Website Redesign Project Plan: The Ultimate Guide with Templates

Traffic Over Time: Spend some time assessing overall traffic, and the overall trends. Try to identify spikes, especially if they coincided with big changes in the website.

Traffic Sources: It’s important to know where traffic is coming from in order to set goals. If there’s little from Organic Search, maybe SEO is a good thing to focus on in the redesign, for example.

User Behavior: You can see the “Behavior Flow” of aggregated users as they go from page to page of the site, which can help you craft a strategy for which pages you need to keep and which connections you need to make stronger.

Bounce Rate: This measures when visitors leave the site without clicking through to any other page—identify the drop off points and see if you can figure out why, so you can strengthen those weak points during the redesign.

Time on Page: There’s no “right” amount of time a user should spend on every page, it’s all contextual. But for example, if you have some killer long form content that takes 10 minutes to read and on average people spend 1 minute on it, that should be a red flag.

Goal Completions: These are custom for every site, and can measure anything from filling in a form to making an actual purchase. Learn how to set up goal completions here.

Improve the Visuals
One of the most common reasons a website redesign comes to a head is an ugly, outdated, or otherwise unusable appearance. If your team is frequently embarrassed to share the site with prospects, or you find that your brand doesn’t have a lot of esteem, this is probably what you need the most. You’ll need the help of a web designer or web design agency, a strong brand guideline, and probably a middling budget to pull off a site with this need.

Improve the User Experience
Customer complaints, frequent help desk tickets, and high bounce rates (leaving a web page without clicking on anything) all can signal difficulty navigating the website. A redesign with this in mind will require a UX specialist, a conversion strategist, and possibly even usability testing.

Increase Traffic
Without visitors to the site, you can’t use it to turn a profit or generate business leads. One of the key ways that a site can increase traffic without spending on ads is through SEO, which requires an SEO specialist and often content writers. The technical SEO side will include providing proper markup and structured data when creating the site, and the content side requires that relevant, useful, and high-quality content is written frequently to draw in organic search traffic. If you don’t have a blog, you’ll need one in order to have an outlet to publish lots of said relevant content, which is vital for improving SEO rankings. Position your blog as a place to get educated on your business’ area of expertise, since that’s what most people search for. Note that blogs on modern websites require a CMS (Content Management System).

Increase Leads & Conversions
If you’re getting visitors to the site, but they never take crucial steps like signing up for email marketing, filling in quote or contact forms, or making a purchase, then the traffic is just a vanity number. Consider whether the UX or messaging need improvement to get visitors to take these steps, or if the forms or shopping carts aren’t functioning perfectly.

Launch Marketing Initiatives
For most businesses, the website is a hub for all sales and marketing efforts, even if they use 3rd party landing pages for ad campaigns and the like. A site with this goal would need to have trackers, heatmaps, marketing pixels, and well-scripted Events and Goal Completions in order to accurately attribute campaigns to the right efforts. A digital media specialist would be helpful here.

Team Can’t Spare Time: Lots of businesses think they can hire an agency and then dust their hands and wait for a beautiful website in a few months, but that’s almost never the case. A good web design agency will require at least one point person to review at many different stages (like the ones outlined in this article), and to handle steps like identifying and gathering content which are time-intensive. And don’t forget decision-makers who are always busy—if they can’t spare the time to chime in, the project will get stuck at choke points frequently.

Redesign projects can hum along for weeks without input if they get the feedback they need on time, so make it a priority, and if possible, assign someone specifically to be the project manager on your side.

Too Many Stakeholders: Speaking of decision makers, just how many cooks are in the kitchen for your website redesign project? If multiple strong and opposing opinions are given equal weight and time, they can halt the project in its tracks. Even worse is bringing in detached senior leadership for a once over near the end, only to have an issue that brings the project back to square one.

Decide your lean project team and have them all present at each touchpoint with your freelancer or agency.

Lack of Strategy: If the website doesn’t have a defined strategy prior to design, it’s subject to the whims of every department and aesthetic trends, and the end result will be impossible to assess the success of.

Start with the strategy, which should only flow from the baseline metrics you’ve analyzed.

Design First Approach: Because an ugly or outdated look is often top of mind on a website that’s getting redesigned, it’s easy for the team to excitedly pick out examples of how they want it to look and send the web designers to work. But design-first leads to disaster and rework. The design needs to serve the businesses goals and be able to fit the right content to help sell to your customers—both need to flow from the strategy.

If you go backwards, you’ll get a site that doesn’t serve the business at all.

Too Much Content: They say content is king, and more content means better SEO—but that’s only if it has a plan behind it. Many businesses treat their website like a directory of everything they’ve ever done, which makes navigation and menus difficult to plan and navigate. A high-performance website can’t feature everything.

Go back to your strategy and determine which things are core to the business and the goals of the site.

Site Function Disruption: During the redesign and especially during development, transition, and testing, core features of the site can be knocked offline, which can affect the business. If content isn’t displaying, form submissions aren’t being recorded, sales can’t go through, and customers can’t log in, that can have a tangible effect on revenue.

This is one of the biggest reasons to rely on a professional web design agency who can manage and minimize the disruption to business.

SEO Disruption: If your current website has high ranking content and draws a significant portion of its traffic from organic search, that can be upended by a poorly planned website redesign.

Make sure your partner has SEO experience and can manage redirects and sitemaps so that search traffic flows seamlessly to the new site and doesn’t plummet in rankings.

Too Low of a Budget: It’s tempting to negotiate to a price and then sit firmly on it, but if you’ve ever hired someone for a project you can’t do yourself, you need to be flexible. Your plumber may find leaks you weren’t aware of which drives the cost up in the middle of a repair, and similarly your web design agency may make you aware that you need a corporate blog, or you might learn about a complex feature you really want that’s not in scope.

Many companies seeking website redesigns set an arbitrary price based on what they’re comfortable spending that season, when they should be doing market research to find out what pricing to expect for the type of site they hope to build. In any case, build in an extra 10-20% of the cost to set aside for increased scope, and you’ll never be caught off guard.

Either give your agency adequate access to stakeholders of this project (no matter how important they are), or don’t hire a web design agency in the first place.

Conversion Strategy: Whether you’re getting leads through a form, getting phone calls from the contact page, selling products through a store, the conversion points are the most important part of the site. These end goals are what the site is for, so you should work backwards to the logical start points. This can be conceived of as a funnel, where the broadest group of visitors start at the top, and get whittled down as they travel through to only the most likely buyers who convert. Similarly, the most broad and simple content should live at the start, and only get more complex and specific as visitors prove their interest by reaching deeper pages on the site, like product and service pages.

Acquisition Strategy: This has a big overlap with advertising and marketing, and is concerned with how you get people to the site in the first place. If you are using ads, where should they lead on the site for the best chance of having an impact? If you’re sharing site content on social media, where should that content live on the site, and what is the next logical step a reader would take? Your acquisition sources should be met with logical pat