A £35,000 redesign can pass every design review and still reduce enquiries. It happens when nobody owns redirects, tracking breaks during deployment, or the polished new form never reaches the CRM. The failure is operational, not aesthetic.
This website redesign checklist turns the work into 47 controlled steps, each with an output or pass/fail test. Tasks within a stage can run concurrently, but each gate must close before the next one opens.
It assumes the brief is approved. If the commercial direction remains unsettled, resolve the principles behind a conversion-led B2B redesign before production begins.
Website redesign checklist: set the project controls
1. Appoint one accountable owner. Name a client-side person who can resolve conflicts, secure internal input and accept completed stages. A committee cannot own a deadline.
2. Lock the approved brief. Give the agreed version a date. Any subsequent request becomes a documented change with an explicit effect on cost, scope or launch timing.
3. Define decision rights. Record who recommends, reviews and approves each deliverable. When external specialists are involved, clarify where website design and redesign delivery ends and internal responsibility begins.
4. Build the schedule backwards. Start from launch, then map QA, content entry, development, design and discovery dependencies. Include approval time rather than assuming instant stakeholder responses.
5. Establish stage gates. Require formal acceptance before moving from evidence to structure, structure to design, and build to launch. Unresolved comments are not approval.
6. Map the technology stack. List the CMS, hosting, CRM, forms, analytics, tag manager, consent platform, advertising accounts and third-party integrations. Assign an access owner for each.
7. Open a risk register. Give every material risk an owner, probability, impact and response. Content delays, integration failures and unavailable subject experts belong here.
8. Create one source of truth. Store decisions, files, status and approvals in one project workspace. Instructions buried in email or Slack should not govern production.
Establish the evidence and baseline
9. Verify measurement first. Check analytics consent, internal-traffic exclusions, conversion events and CRM attribution before using historical figures. Broken data produces confident but useless priorities.
10. Record the commercial baseline. Suppose 4,000 relevant monthly sessions generate 48 enquiries: a 1.2% conversion rate. If 25% qualify, that is 12 qualified leads. Reaching 1.8% at the same qualification rate would produce 72 enquiries and 18 qualified leads—six additional qualified opportunities per month.
11. Segment performance. Break results down by source, device, country, landing page and new versus returning visitors. An overall average can conceal an excellent paid-search path and a poor mobile experience.
12. Identify valuable journeys. Trace how qualified prospects move from landing page to evidence, service detail and enquiry. Prioritise paths associated with CRM-qualified leads, not merely high traffic.
13. Test the existing forms. Submit each form using realistic data. Confirm validation, notifications, CRM fields, source capture, thank-you pages and response ownership.
14. Review paid-media destinations. Match advertisements, keywords and landing pages. Record any campaign that currently sends high-intent visitors to a generic page or forces an unnecessary navigation step.
15. Gather qualitative evidence. Use sales-call notes, on-site search terms, recordings and interviews to find recurring confusion. Five focused customer conversations often expose issues that page-view totals cannot explain.
16. Crawl the current website. Export URLs, status codes, titles, canonicals, internal links, indexability and organic traffic. Follow a defined process for protecting organic visibility during a redesign rather than treating SEO as a launch-week check.
Turn evidence into structure and content
17. Approve the sitemap. Organise pages around buyer tasks and commercial priorities, not the company’s internal departments. Every proposed page needs a defined audience and purpose.
18. Create the URL disposition map. Assign every current indexable URL one outcome: retain, replace, consolidate, redirect or remove. “We will decide later” is not an acceptable status.
19. Define the required templates. Group pages by repeated function, such as service, sector, case study or resource. Fewer coherent templates usually outperform dozens of one-off layouts.
20. Map conversion routes. Specify the primary and secondary action for each template. Record the destination, required fields, confirmation behaviour and CRM outcome.
21. Classify existing content. Mark each asset keep, update, merge or retire using traffic, relevance and sales value. Do not migrate weak copy simply because it already exists.
22. Assign content owners. Give every page a writer, reviewer and approval date. Content is a project dependency, not material to be inserted after development.
23. Validate the homepage separately. Use the agreed strategy and the standards applied by effective B2B homepages as an acceptance reference without allowing homepage debate to delay every other template.
24. Fix the verbal direction. Define tone, vocabulary and unacceptable claims before copy expands. A practical framework for expressing B2B brand personality helps multiple contributors sound like one organisation.
Design and build against real requirements
25. Wireframe with realistic content. Actual headlines, proof points and calls to action expose hierarchy problems that placeholder text conceals.
26. Test the priority prototype. Give representative prospects realistic tasks and observe where they hesitate. Five sessions will not prove universal usability, but they can expose expensive structural mistakes.
27. Establish the component system. Define reusable navigation, forms, cards, tables, alerts and content blocks. Bring in specialist UX and UI support where complex interactions require deeper prototyping or validation.
28. Design responsive and system states. Approve mobile, tablet and desktop behaviour plus loading, error, empty, hover and success states. A desktop screenshot is not a complete interface.
29. Review accessibility during design. Check contrast, focus order, type sizing, labels and interaction patterns before development. Retrofitting accessible behaviour costs more and produces weaker compromises.
30. Build reusable components first. Test the system against several page types before assembling the full site. This catches rigidity while changes remain relatively cheap.
31. Integrate operational systems. Connect forms, CRM routing, calendars, downloads and notifications. Use non-production records so testing does not pollute live sales data.
32. Implement the measurement plan. Configure agreed events, campaign parameters and data-layer values. Use consistent names that a marketer can interpret six months later.
33. Protect the staging environment. Restrict access and block indexation. Use representative content and data, but never expose confidential customer records or credentials.
Website redesign checklist: QA and migration
34. Build a traceability matrix. Map each approved requirement to a test and result. This prevents attractive screens from distracting reviewers from missing functionality.
35. Complete content QA. Check facts, spelling, links, downloads, image rights, contact details and legal wording. Test the rendered page, not only the source document.
36. Run functional QA. Test navigation, search, filters, forms, integrations, authentication and error handling. Confirm that every enquiry reaches the correct person and CRM stage.
37. Test the agreed browser and device matrix. Prioritise combinations shown in analytics, then cover modern mainstream browsers. Record reproducible defects with screenshots and severity.
38. Run automated and manual accessibility checks. Automation finds only part of the problem. Test keyboard navigation, visible focus, form errors, headings and screen-reader labels manually.
39. Enforce performance budgets. Measure representative pages on mobile connections. Oversized hero images, third-party scripts and unused code should block approval when they breach agreed budgets.
40. Complete technical SEO QA. Check titles, descriptions, headings, canonicals, structured data, robots directives, sitemaps and social previews against the migration plan.
41. Test every redirect. Confirm permanent status codes, correct destinations and the absence of chains or loops. Update internal links so the new website does not rely on redirects for normal navigation.
42. Rehearse deployment and rollback. Document backups, DNS changes, cache clearing, database steps and reversal criteria. Assign names and timings, then run the sequence on staging.
43. Hold a formal go/no-go review. Review open defects by severity, not count. A minor spacing issue can wait; failed lead routing, broken tracking or uncontrolled indexation cannot.
Launch and the first 30 days
44. Deploy within a controlled window. Freeze content changes, keep technical owners available and record each completed deployment action. Avoid launching immediately before weekends or holidays.
45. Run an immediate smoke test. Within 30 minutes, test priority pages, navigation, forms, CRM delivery, analytics, consent, redirects and robots directives using the live domain.
46. Reconnect external channels. Submit the sitemap, inspect critical URLs, update paid-ad destinations where necessary and confirm integrations are receiving production data.
47. Monitor against the baseline. Track crawl errors, rankings, conversion events, qualified leads, performance and form failures daily at first, then weekly. Compare equivalent periods and traffic segments; do not declare success or failure from three noisy days.
FAQ
How long should a B2B website redesign take?
A focused site with 10–25 core pages and a standard CRM integration commonly needs 10–14 weeks. Large content migrations, multilingual variants or custom applications add time. Dependencies and approval capacity should determine the schedule.
Who should own the checklist?
One client-side project owner should maintain it, with named specialists accepting technical, content, SEO and measurement tasks. Accountability stays singular even when delivery is distributed.
Can the website launch in phases?
Yes, when each phase works independently and the URL, tracking and navigation effects are understood. Phasing is useful for large estates; it is dangerous when it creates duplicate pages or fragmented journeys.
How much time should be reserved for QA?
Reserve roughly 15–20% of the delivery schedule for integrated QA, fixes and retesting. Testing squeezed into the final two days usually becomes a defect-sorting exercise rather than quality control.
Summary
- Treat the redesign as 47 controlled decisions, not a sequence of visual approvals.
- Establish ownership, evidence and stage gates before design begins.
- Map every page, conversion route, integration and legacy URL.
- Block launch for failures affecting leads, measurement, accessibility or indexation.
- Judge results against qualified-lead baselines over a meaningful post-launch period.
Actualyse designs and rebuilds B2B websites that turn research visits into qualified pipeline. Book a call to talk through where yours stands.
