Step 1: Audit Your Current Website and Assets

The first step of our website redesign checklist is all about reviewing where you currently stand. By reviewing what collateral is popular, what pages are frequented, and what might be missing, you’ll get a sense of what can be repurposed and refreshed or what needs to be created from the ground up.

By going through your analytics to see user trends, you may be shocked to find pages no one felt were important are generating a decent amount of traffic, and that could be great!

The next step here is to note these pages, and save them for later to do some user testing with. You’ll want to find out exactly what’s appealing, aside from the obvious. Is there a campaign pushing traffic to them? Are users going there because the content is awesome?
Or, on the other hand, are they going there only to leave because the messaging isn’t what they were expecting?

Understanding where your weak points are allows you to know where you biggest effort needs to be made.
The pages that are strong, generate traffic, and convert well, however, need to be kept intact, and optimised further, if possible. Keep both of these sets in mind as we go into the next phase of the website redesign checklist.

Step 2: Gather Inspiration and Analyse the Competition

Taking what you’ve uncovered in your site audit, start envisioning what you ultimately want your website to look like, branding aside.
Do you need a store? What types of imagery will work for your users? What layouts are the best for your industry?

Gathering website inspiration and analysing your competitor’s websites help you get a view of industry best practices and where you can shake things up a bit (as long as it benefits the user).
We recommend taking your top two or three competitors and spending roughly 2-4 hours on their websites. What common threads are you seeing? Do they talk about pricing? Are they utilising specific visuals or videos? Refer back to the list of pages you made in your audit. Are you noticing any similarities on your competitors sites?

While you’re reviewing different sites for inspiration, bookmark things you find interesting and you feel will help your user get a better sense of what you do. It could be something like layout, use of a testimonial, juxtaposition of an image with content…really anything that catches your eye.
These pieces of inspiration will help you, your team, or an agency like MadMunki Studios, understand what you’re looking for and work with you to craft the best design for your users.

Step 3: Create / Update / Review Brand Guidelines and Styles

Next, it’s important to review your brand guidelines and styles so you can create a cohesive design.
Begin by having your team review where the current branding guidelines stand.
Does it feel dated? Are the fonts hard to read? Is there a font hierarchy? Is your brand’s tone accurately depicted by this style?

The reason why this step warrants attention is so that everything designed will be consistent and showcase your company as envisioned. Make sure all brand colours allowed have accurate portrayals, including different values such as CMYK, RGB, and Hex.
Other key items to include in your guidelines are logo usage, fonts, button styles, iconography, and image examples (in some cases).

The goal of this is to give direction to anyone who designs for your brand, and create consistency across all media whether it be web, print, or video.
On another note, adding in a button hierarchy that corresponds to different levels of the marketing funnel usually helps the user in their journey. Aligning specific button colours with particular stages gives a consistency across the site that can clarify your user journey and improve their experience.

Understanding that orange, for example, is always a button to request a consultation or take another bottom-of-the-funnel action, while light blue is for learn mores and top-of-the-funnel offers can provide a more seamless user experience.

Once your guidelines are in order, it’s time to begin thinking about the time frame the entire website redesign needs to be completed.

Step 4: Create a Realistic Timeline

The next step in our website redesign checklist is one that’s often overlooked — creating a realistic timeline.
Remarkable websites take time. To make sure you’re hitting the mark not only for your brand, but for your users, there is a good amount of strategy and research that must be taken into consideration long before you start to code.

Depending on the size of your website, and your goals, plan to spend about 2-5 months on the process.
There are ways to expedite the timeline, like reducing the size of your site (do you really need those 300 pages with 1 paragraph of text on each?) or taking a growth-driven iterative approach, focusing on the most important pages to the user journey for your redesign then updating the rest of the website in stages.

Regardless, you’ll want to make sure you’re dedicating a decent amount of time to working with your team or agency, to provide feedback on design direction, help with content creation, and ensure everything is as it should be.

When deciding on a deadline, it’s important to consider when you’ll need your new website by. Are there any events coming up? Trade shows? If there is something pressing, get started as early as possible so you’ll have adequate time to get the quality website you desire.

Time constraints are the enemy of quality.

Step 5: Set Goals

With the amount of money and effort that goes into a website redesign, knowing if it’s a success is critical. Creating realistic goals for your site to reference and measure your success is extremely important. This is where understanding where your current site stands comes in handy. If your current site has a steady stream of traffic, but the leads aren’t pouring in, you may set a starting goal of increasing your conversion rate by 1%.

Whatever goals you set should be communicated to those working on the redesign so they can be front of mind while the site is planned, designed, and developed.

Keep in mind that a website redesign isn’t a magic wand that fixes everything.

Your website redesign should, if properly planned and strategised, improve your stats and get you on track to hit your goals, but you’ll want to track this over the first few months after launch. Don’t expect to see stats jump on day one.
Now that you’ve got some goals under your belt, it’s time to start focusing on the people that really matter—your users!

Step 6: Understand  the User Journey

Quite possibly the most important step in this website redesign checklist is understanding the user and the user journey.
Understanding what the user is looking for, what questions they need answered, and how they’ll look for it on your website is the only way to really set yourself up for success.

There are a few ways you can go about obtaining the information you’ll need, for example, interviewing your users and asking them questions about their experience. Questions like “What made you decide to purchase product x?” and “Did anything on the website frustrate you?” are great for digging into what actually helped them convert.
A few important questions to ask yourself as you review your redesign plans are “What content does the user need to make their purchasing decision?” and “Are there any holes in the journey?”.

We usually set up user testing and ask your audience to perform a task on your current website or your newly developed site before it’s going to launch. This will allow you to see first-hand how a potential customer interacts with your brand and where you need to solve for their frustrations. After all, the goal is to reduce the friction as much as possible to give them an accelerated path to the goal. What better way to improve the journey than by actually asking them?

By focusing on the user journey and reducing any friction, you’ll be setting your redesign up to generate real results. Now that you’ve determined what you need to improve on, it’s time to start working on content to fuel your redesign.

Step 7: Content First

Writing your content first when doing a website redesign is a critical part of any website. Without content your site is just a bunch of pretty pictures —and that helps no one. By creating your content first, you’ll be able to get all your ideas out and fine tune them without risking design revisions or pushing deadlines back.

Your content should be as concise as possible, and always user-focused.
Many companies fall into the age old trap of creating “brochureware” websites that only talk about themselves and drone on for endless paragraphs. Your users don’t care about “you”, they care about how you’re going solve their problems.

By focusing on the user, you’ll help deliver the real value of your organisation instead of coming off as “salesy” or self-serving.
Another positive of putting content first in the design process is that it gives your designer the ability to create a tailored layout to highlight the copy in the best possible way.

Step 8: Start the Website Design

Now, with your content in hand, it’s time to bring in the design team to create your page layouts and design mockups.
It’s important that your designer uses data you’ve gathered from the previous steps — otherwise, all the work you did was just wasted effort.

For example, do your users rely heavily on social proof like testimonials? Then it makes sense to have a very strong section designed for this. Consider including client logos that have seen success with your company, and make sure you give context with a descriptive header which could be “Companies we’ve helped…” or something to that effect.

Using best practices, your designer will also take the brand guidelines you compiled or updated and implement them into all of the designs being created. You’ll begin to see how the button hierarchy and other elements take shape and guide the user to specific information.

After this step, it’s important that you and the designer are fully aligned on these mockups before moving into development. Any uncertainty can lead to misalignments that may cause delays in development, especially if new information comes to light that makes a revision necessary.

Once you have your designs finalised and approved, you should do your best to have real users review them.

Step 9: Get Real User Data

Now that the designs have been created, we are ready for development right? Wrong!

Looking at your freshly made designs, it’s important to go back to your users (usually the ones that helped you in the beginning research stage) to see if your new designs will hit the mark for them.

Interactive versions of the designs can be created to allow your users to experience what the final developed site will be like.
Ask your users to navigate through them to the end goal and if you see any confusion, hesitation, or something doesn’t seem to “click” you may need to go back and rework the designs — but that’s okay!

Now is the time to make your changes, before you move into development and changes can be a bit more costly and time sensitive.
Since you’ve gotten “user approval” on your new designs, it’s time to get into development and get the site ready for the limelight!

Step 10: Develop Your Site

Development is typically the final stretch for any redesign, and our website redesign checklist is no different.
It’s been a long process to get to this point, so there’s usually an anxious feeling that goes along with this step, but rushing development can be a recipe for disaster and delays.

Dedicating ample time for the site to be coded out cleanly, following SEO and industry best practices, is a necessity. In this step, your team, internal or external, will transfer the flat design mockups that we’re created, into HTML, CSS, and other languages. There’s also a decent amount of testing that will go into this step. Checking cross-browser functionality to ensure a consistent experience for any user is key before launch. This gives you peace of mind that no matter what browser is used, your site will display exactly as intend.

The same goes for mobile devices — going through the variety of screen sizes takes time. Typically it’s a good idea to determine the most popular devices at the time and test on those. This gives you a realistic snapshot of what your site looks like on different devices, again ensuring a consistent user experience that won’t frustrate anyone.

Conclusion

That’s our website redesign checklist! It’s not always easy to follow it by the book, especially when there are tight deadlines or time constraints potentially truncating some steps, or skipping them altogether. However, following it as closely as you can will assist in making your new website the traffic driving, lead generating machine you’ve always wanted.