The Website Redesign Checklist: 27 Things to Check Before You Launch

Every failed launch we have ever audited went wrong in one of the same few places: a missing redirect, a form that submitted to nowhere, a noindex tag left on production, analytics that silently stopped. None of these are hard to catch. They just were not on a list. This website redesign checklist is that list: 27 checks, grouped into the eleven areas where launches actually break, in the order you should work through them.

No download, no email gate. The article is the checklist. Bookmark it, open it the week before launch, and do not go live until every item has a name and a tick next to it.

How to use this website redesign checklist

Start the first two groups before design work begins; they define what “done” means. Run the middle groups on staging during the final week. Run the last two groups on launch day and the fortnight after. For every item, record who checked it and when; “someone looked at it” is how things get missed. If you are still choosing how to resource the rebuild itself, our guide to what a website redesign should cost covers the market options.

Business and conversion goals

Two checks that cost nothing and shape everything downstream. Redesigns that skip them launch on time, look better, and change nothing that matters.

1. Define the primary conversion action for every key page. Homepage, service pages, pricing, contact: each page gets exactly one primary action (enquiry, call, sign-up). If a page has no answer, it has no reason to exist on the new site.
2. Agree success metrics with whoever signs the invoice. Write down what the redesign must improve (conversion rate, enquiries per month, demo bookings) and the number it must beat. Without this, the project gets judged on opinions about colours.

Existing analytics benchmark

3. Record a full pre-launch baseline. Export twelve months of sessions, top landing pages, conversion rates and traffic sources. You cannot prove the redesign worked, or diagnose what broke, without a before picture.
4. Export Search Console and ranking data. Page-level clicks, impressions and positions, saved outside the property. If rankings move after launch, this export is your evidence of what changed and when.

Page and content inventory

5. Crawl the current site and list every URL. Screaming Frog or similar, with status codes, titles and metadata exported. This inventory drives the redirect map and the metadata migration.
6. Make an explicit keep, merge or retire decision for every page. No URL leaves the project undecided. Orphaned decisions become 404s.
7. Confirm final copy is signed off for every kept page. Real copy, not placeholder text. Launches slip more often on words than on code.

Redirect requirements

8. Build the redirect map. Every URL that changes or dies gets a row: old URL, new URL, 301. This is the highest-stakes document in the project. The full method is in our guide to redesigning without losing SEO traffic.
9. Test every redirect on staging. Crawl the old URL list against the new site: each should return a single 301 hop to a live page. No chains, no loops.
10. Confirm nothing blanket-redirects to the homepage. Google treats mass homepage redirects as soft 404s, and the equity you meant to transfer evaporates.

Mobile checks

Run these on the devices your analytics say your visitors actually use, not on the newest phone in the office. The gap between the two is where mobile problems hide.

11. Test key templates on real phones. An iPhone and a mid-range Android, not just the devtools emulator. Rendering, keyboards and viewport behaviour differ on real hardware.
12. Check tap targets, type sizes and overflow. Buttons big enough to hit, body text readable without zooming, no horizontal scroll, sticky headers that do not swallow the screen.
13. Complete the primary conversion action on mobile, end to end. Fill the form, book the call, place the test order. Do it on a phone, over mobile data. Most B2C traffic and a large share of B2B traffic is mobile; if the enquiry flow fails on a phone, the site fails, whatever the desktop demo looked like.

Form testing

Forms fail silently more than any other component on a website, and a redesign touches every part of the stack they depend on: templates, scripts, spam filters, CRM connections.

14. Submit every form and confirm the data arrives. In the CRM, the inbox and any notification channel. A form that looks fine and delivers nothing is the most expensive bug a marketing site can ship.
15. Check validation, error states and confirmations. Required fields behave, error messages make sense, and the thank-you step fires; you will need that for conversion tracking too.

Tracking verification

16. Verify the analytics container loads on every template. Staging first, production on launch day. Redesigns are the number-one cause of silent analytics gaps.
17. Fire every conversion event in debug mode. Form submits, calls, purchases: watch each event arrive in the analytics debugger before launch, not in a report three weeks later.
18. Carry over ad platform pixels and consent configuration. Google, Meta and LinkedIn tags plus consent mode must survive the rebuild, or paid campaigns go blind on launch day. If the measurement layer is the part your team dreads, this is exactly what our tech engine builds and audits.

Running this list a week out and finding more red than green? Book a pre-launch review and we will help you sequence what must be fixed before go-live and what can safely wait.

SEO metadata

19. Migrate titles and meta descriptions for every kept page. Field by field from your crawl export. CMS-generated defaults are how years of refined metadata vanish overnight, the pattern behind many of the traffic collapses like the one in our 40% traffic recovery case study, where rebuilding lost equity took a structured 120-day programme.
20. Check heading structure and schema. One H1 per page, logical H2/H3 hierarchy, and structured data carried over or improved.
21. Verify canonicals, noindex and robots.txt. Staging noindex removed, robots.txt permitting crawl, canonical tags pointing at the live domain. Three checks, thirty seconds each, and any one of them can deindex the site.

Page-speed checks

22. Run Core Web Vitals on every key template. LCP, CLS and INP on mobile. Compress images, subset fonts, and defer scripts that are not needed on first paint.
23. Benchmark the new site against the old one. The redesign must not ship slower than what it replaces. “Prettier but heavier” is a downgrade Google notices.

Domain and DNS preparation

The least glamorous group on the list, and the one with the widest blast radius when it goes wrong. Prepare the switch; never improvise it on the day.

24. Prepare the DNS switch. Lower the TTL a day or two ahead, schedule the change for a low-traffic window, and have the SSL certificate issued and tested before the switch, not after.
25. Confirm email and third-party records are untouched. MX records, subdomains, verification records. More than one launch has taken down company email with a careless zone update.

Post-launch monitoring

26. Submit the sitemap and crawl the live site on launch day. New XML sitemap into Search Console, then a full crawl of production to catch 404s, redirect chains and mixed-content warnings while they are hours old.
27. Monitor daily for two weeks against your baseline. Index coverage, organic clicks, conversion events and form deliveries, all compared to the benchmark from checks 3 and 4. Launch is the start of the measurement window, not the end of the project.

The pattern behind all 27 checks

Every item on this list exists because a launch somewhere skipped it. The checks are not sophisticated; they are systematic. Websites do not break at launch because teams lack skill; they break because nobody owned the boring parts.

Print it, assign it, launch it

Twenty-seven checks look like a lot until you weigh them against relaunching a site that leaks enquiries for a month before anyone notices. In practice the whole list takes a small team less than two days. Most items are minutes of verification, not hours of work. Assign every item a name, work the groups in order, and go live only when the list is green.

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