A website redesign checklist exists for one reason: a redesign changes everything at once, and the things that break are the things nobody wrote down. The design is the part everyone looks at. The URLs, the forms, the tracking tags and the CRM connection are the parts that decide whether the new site produces more leads than the old one or fewer.
This checklist has 40 checks in three phases. It is the list we run on our own website redesign projects, where the brief is always the same: make the site better without losing a single enquiry the old one was producing. Use it as a working document. Tick things off, argue with a few, and add the ones specific to your business.
Three failures account for most of the damage we see when a business comes to us after a redesign has gone wrong.
Unmapped URLs. The old site had 300 pages. The new one has 60. Nobody mapped the other 240, so the backlinks, the rankings and the bookmarks now land on a 404 page. Traffic falls, and the redesign takes the blame.
Forms that send to the wrong place. The new contact form was tested by the developer, who received the test in their own inbox. The business never changed the recipient. Enquiries pile up somewhere nobody looks.
Tracking that was never rebuilt. GA4 was on the old site. The ad platform tag was on the old site. Neither was carried across, or both were, twice. The business has no idea whether the new site is working, and the decisions that follow are made on guesswork.
None of these is a design problem. All of them are checklist problems, which is why the first phase below is the longest.
Everything in this phase is about recording the current state. You cannot protect what you have not measured.
Two of these deserve a note. The GA4 and CRM reconciliation (check nine) is the one businesses skip, and it matters because your baseline may be wrong. We have found sites reporting more than 150 conversions a month in GA4 where the CRM held 80 real leads. If you redesign against a false baseline, you will never know whether the new site worked. Our conversion tracking service exists for exactly this reconciliation.
The maintenance decision (check eleven) belongs before the platform decision, not after launch. Who will run updates, fix things and check the forms? If the answer is nobody yet, our guide to website maintenance costs explains what that should cost and include.
The order matters more than people expect. Redirect mapping comes before design because the site map is the redirect map. Copy comes before visual design because a page designed around placeholder text gets rewritten to fit the boxes. Forms and tracking are built with the pages, not bolted on in the last week, because the last week is when they get forgotten.
For a fuller view of what happens after someone submits a form on the new site, and why we treat that as part of the redesign, see the conversion systems ladder. The redesign is the first rung; tracking, CRM and follow-up are the next three.
Launch day is not the finish. The first thirty days are when the redirects prove themselves, the 404 log tells you what you missed, and the first platform update tests whether anyone is watching the forms. Check ten, re-running the form test after the first update, is the one we would keep if we could keep only one.
The result below is from a UK accountancy whose redesign we ran with the tracking and follow-up rebuilt alongside the site. The design changed, but the number that moved was the one recorded in phase one.
The pattern behind it is the pattern behind this checklist. The old site’s pages were mapped, the forms were rebuilt to land in the right place, the conversion events were named consistently, and the first month’s numbers were read against a baseline that had been checked. Everything else, the design, the copy, the platform, served that.
If you are still deciding whether a redesign is due, our guide to how often you should redesign your website for conversions covers the signs, and our guide to homepage design covers the page that carries most of the load.
Send us your current site. We will audit the URLs, forms and tracking, tell you what the redesign needs to protect, and quote the rebuild with the plumbing included. Most business sites take four to eight weeks.
See How We Run a RedesignFour to eight weeks for most business sites, from audit to launch, in our experience. Ecommerce, multi-language sites and large content migrations take longer. The schedule slips most often on content and approvals rather than on design or development, so agree who signs off what before the build starts.
Most of the redesigns we quote land between $5,000 and $18,000. A five-to-ten page business site sits at the lower end; ecommerce, integrations and large content migrations push it up. The cost that matters more is the one nobody quotes: the leads lost when redirects, forms or tracking are not carried across.
Record every URL that gets organic traffic before you start, map each one to a new URL or a 301 redirect, keep the page titles and headings that already rank, and submit the new sitemap to Search Console on launch day. Then watch the coverage and 404 reports for thirty days. Most SEO losses after a redesign are unmapped URLs, not design changes.
Every form end to end: submit a test enquiry and confirm it reaches the inbox, the CRM and the analytics as a conversion. Then the redirects, the sitemap, page speed on mobile, and the 404 log. Do the form test on launch day and again after the first update, because that is when tracking breaks.
Yes, if you want to know whether it worked. A redesign that changes the site but leaves the forms sending to an old mailbox and the analytics counting test submissions cannot be measured. Our redesigns rebuild the tracking, the CRM connection and the follow-up alongside the pages, and hand all of it over in the client's name.
As CEO and Founder of Apexure, Waseem Bashir's decade-old experience in building high-converting landing pages extends to collaborations with Fortune 500 leaders and over 1000 clients. He transforms this wealth of expertise into remarkable landing pages, inspiring marketers towards targeted marketing success. Read more
Planning a Redesign? See How We Rebuild a Site Without Losing the Leads It Already Gets
See Website Redesign“I had tasked Apexure to help me redesign our business website from the ground up. The entire process was extremely smooth and they helped to create a site which was exactly in line with my vision.”
Anand Singh Virdi, Solicitor, RFC Law
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