A website redesign has more moving parts than most businesses realize — and one skipped step during migration can vaporize 40% of organic traffic overnight. This checklist is the compressed version of the internal SOP AuraXLaunch runs on every project.
Before You Redesign — 9 Questions
- 01What is the one metric that determines success?
- 02Do we have current baseline analytics for that metric?
- 03What existing organic pages generate 80% of our traffic today?
- 04Are we changing the URL structure? If yes, are 301 redirects planned?
- 05Who owns copy, and are they available for the full project?
- 06Do we have written brand guidelines, or are we creating them?
- 07What integrations must survive the migration?
- 08What is the launch window that does the least damage to the business?
- 09Who signs off on the final launch?
Strategy & Positioning Checklist
- Homepage headline updated based on customer interviews
- Single primary CTA defined for every page
- Value proposition testable in 5 seconds
- Competitor differentiators documented
- Proof strategy defined (case studies, logos, quotes)
Content & SEO Checklist
- Full crawl of old site with screaming frog or similar
- Traffic-generating pages identified and preserved
- 301 redirect map complete and reviewed
- Meta titles and descriptions rewritten for every indexed page
- Structured data implemented (Organization, Article, Product, FAQ)
- Internal linking plan for cornerstone content
- Sitemap.xml and robots.txt validated
- Canonical tags set correctly on paginated and near-duplicate pages
Design & Build Checklist
- Design system tokens defined and applied
- Accessibility audit against WCAG 2.2 AA
- Mobile-first breakpoints tested at 320, 375, 414, 768, 1024, 1440
- Core Web Vitals passing on a staging Lighthouse run
- Fonts subset and preloaded
- Images served in AVIF/WebP with responsive sources
- Forms tested end-to-end including spam handling
Launch & Migration Checklist
- 01Staging URL locked behind auth
- 02Analytics tracking installed and QA'd on staging
- 03301 redirects deployed and tested with a crawler
- 04DNS TTL lowered 24 hours before cutover
- 05Post-launch smoke test of top 20 pages within 30 minutes
- 06Search Console: new site verified, sitemap re-submitted
- 07Old-URL 404 monitor set up for 30 days
Post-Launch 90-Day Checklist
- Week 1 — daily traffic and error monitoring
- Week 2 — heatmap review, top 10 improvements queued
- Week 4 — first A/B test live
- Week 8 — SEO recovery report (rankings, impressions, CTR)
- Week 12 — full retrospective and next-quarter roadmap
Key takeaways
- ✓The redesign fails on migration far more often than on design.
- ✓Preserving your top-traffic URLs is non-negotiable.
- ✓Baseline analytics before the redesign is the only way to measure success.
- ✓The 12 weeks after launch matter more than the 12 weeks before.
FAQ
8–14 weeks for most SMB and mid-market projects. Enterprise timelines extend to 20+ weeks.
Note
Redesigning your site this year?
Book a free 30-minute redesign readiness review with AuraXLaunch.
Next step
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