The website redesign checklist.

Why redesigns go wrong

Most website redesigns fail in one of two ways: the new site looks better but converts worse, or it launches beautifully and the Google rankings quietly fall off a cliff. Both failures are preventable, and both come from treating a redesign as a design project instead of what it really is: a migration of a working business asset.

This is the checklist we run on every rebuild at Skybound, from luxury builder sites to healthcare platforms. Steal it.

Before you design anything: 7 steps

• 1. Crawl your current site. Export every URL that exists today. You cannot protect what you have not inventoried.
• 2. Pull your rankings and traffic. Note every page earning organic visits or backlinks. These pages are load bearing walls: move them carefully, never delete them casually.
• 3. Record your conversion baseline. Forms per week, calls per week, conversion rate. Without a baseline, nobody can prove the redesign worked.
• 4. Interview your best customers. The words they use to describe your value become your headlines. Skipping this is why redesigned sites so often say less than the old ones.
• 5. Define one job per page. Every page gets one action it exists to cause. Pages without jobs get cut or merged.
• 6. Map the new URL structure. Decide what stays, what moves, and what dies, with a redirect for every change.
• 7. Set the performance budget. Green Core Web Vitals on mobile is the floor, not the stretch goal.

During the build: 8 steps

• 8. Design mobile first. That is where most of your visitors are and where weak layouts collapse first.
• 9. Rewrite, do not repaint. New sections with old copy is the most expensive way to change nothing.
• 10. Keep title tags and metadata intentional. Every page ships with a unique title under 60 characters and a description under 160.
• 11. Preserve heading hierarchy. One h1 per page, logical h2 and h3 structure. Screen readers and search engines both read the outline.
• 12. Compress and dimension every image. Modern formats, explicit width and height, lazy loading below the fold.
• 13. Rebuild structured data. Organization, breadcrumbs, FAQ, and service schema where they apply.
• 14. Wire analytics and conversion events before launch. Not after. The first week of data is the most interesting.
• 15. Build the 301 redirect map. Every old URL points to its closest new equivalent. No redirect chains, no redirecting everything to the homepage.

Launch week: 6 steps

• 16. Ship the redirects with the site. Same deploy, same hour. A gap here is how rankings vanish.
• 17. Update the sitemap and resubmit it. Google Search Console, the day you launch.
• 18. Crawl the new site immediately. Hunt broken links, missing titles, accidental noindex tags, and orphaned pages.
• 19. Verify analytics fire. Test every form and click event yourself, on a phone.
• 20. Watch Search Console daily for two weeks. Coverage errors and ranking wobbles caught early are cheap to fix.
• 21. Compare against your baseline at day 30. Conversion rate, organic traffic, and lead volume against the numbers from step 3. This is the report that proves the project.

How often should you redesign?

Structurally, every three to five years, or when the business has outgrown the story the site tells. But the healthier pattern is continuous: a site you can edit easily, sharpened monthly with real data, rarely needs the dramatic teardown. That is a core reason we build marketing sites on Framer, covered honestly in our Framer service and our Framer vs Webflow comparison.