Website Redesign Checklist: 15 Steps Before You Launch

A redesign that loses your existing traffic or breaks your email was avoidable. This is the sequence we run before relaunching any site, in order, with the reasoning attached. Skim it before a redesign; work through it line by line before launch.

Before design starts

1. Inventory everything on the current site. Every URL, every form, every download, every email address hiding in a footer. The inventory is the redesign's contract with reality — whatever it misses dies silently at launch.

2. Pull a year of analytics and search data. Which pages get traffic, which queries bring it, which pages convert. The data tells you what to protect. If the site has no analytics, install something now and let it run through the redesign — you will need the baseline.

3. Write down what the redesign must achieve — enquiries, sales, credibility, hiring — with a number attached to each. Without a target, a redesign is redecoration, and decoration is not the job.

4. List every URL that must keep working: pages linked from printed material, WhatsApp cards, client emails, supplier portals. These are migration-critical, not optional.

During the build

5. Map old URLs to new ones. Every retired URL needs a redirect to its closest successor. Permanent redirects — 308s, as we ship them — preserve search equity and keep old links honest. This single step is the difference between a redesign that grows traffic and one that resets to zero.

6. Rewrite copy against the new structure. The most common failure in redesigns is dragging old sentences into new layouts. Write for the page the visitor is now on.

7. Design mobile-first — not as a slogan, but as the order of work: the phone layout is designed, then widened. Most Namibian traffic arrives on phones; design for the majority first, as we cover in mobile-first design.

8. Check image weight as you go. Oversized images are the most common speed problem we find in audits, and the easiest to fix before launch rather than after.

9. Test forms and enquiry paths with real submissions. A form that returns a success message and delivers nothing has cost more Namibian businesses enquiries than any design decision ever has.

10. Verify accessibility basics: contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text, form labels. The checklist is short and the stakes are real — see the accessibility basics.

The week before launch

11. Stage the full site and crawl it. Run a link checker against the staging build. Fix every broken link before it becomes a visitor's problem.

12. Set up the analytics and search console on the new build before DNS moves, so the first day of new traffic is fully measured.

13. Prepare the 404 page with navigation and a search field. Something will break; the 404 decides whether the visitor leaves or recovers.

Launch day

14. Move DNS during a low-traffic window and verify: SSL certificate live, redirects firing, forms delivering, sitemap submitted, and the site reachable from a phone on mobile data — not just office wifi.

15. Watch the first week of data daily. Search console errors, form submissions, and analytics against the old baseline. Small problems caught in week one are cheap; the same problems found in month three are embarrassing.

The meta-step

Notice that steps 1 through 4 happen before a single screen is designed. That order is the discipline. A redesign that starts in a design tool inherits whatever the old site knew; a redesign that starts with an inventory inherits nothing it did not choose. If your current site is large or old, that is exactly why the audit step exists — the inventory with fresh eyes, before anything is promised.