Website redesign checklist for small businesses

A redesign is one of the few moments a business can do itself real damage online. Your old site, whatever its faults, has probably spent years earning search rankings, links from other sites, and a set of pages Google trusts. Replace it carelessly and all of that can vanish in a week, and you’ll spend months winning it back.

Done properly, none of that happens. Here’s the checklist we work through, in the order it matters.

Before you start

Write down why you’re redesigning. “It looks dated” is a reason, but it’s not a goal. Better: “the site gets traffic but no enquiries”, “it doesn’t work on phones”, “it doesn’t mention half of what we now do”. The goal decides what the redesign should change, and just as importantly, what it should leave alone.

Find out what’s already working. This is the step everyone skips, and it’s where redesigns go wrong. Before anything else:

• Open your analytics and list your most visited pages.
• Search Google for your trade plus your town and note which of your pages rank.
• Check Google Search Console (free) for the searches that bring people in.

Any page on that list is an asset. Carry it over, keep its address or redirect it properly, and don’t let it get dropped because it doesn’t fit the new design.

Check you hold your own keys. Confirm you have logins for your domain registrar, hosting, and analytics, in your name, before the project starts. If your old developer holds any of them, get that resolved now. Launch week is the wrong time to find out. We’ve written about why this matters.

Save a copy of the old site. Full backup: files, database if there is one, and a crawl or copy of every page’s text. You will want to check something against it later. Everyone does.

Content

Audit every page: keep, rewrite, or kill. Most sites accumulate pages nobody would miss. Fewer, better pages beat many thin ones, for visitors and for Google.

Rewrite for the visitor, not the mirror. The test for every page: does it say what you do, who it’s for, what it costs or how pricing works, and what to do next? Most small-business sites fail on the last two.

Use your own photos. Your jobs, your shopfront, the people who answer the phone. Stock photos are one of the fastest ways to look like every other site in your trade.

One clear action per page. Call, book, get a quote. If a page doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s decoration.

The technical list

This is the part that protects your rankings. If your developer can’t explain their plan for it, that’s a red flag.

• Redirect every URL that changes. If /our-services.html becomes /services, a redirect must point the old address at the new one. Miss this and every link and ranking the old page earned dies with it. Map every old URL before launch day.
• Keep the pages that rank. A ranking page’s address, title, and core content should survive the redesign unless there’s a strong reason otherwise.
• Make it fast. A redesign is the one chance to fix speed properly rather than patch it. Test the new site with PageSpeed Insights before launch, not after. Our plain-English guide to slow sites covers what to look for.
• Build mobile-first. Most of your visitors are on phones. Judge every design decision on a phone screen first.
• Don’t regress accessibility. Text contrast, keyboard navigation, image descriptions. It’s a legal consideration in the UK, and it’s also just more customers who can use your site.
• Update the legal pages. If the new site collects anything new, or adds analytics, chat, or embeds, your privacy and cookie policies need to say so.

Launch day

• Redirects live and spot-checked against your URL map.
• Contact forms tested with a submission that lands in your inbox. Forms fail silently more often than you’d think.
• Analytics receiving data on the new site.
• Search Console told about the new sitemap.
• Phone numbers, prices, and opening hours checked. The details that embarrass you are always the small ones.

The month after

Watch Search Console weekly for crawl errors and for rankings that moved. Some movement is normal for a couple of weeks. A cliff is not, and caught early it’s usually a missing redirect, which is a five-minute fix.

Then watch the number that motivated the redesign in the first place. Enquiries, calls, bookings. If the new site isn’t beating the old one within a couple of months, something in the plan was wrong, and it’s worth finding out what rather than shrugging.

The short version

Know what the old site does well, carry every bit of it over deliberately, redirect everything that moves, and test before launch rather than after. The new design is what people will comment on. Whether the redesign worked shows up later, in the rankings and the enquiries, and that part is decided by the boring list above.

Planning one and want a second opinion on the plan, or a quote for the build? Tell us about it.