Website Redesign Checklist: 15 Things to Get Right
· 6 min read · Mona Technologies
Redesigns fail for a boring reason: teams optimize for how the site looks in the review meeting, not for what happens after launch. A new site can be visually sharper than the old one and still convert worse, rank worse, and load slower, because none of that is decided by the visual layer. Here are the 15 things that actually determine the outcome, grouped by where they get decided — before design starts, during build, and at launch.
Before you touch design: decide what you're actually fixing
A redesign without a stated problem becomes a taste exercise, and taste exercises run over budget because there's no way to say a version is 'done.'
- Write down the specific business metric the redesign is meant to move — bounce rate on the pricing page, mobile checkout completion, lead form submissions — not 'make it look modern.'
- Audit which existing pages actually drive revenue or leads before you let anyone redesign them out of the sitemap. Pull 12 months of analytics, not gut feeling.
- Decide what stays. Old URLs with backlinks and search rankings are assets — a redesign that changes every URL without a redirect plan throws them away.
- Set a content deadline before a design deadline. Design built around placeholder text gets rebuilt around real text anyway, which is where most schedule slippage comes from.
During build: the parts that decide whether it's fast
Google measures page experience with three metrics collectively called Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the main content appears, target under 2.5 seconds), Interaction to Next Paint (how fast the page responds to a click or tap, target under 200 milliseconds), and Cumulative Layout Shift (whether elements jump around as the page loads, target under 0.1). These aren't abstract scores — they're measured from real visitors, and a redesign that ignores them can quietly get outranked by a slower-looking but faster-loading competitor.
- Set an image budget before design starts — a hero image exported at 4x resolution because it 'looked crisp in Figma' is the single most common cause of a slow LCP.
- Ban layout-shifting ads, embeds, and web fonts that load without a reserved space; each one is a CLS penalty a designer never sees because they test on a fast connection.
- Test interactivity on a mid-range Android phone, not the designer's laptop. INP problems are invisible on high-end hardware and very visible on the device most of your traffic actually uses.
- Decide the CMS and hosting stack based on who edits content day to day, not who's easiest to demo. A marketing team that can't update a page without a developer will stop updating it.
At launch: the mistakes that cost rankings and money
This is where most of the damage that's hard to undo actually happens — not from bad design, but from operational steps skipped in the rush to launch.
- 301-redirect every old URL that had traffic or backlinks to its new equivalent. A redesign that launches with broken old links can lose months of accumulated search visibility, and it comes back slowly, not instantly.
- Re-submit an updated XML sitemap and check that the new site isn't accidentally blocking search engines via a leftover 'noindex' tag from staging — this happens more often than teams admit.
- Meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the accessibility standard most contracts and regulations actually reference. That means readable color contrast, keyboard-only navigation, and proper form labels — not a caveat, a legal exposure in several jurisdictions.
- Keep analytics and conversion tracking identical across old and new sites for at least a week of overlap, so you can actually compare before-and-after instead of guessing.
- Have a rollback plan. If checkout conversion drops 20% in the first 48 hours, know in advance whether you can revert DNS or you're stuck debugging live.
- Load-test the checkout or lead-capture flow specifically, not just the homepage — it's the page failure that costs money directly, and it's usually the last thing anyone stress-tests before launch.
- Brief whoever runs paid ads before launch. Landing pages, UTM parameters, and conversion pixels built for the old site silently break against new URLs and templates.
The short version
Design is the part of a redesign everyone notices and the part least likely to move the numbers. Speed, redirects, accessibility, and a clear pre-launch definition of what 'better' means are what actually decide whether the new site outperforms the old one — get those 15 things right and the visual refresh takes care of itself.