Website redesign checklist
The redesign survival list: audit before promise, preserve URL equity with redirects, stage the SEO migration, and launch with a rollback plan — nothing missed.
14 checks · copy it, print it, argue with it.
Redesigns fail in predictable places: rankings destroyed by missing redirects, content lost because nobody exported it, and budgets blown because “while we're at it” had no off switch. This checklist is the sequence that prevents all three — start to finish, the redesign guide is the long-form version. Print it, work it in order, and skip nothing in the “protect” sections; everything else is recoverable, those are not.
Before design starts — know what you have
- Crawl the current site and save the full URL list with traffic and ranking data per URLyou cannot preserve value you never mapped
- Export ALL content — posts, pages, media, forms, products — and store it outside the current sitethe export is your insurance policy against every later mishap
- Screenshot key pages and record current analytics baselinesconversion rates, top pages, bounce — the redesign gets judged against these numbers
- List every integration, embed and third-party service currently runningthe things nobody remembers are the things that break silently at launch
- Decide explicitly: redesign, rebuild, or refresh — and write down what each means for budgetthe most expensive redesign is the one that discovers mid-project it was a rebuild
During build — protect the value
- Map every old URL to its new equivalent — a redirect map, reviewed line by linethis single artefact decides whether your SEO survives; treat it as a deliverable, not an afterthought
- Preserve or improve: titles, meta descriptions, H1s, schema on pages that rankranking pages get surgical treatment, not creative reinterpretation
- Keep the same or better internal-link structure for pages that earn trafficinternal links are ranking equity flowing through the site — redesigns that sever them bleed
- Audit new builds on staging for the whole <a href="/resources/checklists/seo-checklist/">launch SEO checklist</a>redesigns inherit every rule of new builds — plus migration risk on top
Launch & after — verify, don't celebrate yet
- Deploy the redirect map BEFORE announcing anythingthe first 48 hours of traffic set the recovery tone
- Run the old-URL crawl against the live site — every legacy URL resolves, zero chains beyond one hopautomated verification beats “I'm pretty sure we got them all”
- Submit updated sitemaps; monitor Search Console coverage and crawl errors daily for two weeksthe migration is not done when the site is live — it is done when indexing settles
- Compare analytics against baseline: traffic, conversions, top landing pages — and write down the deltasa redesign you cannot judge is a redesign you cannot defend
- Keep the old site's backup and content export for at least six monthsrollback windows close; the archive's value lasts
Worked in order, this list turns a redesign from a leap into a controlled move — redesigns run here exactly this way, and SEO migration is its own discipline when rankings matter.
Quarterly, and only when the numbers move
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