The website redesign checklist that protects your traffic

A website redesign has three phases, and most of the damage happens in the one people skip. Before you touch anything, record what the current site does so you can prove the new one is better. During the build, map every old URL to a new one. After launch, watch Search Console for thirty days and compare the numbers at 30, 60, and 90 days against the baseline you recorded.

That is the whole checklist in four sentences. The rest of this article is the detail, in order, with the specific exports and settings that matter. I have watched organizations lose most of their search traffic on relaunch day for one reason, and it was almost never the design.

Should you even redesign your website?

Start here, because a real answer saves some readers several thousand dollars. Run these four checks before you spend anything.

1. Load your home page on a phone, on cell data, not office wifi. If it is usable in about two seconds, speed is not your problem.
2. Look at your top three pages on a small screen. If text is readable without pinching and the phone number is tappable, mobile is not your problem.
3. Try to edit a paragraph and add a page yourself. If you can, your platform is not your problem.
4. Open Google Analytics and count form submissions and phone clicks for the last 90 days. Write the number down.

If the first three checks pass and you still are not getting inquiries, a redesign is the wrong purchase. What you have is a content and visibility problem, and rebuilding the same thin content in a prettier wrapper produces the same silence with a new invoice attached. Spend $1,500 on real service pages, a working Google Business Profile, and photos of actual staff, and you will usually beat a $9,000 rebuild. Our article on why a site gets traffic but no leads walks through that diagnosis in more detail.

I will say the uncomfortable version plainly. We turn down redesign work a few times a year, usually for organizations whose site is 18 to 30 months old and structurally fine. The honest recommendation is a care plan at $75 to $600 a month plus a few hours of content work, not a project. If a studio never tells you that, ask yourself when they last talked a client out of anything.

Redesign when at least one of these is true.

Reason to redesign	Why a rebuild is the right fix
The site is not usable on a phone	Mobile layout problems usually run through the whole theme, not one page
It takes more than 4 seconds to load and the platform is the cause	Old page builders and bloated themes cannot be optimized past a point
You cannot edit it without paying someone	Every content update becomes a purchase order, so updates stop happening
The organization changed	New services, a merger, a new name, or a new audience breaks the structure
It fails accessibility badly	Public schools, government-funded programs, and grant-funded nonprofits carry real obligations here
The platform is unsupported or insecure	An abandoned CMS is a breach waiting for a slow week

What to record before anyone touches the site

Do this in the week before design starts. It takes about two hours and it is the only thing standing between you and an unanswerable argument three months from now.

Export your Search Console data. Google Search Console keeps 16 months of search performance history and it does not travel with you if the property is misconfigured later. Export total clicks, total impressions, and the full query and page tables for the last 16 months. Save the file somewhere that is not the web designer’s laptop.

Export a full list of every URL on the site. Pull your XML sitemap, then crawl the site with a tool like Screaming Frog, which is free for up to 500 URLs and covers most small sites completely. You want a spreadsheet with every URL, its title tag, its status code, and its word count. This spreadsheet becomes your redirect map later, so do not skip it because the site “only has 12 pages.” It usually has 60, once you count PDFs, tag archives, and old event pages.

Note the top 20 pages by traffic and the pages with links pointing at them. These are the pages that must survive. If a 2018 blog post about respite care rules brings in 200 visits a month, it is worth more than the home page redesign, and it should keep its URL, its title, and its content.

Write down your conversion numbers. Form submissions, phone clicks, direction clicks, donations, applications, for the last 90 days and the last 12 months. If you are not tracking any of these, that is the first thing the redesign should fix.

Audit your content and decide the fate of every page. One row per URL, one decision each.

Decision	When to use it	What happens to the URL
Keep as-is	Ranks or converts, still accurate	URL stays identical
Rewrite	Right topic, weak or outdated copy	URL stays identical if possible
Merge	Three thin pages covering one topic	One survives, the others redirect to it
Retire	Wrong, obsolete, or about a service you dropped	Redirects to the closest relevant page

Then define one goal. Not five. One sentence, with a number in it. “Get from 6 inquiry forms a month to 15.” “Get 30 online donations a month instead of 4.” A redesign aimed at one measurable outcome makes every later argument about the home page easy to settle. A redesign aimed at “looking more professional” never ends, because nobody can tell when it is finished.

The URL map and redirect plan

This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the step that costs traffic. When a URL changes and nothing tells the browser where the page went, the old address returns a 404. Every link anyone ever shared, every result Google has indexed, and every bookmark now goes to a dead end.

A 301 redirect is a permanent instruction that says the page moved here. Google’s guidance is that permanent redirects pass ranking signals to the new URL, so a well-mapped move survives. An unmapped move does not.

Build the map as a spreadsheet before development finishes, not after launch. Here is what one looks like for a small care provider moving off an old handwritten site.

Old URL	New URL	Type	Why
/index.html	/	301	Home page path retired
/services.html	/services/	301	Page survives, extension dropped
/about-us/our-team.php	/about/	301	Team page merged into About
/respite.html	/services/respite-care/	301	Renamed and moved into a section
/companion-care.html	/services/respite-care/	301	Two thin pages merged into one
/blog/2019/03/winter-safety/	/blog/winter-safety-tips/	301	Date-based paths retired
/jobs.html	/careers/	301	Section renamed
/uploads/2020-rates.pdf	/pricing/	301	PDF retired, replaced by a page
/events/gala-2021/	/events/	301	Content retired, redirect to parent

Four rules make the map correct.

• Every old URL gets a row. Not just the pages in the navigation. PDFs, images that earned links, category archives, everything in your crawl.
• Redirect to the closest relevant page, never blanket everything to the home page. A visitor looking for respite care rules who lands on your home page leaves.
• Use 301, not 302. A 302 says temporary, and temporary is not what you mean.
• Test the map before launch on staging, then again in the first hour after launch.

If you are also changing platforms, WordPress to Squarespace or a custom build, the redirect work gets harder because the new system may not allow arbitrary redirect rules. Our guide to moving a website to a new platform covers the platform-specific traps. This is also the moment to confirm you control your own domain and DNS, which is not always true. If you have never checked, read how to verify you own your website before the migration, not during it.

What to protect while the new site is being built

Keep title tags that are working. If a page ranks for something useful, its title tag is doing part of that job. Copy the old titles into the new site, then improve them later once traffic has stabilized. Changing the URL, the title, and the body copy on the same day means you cannot diagnose anything afterward.

Preserve high-performing content word for word if it is accurate. Designers want shorter pages. Search engines and buyers often want the long, specific one. The 1,400-word page explaining what families should ask a home care agency is the page that earns the call. Shortening it to 300 words for visual balance is how a redesign loses.

Set an accessibility standard and hold the design to it. WCAG 2.1 AA is the practical target. That means at least 4.5:1 contrast for normal text, every image with meaningful alt text, every form field with a real label, visible keyboard focus, and headings in order. WebAIM’s annual scan of a million home pages has found detectable failures on the large majority of them every year it has run, so assume yours has some. For public entities, including public school districts, the Department of Justice’s Title II rule sets WCAG 2.1 AA as the standard with compliance dates in April 2026 for larger entities and April 2027 for smaller ones. If you run a charter school, this is a legal deadline and not a nice-to-have. We cover the practical version in what small organizations actually need for accessibility, and it shapes how we approach school website design.

Set a speed budget and enforce it before launch. Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds are the ones to hold your designer to: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Say the numbers out loud in the kickoff meeting. Most sites fail because of unoptimized hero images, a video background, and four tracking scripts nobody remembers adding. The article on why your website is slow explains what to cut.

Rebuild forms and tracking deliberately. Forms break silently, which is the worst way for anything to break. Before launch, submit every form yourself, confirm the email lands somewhere a human checks daily, and confirm the notification does not go to an employee who left. Reinstall analytics with the same property so history is continuous, and set up conversion tracking for the goal you defined earlier.

Review on staging with the actual decision makers. Give reviewers a specific job, not “tell me what you think.” Ask the office manager to check hours, phone numbers, and staff names. Ask the program director to check service descriptions. Ask the board chair for one consolidated round of feedback with a date on it. Nonprofit boards meet monthly, which can add weeks, so we build the approval date into the schedule for nonprofit website projects instead of hoping it fits.

Launch day and the first 48 hours

Work through this list in order on launch day. The full version lives in our website launch checklist, but these are the redesign-specific items.

• Confirm the site loads on the real domain with HTTPS and no certificate warning.
• Spot-check 15 to 20 redirects from the map by pasting old URLs into a browser. Include your top 20 traffic pages.
• Confirm the staging site is password protected or taken down so it does not compete for rankings.
• Check that the new site is not blocking search engines. A noindex tag or a disallow rule left over from staging is the fastest way to disappear.
• Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
• Submit every form on the live site and confirm delivery.
• Check the phone number and address on every page against reality.
• Load the home page and top three pages on an actual phone.
• Confirm analytics is recording live traffic.

What to watch for the first 90 days

Expect a small dip in the first two to three weeks on a site of any size. Google has to recrawl everything, and recrawling takes time. What you are watching for is whether it recovers.

Weeks 1 through 4, check weekly. In Search Console, watch the Pages report for a spike in “Not found (404)” and fix anything real by adding it to the redirect map. Watch the Sitemaps report to confirm pages are getting indexed. Watch Core Web Vitals for regressions from images uploaded after launch.

At 30, 60, and 90 days, compare against the baseline you exported.

Metric	Where it comes from	What good looks like at 90 days
Organic clicks	Search Console	At or above the pre-launch baseline
Indexed pages	Search Console Pages report	Close to your live page count, few errors
404 errors	Search Console Pages report	Trending toward zero
Top 20 page rankings	Search Console query and page tables	Same pages, same or better positions
Form submissions	Analytics	Above baseline, since this is the actual goal
Core Web Vitals	Search Console or PageSpeed Insights	Passing on mobile

If organic traffic is still down 20 percent or more at 60 days, the cause is almost always redirects, an accidental noindex, or deleted content. In that order. Check those three before anyone blames the design.

What this costs and how long it takes

Our published redesign range is $2,500 to $12,000, and most small business, nonprofit, and school redesigns in the Twin Cities land in the middle of it. The low end assumes existing content and a modest page count. The high end includes a content rewrite, new photography, and a large URL migration. Ongoing care runs $75 to $600 a month, and hourly work is $95 to $150. The full list is on our pricing page.

Plan on 4 to 10 weeks. The website timeline article breaks down where the weeks go, and the short version is that content and approvals, not development, decide your launch date.

One last piece of advice that costs us money. Ask any studio you are considering to show you their redirect map from a recent project before you sign. If they do not have one, or do not know what you are asking for, keep looking. The questions to ask a web designer list covers more of these.

If you want a second opinion on whether your site needs a rebuild or a tune-up, send us the URL and we will tell you which one we think it is, including when the answer is neither. You can also look through our recent work to see what a finished redesign looks like for organizations about your size.