A website redesign is one of the highest-impact projects a business can undertake — and one of the easiest to get wrong. Missed redirects tank your SEO. Overlooked functionality frustrates users. Unclear objectives lead to scope creep and blown budgets. This checklist covers the critical steps we follow at Born Digital to ensure redesigns launch smoothly and deliver measurable results.
Phase 1: Discovery and Planning
Before touching any design tool, establish a solid foundation:
- Audit current performance: Document existing traffic, conversion rates, bounce rates, and top-performing pages. These are your benchmarks.
- Define measurable goals: "Increase lead form submissions by 30%" is actionable. "Make the site look modern" is not.
- Content inventory: Catalogue every page, asset, and form on your existing site. Decide what to keep, merge, update, or retire.
- Technical requirements: List integrations (CRM, payment gateways, analytics, marketing tools) that must work on day one.
- Stakeholder alignment: Get sign-off on goals, timeline, and budget before design begins. Revisiting fundamentals mid-project is expensive.
Phase 2: Design and Content
Design and content should develop in parallel, not sequentially. Designing pages with placeholder text creates layouts that break when real content is inserted. Start with wireframes that establish information hierarchy and user flows, then move to high-fidelity mockups once content direction is confirmed. Test the design with real users before committing to development — it is far cheaper to adjust a Figma prototype than a coded page.
Ensure your new design is mobile-first, meets WCAG accessibility standards, and loads fast on mid-range devices. These are not nice-to-haves; they directly impact search rankings, user engagement, and legal compliance (particularly under the European Accessibility Act).
Phase 3: Development and QA
Build on a staging environment that mirrors production. Test every page across browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) and devices (desktop, tablet, mobile). Verify all forms submit correctly, integrations function as expected, and page load times meet your targets. Create a comprehensive redirect map for every URL that is changing — a single missed redirect can drop high-ranking pages from search results overnight.
Run automated accessibility checks, validate structured data markup, and verify that analytics tracking fires correctly on every page and event. These are the details that separate professional launches from problematic ones.
Phase 4: Launch and Post-Launch
Launch during a low-traffic period. Monitor server logs, error rates, and core metrics intensively for the first 48 hours. Submit your updated sitemap to Google Search Console immediately. Watch for 404 errors, broken redirects, and crawl issues in the days following launch.
A redesign is not finished at launch. Compare post-launch metrics against your pre-redesign benchmarks at 30, 60, and 90 days. Identify pages underperforming expectations and iterate. At Born Digital, we build post-launch monitoring and optimisation into every redesign project because the first version is never the final version — it is the starting point for data-driven improvement.