The Ultimate Website Redesign Checklist and Planning Guide

Website redesign is the process of improving and updating a website to enhance the user experience (UX) and keeping the website up-to-date with latest trends and technologies. A website redesign checklist helps us in avoiding the pitfalls of poor planning and execution.

Following a website redesign checklist also ensures a systematic and complete execution of all the SEO perspectives before a website gets live.

Pre-launch website redesign checklist

What to check right before site goes live?

Source: giphy.com Almost there! We are down to last minute checks. Every department including marketing, design and development should do final testing from their end before the site goes live. It is critical in this phase to maintain open communication on any and all feedback. Everybody should be kept in the loop to make sure absolutely nothing falls through the cracks. Let’s get to it then, shall we?

• Forms

  1. Do a functionality testing of all the web forms on the site
  2. Make sure you validate the information submitted by a site visitor. Is it being captured?
  3. See if a ‘Thank You’ page is generated right after the form is filled successfully.
  4. Does the website fire an email to both the customer and company with all the user information?

• Links

  • Check all internal links and external links. Are they working as they should? Watch for 404s, invalid links, or anything in between.
  • See if the social media icons are linked correctly. You’ll be surprised how often we come across websites whose Facebook account links to their Pinterest. *Facepalm*

• Content

  Things you should check:
  • Typos
  • Grammar mistakes
  • Missing meta titles and descriptions
  • Missing image alt tags

Boom! The site is live. Now what?

• Google Analytics

  • Get the analytics code added in your site header
  • Annotate the date of launch in Google Analytics
  • Set-up new Goals if URLs were changed
  • Verify if Google Analytics is collecting data. Open your website and check the Real Time reports to see if it is working.
  • Finally, use Google Analytics filters to eliminate spam visits, your company IP address, and anything else that will contaminate your data

• Google Search Console

  • Create new XML sitemap and submit to all the versions of your site in Google Search Console
  • Add the sitemap to your robots.txt

• 301s and 404s

  • Cross check the 301 redirection mapping sheet.
  • Open every old URL in the browser and see if it gets redirected to new one with the 301 status code.

• Run a Screaming Frog test to validate

  • Check 404 pages, canonicals, noindex, nofollow.
  • Missing H1, alt tags, meta tags and descriptions. You should also validate the length of the meta tags.

• Page Speed check

  Do a page speed check with Google Pagespeed Insights to ensure there are no bottlenecks. If there are some, make sure to convey that to your designer and development team. In addition,
  • Ask your team, your clients, subscribers, and social media followers what they think of your cool new design!
  • Do a blog post announcing the relaunch.

Post website redesign checklist

You should be happy; your site is live!

Source: giphy.com But that doesn’t mean you get to rest. Buckle up, this is the phase where you are supposed to suit up and start monitoring everything.

1. Make sure to double and triple check that Google Analytics is working and collecting data.
2. Do a regular check of website traffic data in GA from the date of annotation. Note any improvements/decline
3. Test your goals in Google Analytics
4. Compare different website metrics including sessions, time on site, etc
5. Compare the bounce rate before and after the launch [make sure you do this weekly or daily]
6. Extract keyword ranking and compare with the rankings you recorded before the launch.
7. Keep an eye on 301s and 404s in Google Search Console and immediately get it resolved if you see them

Additionally, you must also check each page of the redesigned website in Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to see if there's any problem.

Cheers to a successful site launch! Did we miss anything you would like to add? Let us know!

Want to design/redesign your website? Contact us and get a quote. We’ll be more than happy to help with your site design.