heavy sites but limited for complex functionality. Shopify for e-commerce. Don’t overthink this.
List every third-party integration that needs to be maintained: CRM connections, email marketing platforms, analytics tracking, chat widgets, booking systems, payment processors. Document all forms and where they send data. One broken integration can kill your lead flow overnight.
Define browser and device support requirements upfront. Plan for accessibility compliance — WCAG 2.1 AA is the minimum standard. This isn’t nice-to-have anymore, it’s a legal requirement in many jurisdictions.
Design and Development: Where Vision Meets Reality
Good design serves business goals, not ego. Beautiful websites that don’t convert visitors into customers are expensive art projects. Keep that in mind during this phase.
Mobile-First Isn’t Optional
Design wireframes for key page templates before touching visual design. Start with mobile layouts, then adapt for tablet and desktop. This forces you to prioritize the most important elements because there’s no room for clutter on a phone screen.
Create designs for all unique page templates: homepage, about page, service pages, blog template, contact page, and any landing pages. Don’t forget error pages — a well-designed 404 page can save conversions when something goes wrong.
Get stakeholder approval on wireframes and designs before development starts. Changes are cheap in design, expensive in development, and catastrophic after launch.
Development Best Practices
Build on a staging environment that’s completely separate from your live site. Never develop on a production website. Set up SSL certificates from day one. Configure clean, readable URLs that include target keywords where appropriate.
Implement proper heading hierarchy on every page. Add schema markup for your organization, breadcrumbs, FAQs, and local business information. Set up XML sitemap auto-generation. Configure robots.txt properly to allow crawling but block admin areas.
Optimize images during development, not after launch. Use WebP format where supported, implement lazy loading, and size images appropriately for their display containers. Set up caching and performance optimization from the beginning.
Analytics tracking setup is critical. Install Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager during development. Test conversion tracking before launch. You can’t optimize what you can’t measure.
Pre-Launch Testing: The Phase That Saves Your Reputation
I’ve never seen a website launch perfectly without thorough testing. Never. The businesses that skip this phase are the ones posting apology emails to their customers about “technical difficulties” three hours after launch.
Functionality Testing That Actually Matters
Test every form submission and verify data reaches the correct destination. A beautiful contact form that doesn’t send emails is worse than no form at all. Test all CTAs and buttons across the site. If you have e-commerce functionality, test the entire checkout flow with real payment processing.
Test search functionality if your site includes it. Verify all third-party integrations are working: CRM submissions, email signups, chat widgets, booking systems. Test user account flows including login, registration, and password reset. These mundane features are what actually make websites function.
Cross-Browser and Device Reality
Browser developer tools are not sufficient for testing. Real device testing catches issues that emulators miss. Test on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge at minimum. Test on actual iOS Safari devices — both iPhone and iPad. Test on Android Chrome. Test on screen sizes from 320px to 2560px wide.
Your website needs to work perfectly on a cracked iPhone 8 with slow internet, not just your developer’s MacBook Pro with gigabit fiber.
Performance Testing: Speed Kills Conversions
Run Google PageSpeed Insights and aim for scores above 90 on mobile. Test Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, First Input Delay under 100ms, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. These aren’t suggestions — they’re ranking factors.
Check total page weight and aim for under 3MB per page. Verify image optimization across the entire site. Test load times from multiple geographic locations because your customers aren’t all accessing your site from the same server farm. For comprehensive optimization strategies, see our conversion rate optimization guide.
Watch out: A slow website loses customers faster than a broken website. People will wait for something that’s loading, but they’ll leave immediately if it takes too long to start.
Launch Day: The Moment of Truth
Launch during low-traffic hours — usually early morning or late evening on weekdays. Back up your old website completely before making any changes. You might need to roll back, and panic isn’t the time to discover your backup strategy has holes.
Deploy the new site and implement all 301 redirects immediately. Verify the site is live and loading correctly across multiple devices. Submit your new XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools within the first hour.
Test all forms again on the live site. Check that SSL is working without mixed content warnings. Verify analytics tracking is firing correctly by generating test conversions. Check all third-party integrations one more time because sometimes things work in staging but fail in production.
Remove any “under construction” references or staging URLs that might have slipped through. Check that your favicon and touch icons are displaying correctly. Test the site on your phone immediately after launch — if it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work.
For industry research and benchmarks, check out Google’s web.dev.
Post-Launch: Where Real Optimization Begins
Launch day is the starting line, not the finish line. The first week after launch requires vigilant monitoring because problems surface quickly when real users hit your site.
First Week Monitoring
Monitor Google Search Console daily for crawl errors. Check Google Analytics for traffic drops or unusual patterns. Track form submissions and conversion rates closely. Fix any 404 errors immediately and add redirects for missed URLs.
Verify search rankings haven’t dropped significantly for your target keywords. Gather feedback from team members and customers about the new site. Fix bugs and issues as they’re reported — small problems become big complaints if left unaddressed.
First Month Optimization
Compare traffic and conversion data to your pre-redesign baseline. Some fluctuation is normal, but significant drops need immediate attention. Monitor keyword rankings for movement — slight volatility is expected, but major losses indicate SEO migration issues.
Review Core Web Vitals scores in Search Console. Check for indexing issues with new pages. If you have heatmap tools running, analyze user behavior on key pages to identify conversion obstacles. Continue building internal links to new pages to help with SEO authority transfer.
Websites that follow a complete redesign checklist see 40% fewer post-launch issues and recover baseline performance 60% faster than those that skip steps.
The Fatal Mistakes That Tank Redesigns
After watching hundreds of redesign projects, I can predict which ones will fail based on these warning signs.
Ignoring SEO During the Redesign
This kills more redesigns than any other factor. Businesses lose 50-80% of organic traffic because they didn’t plan redirects, changed URL structures without proper mapping, or removed content that was ranking well. SEO migration planning isn’t optional — it’s the foundation of a successful redesign.
Making Decisions Without Data
If you don’t know what’s working on your current site, how do you know what to keep? I’ve seen companies remove their highest-converting pages because “they didn’t match the new design aesthetic.” Decisions should be driven by analytics data, user research, and conversion metrics — not personal preferences or design trends.
Scope Creep That Never Ends
The redesign was supposed to take eight weeks. Six months later, you’re still “almost done” because someone had another brilliant idea that “would be easy to add.” Set firm scope boundaries and stick to them. Plan a Phase 2 for nice-to-have features after the core redesign is complete and performing well.
For complete ongoing maintenance strategies, check our website maintenance checklist to keep your redesigned site performing optimally.
Get Your Redesign Right the First Time
A website redesign touches every part of your digital marketing: SEO, conversion optimization, user experience, technical performance, and content strategy. If your internal team doesn’t have expertise in all these areas, you’re taking a significant risk with one of your most important business assets.
At DeskTeam360, we’ve managed redesign projects for 400+ clients across every industry. Our teams include designers, developers, SEO specialists, and conversion optimization experts who work together from planning through launch and beyond. We handle everything from wireframes to launch to ongoing performance monitoring — all for one flat monthly rate with no surprise invoices when scope expands.
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