Website Redesign Checklist: 6 Steps to Success in 2024

Your website is one of your business’s most important assets. It’s your digital storefront – a place every prospective customer visits before they choose to do business with you. It represents your brand, your people, and your ethos as a business. 

If performance has been slipping, it might be time to consider a website redesign. By now, you’ve likely realized that the website redesign process is a big undertaking. That’s why we’ve put together this simple six-step website redesign checklist. 

By following the steps here, you’ll be well-positioned to improve your business’s online presence and meet your marketing goals in 2024. But first, what are some of the indicators that your website needs a refresh? 

How to Determine If You Need a Website Redesign

A website redesign is a costly, time-consuming project that can stretch on for months. Before you dive into the process, pause for a moment and make sure you understand the reasons you’re redesigning your website. 

You might think your existing website looks a little outdated and clunky, but if it’s attracting and converting customers, there might be nothing wrong with that. Usually, you can tell if your website needs a redesign by asking yourself a few key questions:

• Does your website support your business goals?
• Is your website easy for your marketing team to work with? Can you make changes, run A/B tests, and easily publish new content?
• Do you have access to the analytics you need to measure and improve performance?
• Is your website optimized for mobile? (Today, nearly 60% of web traffic comes from mobile.) 
• Are you undergoing a rebrand, launching a new product, or looking for a refreshed look and feel?

Your answers to these questions will tell you whether you need a website redesign. In addition, take the time to look at your website performance data. If the following performance metrics are getting worse, that’s more proof it’s time to consider a redesign:

• Bounce rate
• Organic traffic
• Conversions, leads, and form submissions
• Website speed (look for time to first byte, time to download an HTML page, and time to render)

6 Step Website Redesign Checklist

The website redesign process is a journey – and it’s not one you should undertake alone. Along the way, you’ll need to juggle competing priorities and pull in support from all over your business. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed, but by breaking things down into a simple step-by-step approach, you can make steady progress toward your goals. 

1. Audit Your Current Website

Start by completing an in-depth audit of your current website. While you’re primarily looking for the weaknesses in your current website, pay close attention to the positive elements as well; your redesigned website should replicate those. There are several areas to include in your audit. 

Map Topical Coverage

Your website should be an accurate representation of your business. It should educate potential buyers about your products and services, share relevant content, and answer questions that prospective customers might have. 

Create a topical map outlining the topics your website covers and overlay that with the strategic plan for your business. If there are any missing areas, make sure to include them in the new site. 

Analyze the Data

Dive deep into the data to audit your website. Examine your performance by page, determining where your traffic enters and leaves your site, the pages people are most likely to convert on, and the amount of time people spend on key pages. You can find all of these insights in tools like GA4, HubSpot, and other web analytics tools. 

Complete an SEO Audit

Over half of all web traffic comes from organic search, so it’s crucial your website has strong SEO. Completing an SEO audit helps pinpoint your weaknesses and identify whether your website is harnessing the most effective SEO techniques. Lean on these tools to help with your SEO audit:

• Google Search Console: Check indexing status, crawling errors, and traffic from organic search. 
• Semrush: Identify technical issues, analyze backlink profiles, and track keyword rankings. 
• Screaming Frog: Diagnoses technical SEO issues by crawling your website, identifying broken links, analyzing page titles, and highlighting duplicate content. 

2. Align on Goals

Focus on setting goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. By adopting this method, you can align your business around goals that are achievable but also move the needle. If you like, you can also add stretch goals: more ambitious targets that exceed your expectations. 

Here’s an example of a SMART goal with a stretch goal. 

Let’s say that right now, your form fill rate is 3%. That means that for every 100 people who visit your site, only 3 fill out a form and become a lead. 

A SMART goal would be to increase form fill rate to 5% by the end of the year. 

A stretch goal would be to increase form fill rate to 7% by the end of the year. 

These numbers might seem small, but achieving them would have a huge impact on your business. By increasing from 3% to 5%, you’re increasing lead flow by 66% – a game changer for your sales team. The best news: with the right website redesign service, results like that are absolutely possible. 

3. Hire a Skilled Web Design Partner

Once you’ve established your goals, start drafting the team that will help you redesign your website. Your most important partner is a website redesign agency: a team of talented developers, creatives, and strategists who will help bring your vision to life. 

Look for a website redesign service with experience designing websites similar to yours. Today, many web design agencies primarily build on platforms like HubSpot and WordPress that make it easy for businesses to manage their own site. 

Potential website redesign agency partners should have a comprehensive web design portfolio and plenty of case studies. As you scope out the project, meet with your potential partners and pay close attention to how they treat you. You’ll be talking to each other every week for the next few months, so it’s important you have a great relationship.  

4. Invest in New Content and Marketing Assets

The website redesign process is the perfect time to invest in new creative elements for your business. From updating outdated graphics to creating new sales collateral, consider all the ways you can update your content to enhance your new web platform. 

Be open to feedback from your web design partner. They’re dedicated professionals with plenty of knowledge on web redesign best practices. It’s their role to listen to you, incorporate your ideas in the design process, and steer the project toward an end product you’re excited about. You’re still the boss, though, so feel free to share any UX design ideas you have with them. 

Here are some content ideas to consider adding to your website redesign checklist: 

• Product images
• Graphics
• Video content
• Learning center articles, videos, and guides
• Team photos
• Help center resources
• Customer testimonials and case studies

5. Test Design and Functionality

Website redesigns don’t roll off the production line ready for prime time. In fact, the opposite is true. That’s why it’s vital that you account for the time it takes to test your new website into your website redesign checklist. 

Your website redesign agency will lead the way on this, but you should play a role as well. Here are some of the top watch-outs you’ll want to test for:

• Does the site work well on different devices and browsers?
• Do all buttons and hyperlinks work correctly?
• Is the site responsive?
• Are forms and automations working correctly?
• Are there any typos?
• Are page titles and meta descriptions present and accurate for every page?
• Is your website secure?

Many of these issues can be easily fixed. But you must find and fix them before you launch your website – the last thing you want is to launch a new website that delivers a disappointing user experience. 

6. Launch Your New Website

Once you’ve completed all of the steps outlined above, you’re ready to push that big red button and launch your website. This is an exciting time – the culmination of months of hard work! Take a moment to pat yourself on the back, but remember that your work isn’t done. 

Over the coming weeks and months, make sure to track the performance of your new website and identify areas for continued improvement. No website is perfect, especially one that’s just been redesigned from the ground up. That’s why it’s crucial you continue to test, learn, and refine every element of your website, from alternative form placements to new headlines and calls to action (CTAs). 

Ready to Revamp Your Website? 

A website redesign is truly a team effort, and it’s crucial that you, alongside all of your internal and external partners, take a joint approach. It’s a significant investment, but when you nail every element of the website redesign checklist, you’re creating a business asset that will produce returns for years to come. 

Get in touch if you’re thinking about redesigning your website in 2024. Our web design experts specialize in creating revenue-driving websites that showcase your brand and captivate your target audience.