Planning a website redesign is an exciting opportunity to refresh your brand, enhance user experience (UX), and ensure your site meets modern standards. To help you execute a seamless redesign, we’ve put together this comprehensive checklist. Follow these steps to ensure your website stands out and performs optimally.

1. Define Your Goals

Before making any changes, be clear on why you’re redesigning your website. Understanding your goals will guide every decision you make.

• Are you focusing on improving UX
• Do you aim to boost conversions or increase site traffic?
• Has your brand evolved and you need a visual refresh?
• Are you optimizing for mobile and accessibility standards?

Write down measurable objectives, such as “increase lead conversions by 20%” or “reduce page load time by 30%.”

2. Audit Your Current Website

Before starting from scratch, conduct a detailed audit of your current website. It’s important to leverage data to also help guide your decisions.

Analytics Review
Use tools like Google Analytics to identify top-performing pages, bounce rates, user journeys, and underperforming areas. Lucky Orange is also a very useful tool we recommend, where you can see more in-depth how users interact with your website by watching user sessions, seeing heatmaps and more. Look out for any perceived obstacles, unexpected behaviors or areas where users get stuck. Ensure to document and improve the experience.

Content Assessment

Evaluate which pages and articles resonate with your audience and which need updating or removal. Quality over quantity matters. If you don’t have a keyword strategy, now would be the time to conduct keyword research and edit content accordingly to help your content rank better with search engines. Look for opportunities for internal link building between pages and content to help improve SEO rankings. 

Gather User Feedback
Reach out to site visitors, customers, or internal teams to gather insights on usability, functionality gaps, or challenges they face. SurveyMonkey or Google Forms can be useful tools for feedback gathering.

3. Create User Personas

Know your core audience. Build out detailed user personas that represent your customers. Include key details such as:

• Demographics (age, profession, location)
• Behavior patterns and interests
• Pain points your site should address
• Devices and browsers they use

Design your experience with these personas in mind to improve relevance and usability.

4. Plan Your Site’s New Structure

Redesigning your site is an opportunity to create a more intuitive structure. Start by mapping out an improved navigation and content flow using a sitemap tool.

Optimize Navigation
Keep menu items minimal and focused. Test out simpler labeling for easy comprehension.

Remove Dead Pages
Eliminate unnecessary or outdated pages that clutter the user experience.

Group Similar Pages
Merge pages with overlapping content to avoid repetition and improve clarity.

5. Refine the Design

A fresh redesign isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about providing a better UX. Prioritize user needs while updating your design:

Mobile-First Design
Ensure your website is seamless on mobile because more than 60% of traffic comes from mobile devices.

Modern Visuals
Update typography, color schemes, and imagery for a polished and modern look. Use white space effectively to create a clean, uncluttered feel. Animations and motions as the user scrolls or fun hover interactions, can modernize the look and feel as well as improve engagement.

Accessibility Features
Implement WCAG guidelines for inclusivity. This includes alt text for images, readable fonts, proper contrast ratio, and keyboard navigation compatibility. To go a step further, we recommend an accessibility plugin like accessiBe to do this seamlessly and account for more unique user scenarios. Ensuring your site is optimally accessible for everyone shows you care about inclusivity and can also protect you from legal action against noncompliance.

6. Improve Performance

No matter how good your new design looks, slow load times can drive away visitors. Boost your site’s performance with these steps:

• Compress images without sacrificing quality
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for faster load times - this is included when WordPress website hosting with CTRL+ALT Digital
• Make sure your server hosting can handle spikes in traffic

7. Optimize SEO

Take time during the redesign process to ensure proper search engine optimization (SEO) practices are integrated:

On-Page SEO
Use descriptive, keyword-rich page titles, meta descriptions, and headers.

URL Optimization
Ensure URLs are clean and easy to read (e.g., “/services/web-design”).

Redirects
Implement 301 redirects for any removed pages to avoid broken links and maintain SEO value.

Develop Schema Markup
Add structured data to improve search engine readability and enhance your search results with rich snippets.

8. Test Thoroughly Before Launch 

Pre-launch testing is vital to ensure everything works smoothly. Review and test the following areas:

• Load your site on multiple devices and browsers.
• Check all links to ensure there are no broken URLs. There are a lot of tools out there to help do this for you, such as Screaming Frog.
• Confirm all forms, such as contact, newsletter signup, or checkout, are functioning as expected. 
• Test site performance and adjust if there are speed bottlenecks.
• Walk through the complete user experience, from landing on the homepage to completing a purchase or inquiry. Ensure to keep the user personas in mind as you navigate the site. 

9. Launch and Promote

• Choose a low-traffic period for your launch to minimize disruption.
• Clear caching to ensure your audience sees the latest version of your site.
• Test analytics and lead-tracking setups so data collection is uninterrupted.
• Communicate the redesign to your audience via email, social media and newsletters. Highlight improvements, like faster speeds or better mobile usability. Let your audience know if user feedback helped guide decisions for the redesign, as customers should know you listened to them and that their feedback matters.

10. Collect Feedback Post-Launch

Once your new website is live, your work isn’t over. Listen to your users, just as you did before the redesign:

• Send out surveys asking for feedback on the new look and feel. You can also collect feedback on site with various tools but ensure not to interrupt the user experience or distract from conversion goals.
• Monitor user behavior with tools like Lucky Orange to see how visitors interact with your redesigned site.
• Review analytics for any unexpected drops or spikes in engagement.

11. Maintain and Update 

A website redesign is an investment, but its success depends on ongoing maintenance and optimization. Schedule regular time for:

• Updating content and visuals to keep your site fresh
• Checking for broken links or outdated information. Use our handy guide for free tools to measure SEO efforts.
• Refining performance and ensuring security updates are applied to plugins or software

Ready for a Refresh?

A smart, user-focused redesign can be a game-changer for your business. But it doesn’t stop at a stunning design. Remember, performance, optimization, and constant improvement are just as important.

If you’re ready to start planning your redesign but don’t know where to begin, we’re here to help. Reach out to our team of web design experts and create something that not only looks great but drives real results.