BuildRocket LabsWhat should a website redesign checklist cover?
A safe redesign does four unglamorous things: measures the old site before touching it, maps every existing URL to a redirect, rewrites the words before restyling the pixels, and verifies speed before launch. Redesigns fail when teams jump straight to 'how it looks'.
This is the working checklist we run on our own projects — including our own rebuild off a Framer template, where the before/after was measured, not asserted.
[ published 2026-07-18 · updated 2026-07-18 ]What do you do before designing anything?
- Screenshot and archive the current site — your before evidence
- Measure it: PageSpeed scores, search rankings, current enquiry rate
- Export every URL that gets traffic — each one needs a redirect plan
- List what actually converts today (pages, CTAs) so you don't delete it
- Write the one sentence the new site must say better than the old one
What belongs in the build phase?
- Content first: rewrite pages answer-first before styling them
- 301 redirects for every old URL — lost URLs are lost rankings
- Real device testing at 390px — most of your traffic lives there
- Accessibility floor: keyboard nav, contrast, labeled forms, alt text
- Performance budget enforced before launch, not audited after
What do you verify after launch?
- Re-run the same speed tests — publish the before/after honestly
- Crawl for 404s and broken redirects within the first week
- Resubmit the sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing
- Watch enquiries for a full cycle — the only metric that pays rent
Related questions
q01Will a redesign hurt my Google rankings?
Only if URLs vanish without redirects or the new site is slower than the old one. Both are fully preventable — which is why the checklist starts with measurement and a URL inventory, not moodboards.
q02Redesign or rebuild — what's the difference?
A redesign restyles what exists; a rebuild re-engineers it. If the platform itself is the ceiling — speed, structure, ownership — restyling just repaints the ceiling.
Want this handled instead of researched?
Every project gets a fixed written proposal before any payment. 50% to start, 50% at launch.