Website Redesign Checklist: What to Keep, Improve or Remove

Why do redesigns sometimes lose traffic and enquiries?

A redesign is the only website project that can leave a business worse off than it was. The new site looks better and earns less. It happens for ordinary reasons: pages that quietly brought enquiries were dropped, URLs changed with no redirects behind them, a form now reaches an inbox nobody opens, tracking was never reinstalled, and the one paragraph that answered the question every customer asks did not survive the rewrite.

The common cause is starting from taste. Someone dislikes the old site, so it is treated as a problem to be swept away rather than as a record of what worked. A redesign should begin as an audit. You are not only designing a new website; you are deciding what to carry across, and that decision needs evidence.

Start with an inventory, not a mood board

Two exports come before anything else. First, a complete list of the pages that exist: from your content management system, a crawl, or the sitemap, checked against each other because the three rarely agree. Second, twelve months of analytics and Search Console data, page by page. Save both files somewhere safe. You will want them again the week after launch, when the new site is live and something looks wrong.

Then build the inventory: one row per page, and a decision at the end of every row. It is tedious, and it is the part of a redesign that most reliably pays for itself.

• URL, page title and what the page is for, in your own words.
• Visits, entrances and search queries over the last twelve months.
• Enquiries, calls, bookings or sales the page contributed to.
• Whether other sites link to it, and whether your team sends it to customers.
• When it was last updated, and who owns the content now.
• The decision: keep, improve, merge or remove.

Deciding what to keep, improve or remove

Most decisions become obvious once the evidence sits in one place. A page that brings search traffic and enquiries is not a candidate for a rewrite because the new heading style suits a shorter title. A page that nobody has read in two years does not deserve a place in the new navigation simply because it exists.

Two cautions. Low traffic is not the same as low value: a pricing page, a terms page, a spare-parts list or a careers page can close business or save your team hours without ever looking impressive in analytics. Ask sales and reception which pages they send to customers before deleting anything. And when a page is kept, keep what made it work — the specific paragraph, the specification table, the answer nobody else publishes — rather than only its title. Our guide to what makes a website feel premium is a useful second pass over the pages you decide to improve.

URL mapping and redirects: the part that protects your search results

If any address changes, the URL map is the most important document in the project: one row per old URL, one new URL beside it, and no blanks. Build it from the inventory rather than from the new sitemap, so that pages are matched deliberately instead of by whatever the new structure happens to allow.

Google’s guidance on moving a site with URL changes is specific about what to do next. Use server-side permanent redirects, such as 301 and 308, and keep them in place for at least a year so that ranking signals transfer. Update internal links to point at the new addresses, update canonical tags and language annotations, and submit the new sitemap in Search Console. The Change of Address tool applies only when the domain or subdomain itself changes.

The distinction between redirect types matters more than it sounds. Google treats them differently: permanent redirects show the new target in search results, while temporary ones keep showing the source page. A temporary redirect left in place by accident is a common reason a new page never appears where the old one used to.

Forms, integrations and the things that break quietly

Design faults get noticed. Broken plumbing does not, because the site looks perfectly well from the outside while enquiries disappear. Every connected part has to be tested again on the new site, by a person, on a phone, using real details rather than test entries nobody reads.

• Submit every form and confirm it reaches an inbox someone actually checks.
• Check the automatic reply, the spam filtering and where the record is stored.
• Tap the phone number and the WhatsApp link, and confirm whose phone they reach.
• Complete one real payment and one refund, and one booking with a cancellation.
• Confirm enquiries still arrive in your sales or CRM tool, with their source recorded.
• Reinstall analytics and tag management, and check the actions you agreed to measure.

Accessibility and speed are cheaper to fix during a rebuild

A redesign is the only moment when accessibility is inexpensive. Contrast, focus states, form labels, heading order, keyboard navigation and alternative text are design decisions before they are development tasks. The W3C sets its success criteria at three levels, A, AA and AAA, encourages using the latest version, and notes that content meeting WCAG 2.2 also meets 2.1 and 2.0. Agree the level you are aiming for while the layouts are still drawings.

Speed deserves a before-and-after measurement on the same pages. web.dev sets the pass mark at Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of page loads. Record the old figures before launch. A redesign that adds a video header, three tracking scripts and uncompressed photographs can be slower than the site it replaced, and the numbers are the only way to notice before customers do.

The launch checklist

Launch early in the week, in the morning, with the people who can fix things at their desks. Work down this list in order, and do not treat any item as done because somebody says it should be fine.

1. Confirm the site is indexable: no leftover noindex tags and no staging rules blocking crawlers.
2. Test every redirect in the mapping, and check each one resolves in a single hop.
3. Crawl the live site for broken links, missing titles and pages that return errors.
4. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and keep the old URL export safely.
5. Submit each form, complete a payment and a booking, and check the confirmations.
6. Confirm analytics, tag management and consent handling are recording correctly.
7. Read the pages that earn enquiries side by side with the old versions.
8. Set an error page that helps a visitor find what moved, with search and key links.
9. Keep a full backup of the old site and its database for at least a year.

What to watch in the first ninety days

Expect some movement. Google notes that for medium-sized websites it can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to start showing, and longer for larger sites. That is a reason to monitor weekly rather than to panic on day three, and a reason not to launch a fortnight before your busiest season.

• Search Console: indexing coverage, crawl errors and pages reported as not found.
• Server logs or analytics: which old URLs are still being requested, and whether they redirect.
• Enquiries, calls and bookings against the baseline you recorded before launch.
• Core Web Vitals on the pages that matter, on mobile as well as desktop.
• Anything your team hears: a customer who could not find a document is a bug report.

When something drops, work through the same three questions before touching the design: does the old URL redirect to a page that answers the same question, did the content survive the rewrite, and is the page indexable? Most redesign losses are one of those three.

This is how we approach a rebuild in Website Design & Development: review the current pages, keep valuable content and URLs where practical, and plan redirects for any structural change, with your team reviewing the design, copy and key journeys before it goes live. If you are still deciding what the new site should do, read strategy before screens first, then tell us what you have and what it needs to become.