What to look for when redesigning a website?

A website redesign checklist should start with four questions before any design work begins: what is the site failing to do, who are you trying to move to action, what does the brand need to say that it isn't saying, and what does success look like in actual numbers. Most redesigns skip the first three and go straight to visual preferences. That's why most don't move the metrics they were built to move.

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The gap most guides miss is the audit phase. Pull your top-10 landing pages by organic traffic, check session recordings for drop-off points, and look at scroll depth. Before we start any redesign engagement, we pull heatmap data, conversion rates by page, and the sales team's three most common objections. If the website isn't pre-handling those objections, the redesign will fail regardless of how polished the visuals are.

What the checklist should actually contain

First, a positioning audit: does every high-traffic page communicate what you do, for whom, and why it matters in under eight seconds? Second, a content architecture review: is information structured around buyer decisions or your internal org chart? Most B2B SaaS sites are built around the latter, and buyers can feel it. Third, a performance baseline covering bounce rate, session duration, and goal completions per page. No baseline means no way to know whether the redesign actually worked. Fourth, a brand consistency check: does the site match your sales deck, product UI, and demo environment? We worked with a Series-B infrastructure SaaS where the website looked like three different companies had touched it over 18 months. Buyers noticed before anyone on the team did.

Here's the tradeoff worth naming: a thorough audit adds two to three weeks to the front of the project. Founders under pressure to ship almost always want to skip it. The cost of skipping it is a redesign that looks newer but converts at exactly the same rate. I've seen it happen more than once.

On the technical side, mobile performance isn't negotiable. Google's Core Web Vitals have direct ranking implications, so set a hard target before you launch: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds. If your current CMS can't hit that, platform choice becomes part of the redesign scope. Most founders discover this six weeks in. It's worth discovering it at week one instead.

Internal link structure is a conversion architecture decision, not an SEO afterthought. Where you send someone after they land determines whether they reach a buying decision or leave. Map the three most common buyer journeys before wireframing begins. The path from "I just landed here" to "I want to talk to someone" should be obvious at every step, not something users have to figure out.

If you're scoping a redesign and want to pressure-test whether you're starting in the right place, book a 20-minute intro and we'll tell you what your checklist is missing. For the full guide, read our website redesign checklist overview.