Corporate Website Redesign Checklist
A redesign is one of the highest-risk moments in a website's life for SEO and lead flow, not because redesigns are inherently risky, but because the boring infrastructure work (redirects, structured data, tracking) gets rushed in favor of the visual work everyone's excited about.
Before the redesign starts
- Export a full list of current URLs, their current rankings, and their traffic, so you have a baseline to compare against and a map for redirect planning
- Audit which pages actually drive leads or revenue today, so the new information architecture doesn't accidentally bury them
- Document current structured data so it can be rebuilt, not just visually redesigned
During the build
- Plan 301 redirects for every URL that will change, mapped individually, not just a blanket redirect to the homepage
- Keep the same core page titles and heading structure where the content hasn't fundamentally changed, to preserve existing relevance signals
- Rebuild schema markup for every page type as part of the new templates, not as an afterthought
Before launch
- Test the staging site with a crawler to catch broken internal links before they go live
- Confirm analytics and conversion tracking fire correctly on the new site, verified with real test submissions, not just "the code is there"
- Have redirects tested, not just written, click through a sample of old URLs against the new deployment
After launch
- Submit the updated sitemap in Search Console immediately
- Monitor indexing and rankings weekly for the first month, redesigns can cause temporary ranking volatility even when done correctly, and it helps to know early if something's actually wrong versus just settling
- Check Core Web Vitals within the first week; a beautiful redesign that's slower than the old site has traded one problem for another
See Corporate & Business Websites for how we scope a redesign to protect what's already working while fixing what isn't.