What to check before redesigning your website

Short answer

The biggest risk when redesigning your website isn’t design quality — it’s losing existing content and URL structure without a plan. Setting a clear objective, inventorying current pages and URLs, preparing a 301 redirect plan, monitoring SEO throughout and running a pre-launch technical check keep the process from going wrong.

Clarify your objective before anything else

“The site looks outdated” isn’t a strong enough reason on its own — clarifying the actual objective of the redesign also defines its scope, and prevents you from unintentionally starting a project that’s bigger or smaller than what you need. Is the goal a visual refresh, a platform migration, or a rebuild of the information architecture and conversion paths? Each of these three scenarios carries a different risk level and requires a different kind of preparation.

Starting a redesign without knowing which pages on the current site perform well — in traffic, conversion, or backlinks — risks accidentally breaking something that was already working. This assessment also makes budget and timeline planning more realistic: a small visual refresh can wrap up in a few weeks, while a full platform migration needs a much longer runway.

Inventory your current content and URLs

Before redesigning, compiling a list of every page on the current site — URL, title, approximate traffic — forms the foundation for everything that follows. Which pages get kept, which get merged, and which are no longer needed should all be decided against this inventory; it’s also a good opportunity to retire content that hasn’t been updated in a long time or is no longer relevant.

Don’t start without a 301 redirect plan

If the URL structure is changing, where each old URL will redirect to needs to be planned in advance. A migration without a redirect plan tends to produce broken links for users and lose the page value search engines have accumulated. Google’s guide to site moves with URL changes is a primary, current resource for planning this correctly from a technical standpoint.

Carry SEO performance through the transition

Title tags, meta descriptions, H1 structure and internal links typically get rewritten during a redesign — that’s a natural part of the process, but the search intent a given page currently serves shouldn’t get lost in the rewrite. If the new page doesn’t serve the same intent the old one did, performance can drop even if the design is better.

Watching crawl errors, indexation status and ranking movement closely in the weeks right after launch helps you catch issues early. Some fluctuation right after a migration is normal; a persistent downward trend can point to a missed redirect or lost content and deserves quick attention. Our crawl budget and INP guide covers this measurement approach from a technical SEO angle in more depth.

Decide who owns content migration, upfront

How copy, images and product information move from the old site to the new one is one of the most common sources of project delay, and it often takes considerably longer than the design phase itself. Will this be handled with an automated tool, or moved page by page manually? Will content be updated in the process, or carried over as-is? Who checks and updates product images and technical details? Without clear answers, the migration can stall with incomplete or inconsistent content even after the design is finished.

Time the launch around your business, not the calendar

Avoiding a launch date that lands during a busy period for your business — your peak sales season, for instance — limits how much an unexpected issue could actually cost you. Where possible, launching at a time when the team can spot and respond to problems quickly (early in the week, during business hours) is safer than launching right before a weekend or holiday.

Validate the new design with real users

A new design looking good to the internal team or agency doesn’t mean it will be easy for visitors to use. Where possible, having a few real users — an existing customer, someone outside the project — walk through core tasks (finding a product, filling out a form, reaching contact info) before launch helps catch problems that get missed internally. You don’t need sophisticated tooling for this: watching a few people share their screen while completing one task is often enough to surface a blocker the designer didn’t see. Our corporate web design process guide covers building this kind of evaluation into the process in more depth.

Run a full technical and content check before launch

Core things worth checking before going live:

• Do all internal links work, and are there any broken links?
• Are images optimised, and do they have alt text?
• Does form submission and the contact flow actually work end to end?
• Do the menu, buttons and form fields work reliably on mobile?
• Is the SSL certificate correctly configured on the new setup?

These checks can feel tedious, but the cost of an error discovered after launch — a lost visitor, an enquiry that never arrives — is usually far higher than the check itself. Keeping this checklist written down rather than in one person’s memory ensures the same steps get followed every time you launch.

Don’t skip a backup of the old platform

If you’re migrating platforms, taking a full backup of the old site (files, and the database if relevant) gives you a way back if something unexpected happens. Keep that backup until the new site is confirmed stable — and make sure it’s a backup that has actually been tested as restorable, not just assumed to exist.

Clarify team roles and communication

Decide upfront who approves content, who runs the technical checks, and who makes the final call to launch. In projects with more than one decision-maker, unclear ownership tends to produce last-minute approval delays that push the launch date back.

Plan for post-launch monitoring

The period right after launch is when problems are easiest to catch early. Search Console errors, form submission counts, page load time and user feedback should all be watched closely. It’s worth checking the redirect plan actually works in practice too — manually test a handful of the old site’s most-visited URLs to confirm they land on the right destination; a single typo in an automated redirect rule can turn an important page into a broken link.

Next step

Redesigning a website isn’t just about a new look — it’s about moving to a better experience without losing the value the current site has already built. With the right planning, inventory and redirect work, that transition can happen without major risk. Two checks that are easy to postpone are responsive behaviour on real devices and image optimisation; both are cheaper to get right during the build than after launch. Our guide to choosing a web design agency can help if you’re also deciding who should run this process with you.

For a different web design approach, Web Tasarım Ofisi is also worth a look.

To plan your redesign together, explore our corporate web design service or contact Argo Ajans.