Planning a website redesign: what to decide before design starts

This guide covers each decision in plain terms, with a checklist at the end you can use with any designer or agency.

Say you run a furniture shop with two showrooms. The website is eight years old and you feel it looks dated, so you hire a designer. Three weeks later you see a handsome new homepage, and only then do the real questions surface:

None of these is a design problem, and each is cheaper to settle on paper than in a finished design. A redesign that starts with these decisions spends its design time on the things that matter to your customers.

“It looks dated” is a common reason, and sometimes a fair one: an old-looking site can make a careful business look careless. It is rarely the whole story, though, so write down what you can observe:

Table 1. Reading the symptoms.

What you are noticing	What to check first	Likely answer
Few enquiries from the site	Whether visitors find the information they need and an easy way to act	Often a content and structure fix; read our guide on why a website is not bringing enquiries
Staff keep answering the same questions	Whether the site answers them at all	New or rewritten content
The site is slow or breaks on phones	Speed and phone usability of the current pages	Sometimes a fix, sometimes a rebuild
Nobody can update it	Who edits the site, and on what platform	Often a platform change
The business has changed (new services, new market)	Whether the structure can hold the new offer	Usually a real redesign

The Nielsen Norman Group, a long-standing usability research firm, makes the case for using evidence to judge how much change you need, and advises against a radical redesign “when minimal adjustments will suffice.” People who already use your site have learned where things are. A full redesign is worth that cost when the problems are structural, such as a site that cannot hold your current services or a platform nobody can edit. If a few targeted changes would solve the problem, they are usually the better investment, and a good studio will tell you so.

Name the actions that matter to the business, in order. For the furniture shop: book a showroom visit, ask for a delivery quote, call a showroom. For a professional firm it might be a consultation request; for a shop, a completed order.

Each action needs a clear home on the pages where it belongs and a way to be counted. In Google Analytics, any action you track can be marked as a “key event,” Google’s term for an action that is particularly important to the success of your business. Deciding the key events before design means the designer gives those actions room on the page, and the developer builds the tracking at the same time as the pages instead of retrofitting it.

Gather what people already ask, in their own words, from three places:

Search Console, Google’s free tool for site owners, shows the searches that bring people to your current site and the pages they land on. These are the questions your new structure must still answer.

Your inbox and phone. The questions staff answer every week are the content the site is missing.

Your sales or service team. They know which doubts stop a customer from buying, and which facts settle them.

Google’s guidance on helpful content asks whether a visitor will “leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal.” That is a useful test for each page you plan: what does this person need to know to take the next step?

Make an inventory of what you have before deciding what to throw away. The Nielsen Norman Group defines a content inventory as “a list of every piece of digital content you currently have,” and a content audit as the step that evaluates it, showing what needs updating, where the gaps are, and what can be removed.

For a redesign, record at least:

Pages that already earn visits or enquiries deserve a plan of their own. If their addresses will change, our guide to redesigning a website without losing search traffic covers the URL map, redirects and launch checks that protect them.

Build the page list from the visitor’s needs. The old menu is useful as a record of what exists, and a poor guide to what people want. A useful rule: one page for each distinct question or task, and no two pages answering the same question. Two near-identical pages split attention and leave visitors unsure which one to read.

For the furniture shop, the list might include one page per product range, a delivery page that answers the area question with a map and lead times, a trade page with the price list behind a simple request, and a page per showroom with opening hours and directions.

More pages are not automatically better. Each one needs content someone will write and keep up to date. A small site where every page earns its place usually serves a business better than a large one with thin pages.

Before design, write a short brief for every page that matters. It does not need to be long. It needs to answer:

With briefs in hand, a designer can make room for what customers need instead of fitting your content into a template afterwards. They also give you a fair way to review the design: does it carry what the brief says, in the order the visitor needs it?

When we plan a site, every important page gets a written brief before design starts, covering these points and a few more, such as images and phone-screen priorities. You do not need our format; you need the decisions written down somewhere both sides can see.

Agree on standards now, because they shape the design. Three are worth naming in writing:

Accessibility. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation on 5 October 2023, and the W3C encourages using the latest version. W3C treats the level to aim for as a policy decision, so choose it deliberately. It covers things like readable color contrast and forms that work with a keyboard.

Speed and stability. Google’s Core Web Vitals give three targets for real visitors: the main content appears within 2.5 seconds, the page responds to a tap or click within 200 milliseconds, and the layout shifts by no more than 0.1 on Google’s scale. Google suggests measuring these at the 75th percentile of visits, on phones and desktops separately.

Phones. Decide which pages people mostly use on a phone and what they must do there, such as calling a showroom or checking delivery.

These are commitments the build is tested against. Write them into the scope, so “fast” and “accessible” mean something specific to both sides.

Some decisions limit the design, so make them first:

Platform. Who will edit the site day to day, and what do they need to change without help? Does the site need a shop, bookings or a members area?

Connections. Which systems must the site talk to, and who owns those accounts?

Content. Who writes new pages, who supplies photos, and by when? Pages cannot be finished without their words and photos, so plan this early.

Ownership. Confirm that you control the domain, the hosting account, the analytics and Search Console properties, and that you will own the finished site.

Scope. Agree in writing what is included before building starts, so additions are handled as their own decisions instead of quiet delays.

Before the old site is switched off, capture how it performs today. Export Search Console’s performance data by page (its date filter reaches back up to 16 months, which also shows seasonal patterns), note your enquiry or sales numbers by month, and keep a copy of your analytics settings. After launch, this is the only fair comparison you will have.

A plan reduces surprises; it does not remove them. Design will raise questions nobody thought of, and some decisions are better made once you can see real pages. Planning also takes time and budget before anything visible exists, which can feel slow. And no plan fixes a weak offer: if customers are choosing a competitor on price or range, a new website will not change that on its own.

There is also a size question. If your business needs a few simple pages and you can maintain them yourself, a website builder with a good template may be enough, and the planning above still applies. A good studio will tell you when that is the right call.

Once these decisions are made, the next risk is the move itself: our guide to redesigning a website without losing search traffic covers the URL map, redirects and launch checks. If you are choosing who to work with, our guide before you hire a web designer covers what to prepare and what to ask. You can read how we run a project to see these steps from our side, and more guides are in the Learn library.

If you are planning a redesign now, our website redesign and migration service starts with exactly these decisions, and you can discuss your project with us without preparing a technical brief first.

Nielsen Norman Group, article author, “Radical Redesign or Incremental Change?” (2015): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/radical-incremental-redesign/

Nielsen Norman Group, article author, “Content Inventory and Auditing 101” (2020): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-audits/

Google Search Central, “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content

Google Analytics Help, “About key events”: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9267568

Google Search Central, “Debugging drops in Google Search traffic” (Search Console date ranges up to 16 months): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/monitor-debug/debugging-search-traffic-drops

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, “WCAG 2 Overview”: https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

web.dev, “Web Vitals”: https://web.dev/articles/vitals