The Website Redesign Checklist: Everything to Do Before, During, and After

Why Website Redesigns Go Wrong

A website redesign sounds straightforward. New design, new content, better performance. But businesses consistently make preventable mistakes that cost them Google rankings, search traffic, and leads.

The most common: launching a new site without preserving URL structures, without setting up redirects, or without migrating SEO metadata. The result is a beautiful new website that ranks for nothing because Google treats it as a completely new site with no history.

Missing 301 redirects after a redesign is the single most common cause of catastrophic organic traffic loss. We have seen businesses lose 70% of their search traffic overnight.

This checklist prevents that. Work through it in order.

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Before the Redesign Begins

Audit what you already have

Before redesigning anything, understand what is currently working.

• Export your Google Analytics traffic data for the past 12 months. Note which pages get the most visits.
• Export your Google Search Console data. Note which keywords you currently rank for and which pages rank for them.
• Run your site through Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) or a similar crawler to get a complete list of every page, its URL, its title tag, and its meta description.
• Note every page that receives meaningful traffic. These pages need special attention in the redesign.

Set your redirects before the launch date

If any URLs will change (they usually do), you need a 301 redirect map: a list of every old URL and the new URL it should redirect to.

This is critical. When Google crawls your old URLs after launch and finds 404 errors instead of redirects, those pages lose their ranking history. For pages that were generating traffic, this can mean months of recovery time.

Create the map now, not after launch.

Define what success looks like

What is the redesign trying to achieve? Common goals:

• Increase enquiry conversion rate from X% to Y%
• Improve mobile PageSpeed score from X to Y
• Better communicate a new service offering
• Reflect a brand repositioning
• Reduce bounce rate

Without defined goals, you cannot measure whether the redesign succeeded.

Brief your team and stakeholders

Who needs to approve the design? Who provides content? Who handles the technical launch? Unclear ownership causes delays and rushed decisions that hurt quality.

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During the Design and Build Phase

Keep all existing URLs until launch day

Do not change URLs on the live site during the build. Build the new site in a staging environment and only swap it over when everything is ready.

Migrate all existing content and metadata

For every existing page that is being carried into the new site:

• Copy the existing title tag (and improve it if needed)
• Copy or improve the meta description
• Preserve the H1 heading and keyword usage
• Retain the internal links

Do not treat a redesign as an excuse to rewrite content from scratch unless you have a specific SEO reason to do so.

Write new content where the current content is weak

If pages currently have thin content (under 300 words), this is the opportunity to improve them. But do so with the keyword strategy in mind. Every page should have a clear target keyword and content that earns a ranking for it.

Set up tracking before launch

• Google Analytics 4 should be installed and tracking events (form submissions, phone number clicks, button clicks)
• Google Search Console should be set up and verified
• Google Tag Manager should be configured if you are using multiple tracking tools

Launching without tracking means you will not know if the redesign helped or hurt.

Test on real devices

Test the completed site on:

• A mid-range Android phone (not just a browser resized to mobile)
• An iPhone
• Safari on iPad
• Chrome on desktop
• Firefox on desktop

Check every form submission, every link, every embedded map or video.

Run a pre-launch accessibility check

Lighthouse accessibility audit should score 90 or higher. Fix any critical issues before launch.

Run a pre-launch PageSpeed check

Google PageSpeed Insights on the staging site. Aim for 80+ on mobile before launch. Do not launch a site scoring below 50.

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Launch Day

Implement all redirects

Every redirect in your map should be live before the new site goes public. Test a sample of them to confirm they are working.

Submit the sitemap to Google Search Console

After launch, go to Google Search Console and submit your new sitemap. This tells Google to recrawl your site.

Check the robots.txt file

Confirm the live site's robots.txt is not accidentally blocking search engine crawlers. A staging environment often has Disallow: / to prevent indexing, and this sometimes gets carried to the live site by mistake.

Check canonical tags

Ensure canonical tags are pointing to the correct URLs and not to staging environment URLs.

Test all forms on the live site

Send a test submission through every form and confirm it arrives in the correct inbox.

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After Launch (First 30 Days)

Monitor Google Search Console daily

Check for:

• Coverage errors (pages being discovered as 404s)
• Index coverage drops
• Manual actions (rare but important to catch early)

Monitor organic traffic weekly

Compare week-on-week traffic. Some fluctuation after a redesign is normal. A sustained drop of more than 15% in organic traffic is a signal that something went wrong and needs investigation.

Check for broken links

Use Screaming Frog or a free online broken link checker to scan the new site. Fix any internal broken links immediately.

Verify that redirects are working in practice

Use Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool on your most important old URLs. Check that they are indexed at the correct new location.

Request indexing for key pages

In Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for your most important pages. This speeds up how quickly Google discovers and ranks the new versions.

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Common Post-Launch Issues and Fixes

Traffic dropped significantly after launch: Check Search Console for 404 errors. Missing redirects are almost always the cause. Implement any missing redirects immediately.

Site is slower than the old version: Run PageSpeed Insights and investigate the specific issues flagged. Common culprits: uncompressed images, render-blocking scripts, no CDN.

Contact form is not delivering emails: Check spam folders first. Then verify the form action URL, the email address it is sending to, and whether your hosting has email sending restrictions.

Google is not indexing the new site: Check robots.txt and canonical tags. Ensure Search Console is verified and the sitemap is submitted. If a staging environment was accidentally set to noindex, that setting may have been carried over.

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Planning a website redesign? Book a free planning call and we will help you avoid every mistake on this list.