A website redesign checklist is the difference between a new site that brings you more calls and a new site that looks great while your phone goes quiet. I’ve seen both. The second one usually happens to smart people who skipped the boring steps because the design mockups were exciting.
Here’s a typical story. A security consultant has had the same site for eight years. It’s dated, but one old article about workplace violence policies still pulls in a steady trickle of HR directors from Google. He hires someone to redesign, the new site launches, and that article disappears because nobody mapped the old URL. Three months later he wonders why the inquiries dried up.
We’ve launched 30+ websites at Design Fly 24, and a good share of them were redesigns for consultants, speakers, coaches and small professional firms. This is the website redesign checklist we actually use, in the order we use it. Print it, share it with whoever is building your site, and tick things off as you go.
- A website redesign checklist starts with goals and an honest audit, not with colors and fonts.
- Find the pages that already rank and bring in leads, and protect them through the whole project.
- A URL and redirect plan is the single step that saves most redesigns from losing search traffic.
- Proof, clear messaging and a simple contact path matter more than visual polish.
- The first 30 days after launch are part of the project. Watch Search Console, forms and speed closely.
Why consultants need a website redesign checklist at all
A consultant’s site has a different job from a store’s site. You aren’t selling a product someone can compare on price. You’re selling judgment, and the site has to earn enough trust for a stranger to book a call. That means every change to wording, structure or proof can move the needle, up or down.
A redesign also touches things you can’t see: page addresses, metadata, tracking codes, form routing, old links from partner sites. Lose any of those and the damage is quiet. Nothing breaks on screen. You just get fewer leads. A written website redesign checklist forces those invisible items into the open.
It also keeps everyone honest. When the designer, the writer and you share one website redesign checklist, decisions happen in the right order: messaging before layout, redirects before launch.
1. Set clear goals before anything else
Start your website redesign checklist with one question: what should this site do better than the old one? “Look more modern” is a wish, not a goal. Good goals sound like this:
- More discovery calls from school districts or corporate HR teams.
- Fewer unqualified inquiries from people who can’t afford you.
- A clearer path for event planners who want to book you as a speaker.
- Pages that rank for the services you actually want to sell more of.
Pick two or three. Write them at the top of your website redesign checklist so every later decision can be tested against them. If a fancy animation doesn’t help any of those goals, it can wait.
Decide what success looks like in numbers you already have
Count form submissions and calls for the last few months and note your top landing pages. That’s your baseline, and it belongs on page one of your website redesign checklist.
2. Audit the current site and your analytics
Before you change a single page, look at what the current site is doing. Open Google Analytics and Google Search Console and pull the last twelve months. You want to know which pages people land on, which ones lead to a contact, and which search terms bring them in.
Then click through the site on your phone like a buyer would, and ask two clients what they remember about it. Their answers are often humbling and very useful.
What to record in the audit
- Top 20 landing pages by traffic.
- Pages that lead to form submissions or calls.
- Search queries with real impressions in Search Console.
- Pages with backlinks from other sites (associations, media, partners).
- Broken links, slow pages and anything that looks wrong on mobile.
3. Keep the pages that rank
This is the step most redesigns skip, and it’s the one that hurts most. If a page brings in search traffic today, treat it like an asset on your balance sheet. You can improve it. You can restyle it. But don’t delete it, don’t change its address without a redirect, and don’t strip out the content that made it rank.
One client’s best page was a plain, wordy FAQ about compliance deadlines. The new design almost cut it to five bullets. We kept the full text, cleaned up the layout and moved the call to action higher. Same words, better presentation.
Quick tip: Flag your ranking pages in red on your website redesign checklist. Anyone who wants to remove or rewrite one of them has to explain why first.
4. Build a content inventory
A content inventory is a spreadsheet of every page on the current site. One row per page, with the URL, title, traffic, whether it ranks, and a decision: keep, improve, merge or remove. It sounds tedious. It takes an afternoon for most consultant sites, and it saves weeks of confusion later.
This is also where you find the clutter: old event announcements, a “News” page untouched for years, three thin service pages that should be one strong one. Merging them often helps readers and rankings.
Your website redesign checklist should treat the inventory as the master list. The sitemap for the new site is built from it, and the redirect plan comes straight out of it.
5. Make a URL and redirect plan
Every old URL that changes or disappears needs a permanent (301) redirect to the most relevant new page. Not to the homepage. To the closest match. If /services/training/ becomes /training/, that exact old address must point to the new one. Every row of your website redesign checklist redirect map should be that specific.
Google explains this well in its guide to site moves with URL changes. The short version: map old to new, one to one, set the redirects before launch, and keep them in place for the long haul.
Simple rules for the redirect map
- Keep the same URL whenever you can. No redirect beats a good redirect.
- Redirect removed pages to the closest relevant page, not the homepage.
- Avoid redirect chains (old page to older page to new page).
- Test every row of the map on the staging site and again on launch day.
If there’s one line in this website redesign checklist you refuse to skip, make it this one.
6. Sharpen your messaging
A redesign is the best excuse you’ll get to fix your words. Most consultant sites open with something vague like “Strategic solutions for complex challenges.” A buyer reads that and learns nothing. Your homepage headline should say who you help and with what, in words the buyer would actually use.
Compare “Helping organizations build safer environments” with “School safety assessments and crisis planning for K to 12 districts.” The second tells a superintendent she’s in the right place in three seconds.
Write the messaging before the design. That order is the backbone of any website redesign checklist. If you want help with this part, our brand identity work often starts here, with positioning and plain language, before anyone opens a design tool.
Nobody hires a consultant because the website was pretty. They hire the one whose website made them feel understood.
7. Gather proof before design starts
Proof sells consultants. Client names, logos you have permission to use, short case studies, credentials, media appearances, books, speaking engagements. Collect it all early, because the design should be built around your strongest proof, not decorated with it at the end.
Look at schoolsecurity.org, a site we built for Ken Trump, a national school safety expert. His media work and district experience sit front and center. You have more proof than you think, so dig through old emails and ask clients for a sentence or two.
Add a “proof” section to your website redesign checklist with a simple target: one testimonial or result per service page, and a short credentials block on the about page. You can browse our work to see how other consultants show proof without bragging.
Planning a redesign this year?We’ll walk through your current site and analytics on a free call and point out what to protect and what to fix first.
8. Design for trust, not trends
Once goals, content and messaging are settled, design gets easy. The job is to make the important things obvious: who you help, what you do, why you’re credible, and how to reach you. Clean layout, readable type, real photos of you, and plenty of white space do more than any trendy effect.
We cover the elements that matter most in our guide to consultant website design, so I won’t repeat it all here. The short list: a strong headline, one main call to action, service pages with a clear next step, and a photo of you that looks like the person a buyer will meet.
Design questions for your website redesign checklist
- Can a stranger tell what you do within five seconds of landing?
- Is there one obvious next step on every page?
- Do the photos look like you and your real work?
- Does the design still work if you remove every image?
9. Make mobile the default view
Many of your buyers will see your site on a phone first. The event planner checking you out at a conference. The HR director reading your email on the train. Design and review every page on a phone before you look at the desktop version.
The mobile part of your website redesign checklist: tappable phone number, buttons big enough for a thumb, menus that open cleanly, nothing spilling off the screen. If you get bored before the contact button, so will your buyer.
10. Plan for speed from the start
Speed is a design decision, not a fix you apply at the end. Hero videos, five font families and a dozen plugins slow down any site, so put speed on your website redesign checklist from day one.
Use PageSpeed Insights to test the old site now and the new site on staging. Google’s Core Web Vitals guide on web.dev explains what the scores mean. You don’t need a perfect score. You need pages that load quickly on an average phone connection.
- Compress and resize images before upload.
- Limit fonts to one or two families.
- Remove plugins and scripts you no longer use.
- Use good hosting and caching (this matters more than people think).
11. Carry over your SEO
SEO carryover is where a website redesign checklist earns its keep. Beyond redirects, you need to move the pieces that help Google understand each page:
- Page titles and meta descriptions for every ranking page.
- Headings and body content on pages that rank (improve, don’t gut).
- Internal links between related pages.
- Image alt text.
- Structured data such as Organization or Person markup.
- An updated XML sitemap submitted in Search Console.
Also check the staging site is blocked from search engines while you build, and that the block is removed at launch. I’ve seen a forgotten “discourage search engines” box in WordPress hide a brand new site for weeks. Our SEO services include this handover for every redesign we do, and our post on SEO for consultants covers what to build on top once the new site is live.
12. Rebuild forms and tracking
Forms are where leads arrive, so this part of the website redesign checklist deserves extra care. Every form on the new site should send to the right inbox, show a clear thank you message, and land in your CRM if you use one. Send a test from your phone and from a laptop.
Then reconnect tracking. Your analytics tag, any conversion events for form submissions and phone clicks, Google Ads or LinkedIn tags if you run ads, and your booking tool. Write each one on your website redesign checklist with a checkbox, because tracking codes are the first thing to get lost when a theme changes.
A quick form test routine
- Submit every form with a real email address.
- Confirm the message arrives and isn’t in spam.
- Check that the reply goes to the person who filled it in.
- Confirm the conversion shows up in analytics.
The full website redesign checklist at a glance
Here’s the whole website redesign checklist in one table. Copy it into a shared document and give every row an owner.
| Step | What to do | When |
|---|---|---|
| Goals | Write two or three measurable goals and a baseline | Before planning |
| Audit | Review analytics, Search Console and the site on mobile | Before planning |
| Ranking pages | List pages with traffic, leads or backlinks and protect them | Before planning |
| Content inventory | Every page with a keep, improve, merge or remove decision | Planning |
| Redirect plan | Map each old URL to its closest new URL | Planning |
| Messaging | Headline, service descriptions and calls to action | Before design |
| Proof | Testimonials, case studies, credentials, media | Before design |
| Design | Layouts built around messaging and proof | Design |
| Mobile | Review every page on a phone first | Design and build |
| Speed | Test staging in PageSpeed Insights | Build |
| SEO carryover | Titles, descriptions, headings, schema, sitemap | Build |
| Forms and tracking | Test every form and conversion event | Build and launch |
| Launch day | Redirects, indexing, SSL, final checks | Launch |
| First 30 days | Watch errors, rankings, leads and fix fast | After launch |
13. Launch day checks
Launch on a quiet weekday morning, never on a Friday afternoon. You want time to fix things while people are around. Then run through this part of the website redesign checklist in order:
- Remove the “discourage search engines” setting and check robots.txt.
- Confirm the SSL certificate works and every page loads on https.
- Test the redirect map, row by row, with the old URLs.
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
- Submit every form again on the live site.
- Check analytics is recording visits in real time.
- Click every menu item on mobile and desktop.
- Check your contact details, social links and footer.
Take a full backup the moment the live site is stable, and tick it off your website redesign checklist. If you’re on WordPress, our WordPress maintenance checklist covers backups and updates in more detail.
14. The first 30 days after launch
The launch isn’t the finish line. The first month tells you whether the redesign worked, and it’s when small problems are cheapest to fix. Put these on your calendar.
Week one
Check Search Console every couple of days for “not found” pages. Each one probably needs a redirect your website redesign checklist missed. Watch form submissions closely and confirm leads are still arriving.
Weeks two to four
Compare traffic to your top pages against the baseline from your audit. Some movement in rankings is normal right after a relaunch. A steep drop on one page usually points to a missing redirect or content that got cut. Ask two or three clients to look at the new site and tell you what’s confusing.
At the end of 30 days, go back to the goals at the top of your website redesign checklist. Are calls up? Are the inquiries better? That’s your answer, not whether people said the site looks nice.
Frequently asked questions
What should a website redesign checklist include?
At minimum: goals, an audit of the current site and analytics, a list of pages that rank, a content inventory, a URL and redirect plan, messaging, proof, design, mobile and speed checks, SEO carryover, forms and tracking, launch day checks and a 30 day review.
Will a redesign hurt my Google rankings?
It can if URLs change without redirects or ranking content gets removed. If you follow a website redesign checklist that protects ranking pages and maps every old URL, most sites keep their positions and many improve once the new pages are faster and clearer.
How long does a redesign take for a consultant site?
It depends on the number of pages, how ready your content and proof are, and how quickly decisions get made. A small consultant site moves much faster when messaging is settled before design starts.
Can I use this website redesign checklist if I’m switching platforms?
Yes. Moving from Wix, Squarespace or another platform to WordPress (or the other way) makes the redirect plan and SEO carryover steps even more important, because URL structures usually change.
How much does a redesign cost?
It depends on scope: page count, content work, custom features and integrations. The easiest way to get a straight answer is a short call where we look at your current site together.
Put this website redesign checklist to work
A redesign should leave you with more calls, not a prettier site that Google forgot about. Work through this website redesign checklist step by step and you’ll protect the pages that already earn you business while fixing the ones that don’t.
If you’d rather have a team handle it, that’s what we do every week for consultants, speakers and small firms across the US. See our website design services, or get in touch with Design Fly 24 and we’ll start with a free look at your current site.
