Website Redesign SEO Checklist: Before, During and After Launch

A website redesign should make your business easier to understand and easier to buy from. It should not accidentally remove the pages, enquiries or search visibility you already rely on. This checklist is for the person commissioning the project, as well as the team building it.

Use it to agree what must be protected, who checks each item and what counts as ready to launch. A new design is not evidence that the migration is complete.

1. Record what is working before changing it

Start with a short handover document, not a blank design brief. Which services bring good enquiries? Which pages do prospects read before contacting you? What questions repeatedly come up on sales calls? These answers tell your agency what the new site must make clearer.

• Export landing pages, queries, clicks and impressions from Search Console. Include a longer period if the business is seasonal.
• Record organic sessions, completed enquiries and the current form-to-inbox journey. Keep email clicks separate from submitted forms.
• List important service pages, case studies, articles, downloads and pages with external links.
• Save the existing copy, page titles and screenshots of essential journeys. Take a restorable site and database backup.

Ask for a baseline you can compare with after launch. A report showing traffic alone will not tell you whether the right people are arriving.

2. Give every important old URL a destination

Keep useful URLs where possible. Where an address changes, map it to the closest relevant replacement with a permanent redirect. Do not send every removed page to the homepage. A genuinely removed page without a replacement should return an appropriate error status.

A practical migration sheet has five columns: old address, new address, action, owner and test result. Give priority to pages with enquiries, search clicks or links from other sites. Review merged pages with the person responsible for the service: two pages that look similar can answer different customer needs.

• Keep a service page if the service still exists and customers need its detail.
• When combining articles, preserve the useful answers rather than just the highest-traffic headline.
• Check campaign links, QR codes, email signatures and downloadable documents that may still use old addresses.

3. Test the build as a customer would

Review the real content on a phone, not just the desktop design. Can someone understand the offer, inspect the work and make contact without hunting through menus? Check the longest headings, price explanations, form errors and cookie controls. These are easy places for a polished design to become difficult to use.

• Test navigation, keyboard access, calls to action and browser back behaviour.
• Send a clearly labelled test enquiry and confirm that it reaches the intended inbox. A success message is not proof of email delivery.
• Check image crops, readable type, loading behaviour and content that appears after scrolling.
• Confirm who can edit pages, replace images and publish articles after handover.
• Keep private staging environments protected; do not let a preview copy compete with the live site.

For a complex site, agree a small set of acceptance journeys: for example, find a service, inspect a relevant project and submit an enquiry. Name an owner for each check.

4. Make launch a checked handover

After deployment, check live response codes, redirects, internal links, canonical URLs and the XML sitemap. Remove development indexing restrictions from public pages, while keeping private or utility pages excluded. Use Search Console URL Inspection on representative pages and submit the current sitemap.

Keep someone available who can reverse the deployment if an important journey fails. Avoid launching immediately before a campaign, holiday or period when nobody can check incoming enquiries.

• Confirm analytics still uses the correct property and respects the visitor’s consent choice.
• Check the live forms again after cache clearing, including their error and confirmation states.
• Record the launch date and exactly what changed: design, content, URLs, platform or all four.

5. Watch the pages that matter after launch

Look first at the landing pages that used to generate valuable visits. Compare their queries, clicks and enquiries with the baseline, allowing for seasonality and the size of the sample. Sitewide averages can hide a problem on one important service page.

If clicks fall, separate the possible causes. Fewer impressions may point to changed visibility or demand. Similar impressions but fewer clicks may warrant a closer look at position and the search result. Visits without enquiries call for a check of the offer, proof and contact journey. None of these signals establishes a cause on its own.

• Review failed URLs and indexing reports, distinguishing deliberate exclusions from missing commercial pages.
• Investigate broken journeys immediately; avoid rewriting the whole site in response to a few quiet days.
• Log each follow-up change so later comparisons have some context.

6. Questions to ask your redesign agency

• Which existing pages and enquiries are we protecting?
• Who owns the redirect map and the launch checks?
• What will be tested on mobile, and who confirms email delivery?
• What is included after launch, and who responds if something breaks?
• How will we distinguish more visits from better business enquiries?

A redesign cannot guarantee rankings. It can give you a clearer offer, a better customer journey and a properly checked transition. Google’s site-move guidance and redirect documentation explain the search-specific checks in more detail.

See how our Life Kitchen website work connected bookings, book purchases and storytelling, or explore our web design and SEO support.