A checklist for auditing a website before a redesign kickoff

A redesign that starts from a blank Figma file and a client's list of complaints about the old site tends to fix the visible problems and accidentally break things the old site was quietly doing right. A proper audit before kickoff catches both sides of that equation, and it's a step we don't skip regardless of how outdated the current site looks.

Stakeholder opinion about an old site is almost always focused entirely on what looks dated, since that's the part everyone can see and have an opinion about in a single glance. What's actually driving revenue underneath that dated-looking surface takes real analytics work to uncover, and it's routinely a different set of pages and paths than the ones getting complained about in a kickoff meeting.

We pull the highest-traffic pages, the highest-converting pages, and the specific paths users take to convert, before any redesign work starts. It's common to find that a page the client wants to completely overhaul is quietly the site's best converter, in which case the redesign needs to preserve whatever's working there, not just make it prettier and hope the conversion rate holds.

We present this data back to the client early, often before any design conversation begins, specifically because it reframes the whole project. A redesign framed around "modernize this" is a different, riskier project than one framed around "modernize this while protecting these three specific things that are already working," and the second framing consistently produces a better outcome.

We document every page currently ranking for meaningful search traffic, along with its exact URL, before a single new page is built. A redesign that changes URL structures without a full 301 redirect map is one of the most common causes of a post-launch traffic collapse, entirely avoidable with twenty minutes of documentation done at the start rather than scrambled together after launch.

We've inherited cleanup projects where a previous redesign changed URL structures with no redirect map at all, costing the client months of organic traffic to rebuild. The fix after the fact is far more expensive than the twenty minutes of upfront documentation would have been, and it's rarely a full recovery even once the redirects are finally put in place.

What's the current site actually built on, what integrations does it have (CRM, email tool, booking system, payment processor), and which of those need to carry over versus which can be replaced. Missing an integration during scoping is one of the most common causes of late-stage redesign scope creep, since it surfaces only when someone asks "wait, how does the booking system connect to the new site" partway through the build.

We interview whoever manages each integration internally, not just the person who requested the redesign, since the person requesting a new website frequently isn't the same person who knows the specific configuration details of a booking system integration set up two years earlier by someone who's since left the company.

Every page gets sorted into keep-as-is, needs a rewrite, or cut entirely, based on both performance data and a straightforward read of whether the content still accurately represents the business. This step alone often eliminates 20 to 30 percent of an old site's pages, which is a real scope reduction that makes the actual redesign work faster and the resulting site meaningfully easier to maintain.

This audit routinely surfaces pages the client had genuinely forgotten existed, an old campaign landing page, a discontinued product line's page, still quietly live and occasionally still ranking for something. Deciding what to do with these forgotten pages before the redesign starts avoids carrying accidental dead weight into the new site.

Redesigning based purely on stakeholder opinion about what looks dated, without checking what's actually driving traffic and conversions underneath, is the single most common cause of a redesign that looks better and performs worse. A short audit before kickoff, run consistently, is cheap insurance against that specific and expensive mistake.

We share the completed audit as a standalone document before any design work starts, not folded into a larger proposal, specifically so a client can absorb what's actually working on their current site before getting excited about what a new one could look like. That sequencing matters more than it might seem.

We look at two or three direct competitors' sites during this audit, not to copy anything, but to establish a realistic baseline for what "modern" actually means in that specific industry, since a client's sense of what looks dated is often calibrated against a completely different kind of business than their own. A B2B logistics company comparing itself to a consumer lifestyle brand's website is measuring itself against the wrong bar entirely.

This benchmarking step also occasionally reveals that a client's site is more current than they believed, and the actual complaint driving the redesign request is really about something else entirely, a slow page, an outdated product lineup, a navigation structure that's grown confusing, none of which require a full visual overhaul to fix.

When that happens, we say so directly rather than quietly proceeding with a full redesign the client asked for but doesn't actually need. It's a smaller invoice for us in the short term, and it's the kind of honest recommendation that tends to be what gets us the next, genuinely necessary project a year or two later.

We put the competitor comparison itself into the audit deliverable, screenshots and specific observations rather than a vague impression, so the client can see exactly what informed the recommendation and push back with their own read of the same competitors if they see it differently.

This documentation habit has, more than once, turned what started as a straightforward redesign request into a smaller, cheaper, and ultimately more useful engagement, which isn't the outcome that maximizes our invoice but is consistently the one that keeps a client coming back for the next real need rather than feeling oversold on this one.