The Website Redesign Checklist Nobody Hands You

• Write down the one action each key page should produce. A call, a booking, an order, a direction request. If a page has no action, ask why it exists.
• Pull twelve months of analytics and Google Search Console data. Note which pages bring traffic, which queries bring it, and which pages produce inquiries. These are the pages you must not break.
• Inventory every URL on the current site. Every one. A redirect map starts here.
• List every form, booking link, chat widget, phone number, and tracking pixel, and where each one sends its data. Half of these will turn out to point at something dead.
• Run the ten-point footprint audit. If Google Business Profile and listings are wrong, fix them in parallel; the redesign will not help a customer who never arrives.
• Record baseline numbers: calls, forms, bookings, profile views, direction requests, average rating. You will want the before.

• Design on a phone screen first. Most local customers will never see the desktop version.
• Put hours, location, and the primary action above the fold on the home page. The customer's first three questions get answered before the scroll.
• Use real photos of the place and the people. Stock photography is how a site ends up looking like every competitor.
• Write the copy the way the owner talks. Read it aloud. Cut anything you would not say to a customer at the counter.
• Check contrast, text size, and tap targets against WCAG 2.2 at the AA level. Accessibility is a floor, and it makes the site better for everyone over forty.
• Approve clickable mockups of the key pages with real content before any code is written. Changes are cheap here and expensive later.

• Wire every form to a CRM, not an inbox. Tag the source. Set the auto-reply and the follow-up owner before launch.
• Connect booking, ordering, or quoting to the real calendar or point of sale, and test a booking end to end as a customer.
• If you add an AI concierge, train it only on approved content, make it introduce itself as an assistant, and build the handoff to a person before you turn it on.
• Size every image and cut every script you cannot justify. Test on a mid-range phone on a weak signal. Aim to pass Core Web Vitals on mobile.
• Build the redirect map: every old URL to its best new equivalent, one hop, permanent (301). Pages with search traffic get exact matches, not the homepage.
• Carry over titles, descriptions, and structured data for the pages that rank, then improve them. Do not let a new template overwrite them with defaults.
• Set up analytics, call tracking, and conversion events on the staging site so launch day has data from minute one.

• Launch on a quiet day, early in the week, with the person who can roll it back available.
• Crawl the new site for broken links and missing pages before you point the domain at it, then again after.
• Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and watch coverage for a week. Spikes in 404s mean the redirect map missed something.
• Update the website link on Google Business Profile, every social profile, every directory, and every email signature. Then click each one.
• Submit one of every form, book one appointment, and start one chat, as a customer. Confirm each one arrived where it should and triggered what it should.
• Tell the staff what changed and where inquiries now land. The site is only as smart as the people who answer it.

• Compare calls, forms, bookings, and profile actions to the baseline every two weeks. A dip in week one is normal; a dip in week six is a problem.
• Read what people asked the concierge and searched for on the site. Turn the top three questions into copy on the relevant page.
• Fix the pages that lose people. Analytics will show you where visitors exit; the fix is usually clarity, not design.
• Re-run the footprint audit at day 90. Hours and photos drift; catch it before customers do.
• Put a monthly fifteen minutes on the calendar to keep it current, or connect the systems so it keeps itself current.

That last item is the difference between a redesign and a smart site. A redesign is a moment. A site that captures, answers, updates, and learns is a practice, and it is the only kind that still works two years later.

Almost every horror story about a redesign traces back to one of five decisions, usually made early and usually for a good-sounding reason.

• Changing URLs without a map. New site, new structure, tidy new addresses, and every link Google, Yelp, and your old flyers point at now returns a 404. The fix is boring: a redirect map, one hop, permanent, tested before launch.
• Deleting the pages that were 'ugly' without checking whether they ranked. The blog post from 2021 that nobody on staff likes is often the page that brings a third of the traffic. Check Search Console before you cut anything.
• Letting the template overwrite the titles. New themes ship with default titles and descriptions. If the migration does not carry over the ones that rank, the site relaunches as a stranger to search.
• Launching the design and postponing the wiring. The site is live, the forms are 'coming next sprint,' and for three weeks inquiries go nowhere. Wire first, launch second.
• Treating launch as the finish line. The site that is not measured for ninety days is the site that quietly loses ten percent of its calls and nobody notices until the quarter ends.

Shorter than a custom software project, longer than a weekend. The stages that cannot be rushed are the ones that involve you: gathering real photos and real copy, approving mockups, and testing the wiring as a customer. The stages that can be rushed are the ones people try to skip: the URL inventory and the redirect map. A realistic plan puts the audit and content gathering first, the design approval in the middle, and a launch window with a quiet week after it. Whoever is building the site should be able to give you a dated timeline with your approvals marked on it. If they cannot, that is information too.

This checklist is the spine of our web design and digital footprint engagements: audit, design with approved mockups, rebuild with redirects and rankings protected, workflow fixes behind the forms, and 90 days of measurement. If your redesign is already underway with someone else, the checklist still works. Hand it to them.