A website redesign checklist is a bit like a remodeling checklist (stick with me on this one).
When it comes time to remodel your house, there are about a million different things running through your mind. Not least of these is aesthetics—you want the new design to be beautiful (of course), but that’s not the main reason you remodel a house.
You remodel because something in the house isn’t working the way you and your family need it to. Maybe you remodel to add a new bathroom so the kids aren’t squished into a tiny bathroom/octagon of death every morning and forced to interact. Maybe Grandpa needs to move in and a room above the garage is the best solution for him and the family (we love Grandpa, but sometimes we’re a pain in his ass).
Of course we want all these changes to look beautiful!
But that’s not your primary reason for making the changes in the first place (just as your primary reason for reading this website redesign checklist is not because you just want a beautiful website). You’re remodelling to fix a problem—grandpa needs a place to stay, the kids need their own rooms. Providing a solution to the problem is the goal—aesthetics comes second.
Why in the name of all that is holy are we talking about remodelling houses? Because the exact same principles apply to redesigning your website. Here’s our website redesign checklist to help you through the process.
Why You Would Redesign Your Website in the First Place
So what use is a website redesign checklist anyway? What’s the point?
Redesigning your website is all about making it work for your business. You can read more about why you should redesign your website using a website redesign checklist here, but the gist is this—you redesign to fix a problem, NOT to just make your website prettier.
Generally, you’re redesigning because your website is unusable or it’s not generating the traffic or leads you need it to. (You’re not reading this website redesign checklist because things are perfect.)
In the first case, your clients may have trouble finding even basic information on your site—not good.
In the second case, your website isn’t doing its job—bringing you leads. There’s no traffic on the site, and it’s just sitting around wasting your money—more not good.
There are may be other reasons—your website needs to do something it wasn’t able to do before (like sell products online), or maybe you or your employees are wasting WAY too much time trying to make changes to or manage client information on your website.
But that doesn’t mean the website is completely ruined. There’d be no point in this website redesign checklist otherwise.
Redesign Doesn’t Mean Toss It In The Trash And Start Over
A redesign is no simple task, and using a website redesign checklist can be intimidating, but it doesn’t always mean starting over from scratch. Many websites can be easily redesigned because they’re on a platform that allows it. WordPress is great for this—choosing a new theme or adding functionality can sometimes be simple.
Just don’t avoid redesigning out of fear that it will be a massive project—that’s not always the case. A great developer can help you figure out exactly what you do (and do not) need.
So, What Do I Do? Where’s My Website Redesign Checklist?
Hold your horses! We’ve got you covered. Let’s start with the basics.
#1 — Find Someone To Work With
Start by reaching out to website developers and designers. Make sure you vet them before starting your project. You might start by showing them this website redesign checklist and seeing what they think. You don’t want to be halfway in before you realize the developer is totally crazy.
So read their reviews, talk to people who have worked with them before, look at their portfolio of work—make sure they’re capable of doing what you need. Run this website redesign checklist by those people and see if it matches their experience with the developer. (If not, run for the hills!)
Next, make sure your goals and their goals for the redesign match up. Talk to them about what they envision, and make sure they know what you need your website to do, that they’re not just making it look pretty. Again, show them the website redesign checklist also—see if they’re matching up.
Finally, make sure their workflow matches yours. Talk to them about how they do things. If you go into a redesign with expectations about workflow that aren’t met, you’re gonna have a bad time.
#2 — Follow The 8 Step Website Redesign Process
This one can get pretty intense, so I’ll let you guys read it for yourself. Click here to download the ebook—it explains everything you need to consider before really digging deep into this website redesign checklist. Here’s the quick and dirty:
- Define your audience
- Define or develop your brand
- Create a brand personality
- Call readers to action
- Configure your traffic plan
- Plan your current and ongoing content
- Integrate your website with your workflow
- Design your website
You can see that there’s a lot more going on here. Read the ebook, then come back to this article. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
#3 — Migrate, Update, or Eradicate Your Content
Back already? Great! Let’s get back to the website redesign checklist. Now that you have a plan in place, it’s time to get that content moved! Or maybe not. You might find during this process that some of your content needs to be updated, completely revamped, or done away with entirely. Some of it might need to be converted into a different format (PDFs turned into HTML, for example).
If you have a great deal of content that you need written (or you just don’t want to deal with all the edits), you might hire a content writer. They’re not exactly cheap, but remember, content is the only reason people are coming to your website—it needs to be good. Show them the content portion of this website redesign checklist and see if they agree (again, if not, you may want to look elsewhere).
#4 — Don’t Forget Redirects!
Make sure to set up your 301 redirects—these make sure people (and search engines) trying to access your old website end up at your new website. Match up pages from the old website to the new one and make sure you’re not redirecting to content that no longer exists.
You also want to make sure your pages can be crawled and that the redirects are actually working—test each URL and keep copies of the old URLs in case you run into trouble.
Your developer should be handling all of this, but just check with them to make sure. Having your website redesign checklist in hand could be helpful.
#5 — Make Your Website Accessible to Search Engines
The next step is to make sure your website is accessible to search engines. Check with your developer on this one. You might not have to do anything, but if you had your website blocked while it was being developed, you might need to unblock it.
There’s a whole separate topic of Search Engine Optimization that we won’t get into here, but, if you really want to get found, you need to consider SEO as part of your redesign. Our favorite SEO expert, Pam Aungst with Pam Ann Marketing, spent some time chatting with us about what SEO is and how you can get started on your website — check out the video here.
This is unbelievably important (we used it to find out people needed a website redesign checklist). If you’re not searchable, your audience can’t find you. Maybe a few people here and there who you give the website address to directly, but you want to bring in leads from all over.
Let’s keep moving with the website redesign checklist — time to start testing.
#6 — Test, Retest, Re-retest, Review, Do Some More Testing, Then Test Again
Test your website (This is going to pop up again on our website redesign checklist because it’s so critical). Test everything on your website. Review the content. Review the functions. Make sure all the forms work, the submissions, try adding some content to make sure it displays correctly.
Try it all while you still are actively working with the developer and it can be easily fixed. Fixing a website after launch is both more difficult and more expensive than fixing it before.
A good developer has their own process for this—discuss this process so you understand what’s happening and when it’s happening. Share this website redesign checklist with your developer so they know why you’re such a fanatic about testing.
#7 — Think About The Things OUTSIDE Your Website
Maybe this should be item numero uno on this website redesign checklist. By “things outside your website,” we mean marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). If your goal is to get more traffic, you’re going to need a strong SEO strategy in place to get that traffic off the search engines and onto your website. This generally requires the help of an SEO professional separate from your website developer and designer.
You’re also going to need a marketing strategy to supplement the SEO, a strategy which might involve paid ads, social media, blogging, or a variety of other tactics.
If you build it, they will not (necessarily) come. You can follow the rest of the website redesign checklist all you want, but if you don’t put the signage out there to direct them to your website, they won’t find it.
#8 — (Optional) Migrate to a New Host
You might be able to skip this portion of the website redesign checklist if you’ve got a great host. If not, read on.
Like all aspects of your website, hosting is something that should be invested in—don’t consider it an added fee that needs to be kept as low as possible.
Great hosting is valuable. Quality hosting can protect you from hacks, keep your site loading fast, and give you resources to access if things ever fall apart. If you’re still on the $2-a-month hosting you got when bought your first website, it is time to upgrade to big-kid hosting.
#9 — Launch!
It’s the big day! You’ve tested your brains out, you’re on a new host, you’ve got some fancy new content ready that the SEO experts have had their way with, you’ve got your website redesign checklist in hand—it’s time to launch your website.
Speak with your website developer about precisely how they plan on launching. Make sure you know what is happening and what, if anything, you need to do. Look over this website redesign checklist one last time to make sure you didn’t miss anything.
Typically the process looks like this:
- Migrate the site to it’s permanent home (if that hasn’t already happened)
- Change all URLs on the site to your live domain name
- Point the DNS to this new hosting location
- Wait a while… as advanced as the internet is we still have to wait, sometimes up to 72 hours! (but usually only a couple hours max) for the DNS to do this thing we call propagating. You can read more about it here, but basically every DNS server around the world has to receive the updated information.
Then watch it go up! It’s like launching a boat really—sometimes you don’t find out it has leaks until it gets in the water, so…
#10 — Do Some More Testing
Go through the testing process again (I told you it was on this website redesign checklist twice!). I know, it’s a pain, and you have a business to run—do it anyway. It’ll save you headaches in the long run. Make sure your new website that you just invested all this time and money into is working properly. Fixing problems now will be easier than fixing them later.
#11 — Set Up Tracking and Analytics
No website redesign checklist would be complete without analytics! If you’ve never done tracking or analytics for your website, now is the time to start. Using something like Google analytics to see where visitors are coming from, who they are, what they’re searching for (remember, we found out people were searching for a website redesign checklist by using methods like these), what they’re doing while they’re on your website—this can help you understand who is coming to your website, how many of them there are, what they’re doing when they get there, and what they need.
It helps you understand your audience, which in turn guides the content you create in the future—this website redesign checklist wouldn’t exist otherwise—bringing back more people. It’s the circle of content life man, and it’s beautiful.
#12 — Keep Creating Awesome Content
Your website is not a one-time project that you forget about when it’s over (no matter how much you need it to be and no matter how much you want to be done with this website redesign checklist). It’s a living, breathing, evolving entity, and it requires attention and resources to keep working for you.
Continue creating content, keep refining your current content, look at the analytics and use them to improve your content strategy over time. And hold on to this website redesign checklist in case you need to make changes in the future.
Basically do this forever. Our clients who make their website a priority are consistently bringing in leads, and they have no trouble growing their business because their audience is actively seeking them out.
Now, Get Started!
You’ve got your website redesign checklist in hand—now go grab yourself a developer and get started. We might know one who could help you *cough* US *cough* ‘scuse me.
Let’s do this thing. Click here to tell us how we can help.
