What to Audit Before You Redesign: A Pre-Redesign Checklist

By the time a business calls us asking for a redesign, they've usually already decided what's wrong: "it looks old" or "it's slow". Sometimes that's the real problem. Often it's a symptom of something else entirely, and a redesign built on the wrong diagnosis wastes money fixing the visible symptom while the actual cause survives into the new site. Before you brief any designer, including us, run this audit on your current site yourself. It takes an afternoon and it changes what you ask for.

Content Inventory

List every page on your current site and note, honestly, which ones actually earn their keep. A Thamel travel agency we audited had 40 pages, one for every trek package they'd ever offered, most abandoned years ago, still indexed, still confusing search results. Half the pages didn't need a redesign. They needed deletion. Know what's staying, what's merging, and what's being cut before design work starts, otherwise the designer is rebuilding clutter with a fresh coat of paint.

Traffic and Ranking Baseline

Export your current Google Analytics traffic by page and your Search Console rankings for your top 20 keywords. This becomes your scorecard after launch, and more importantly, it tells you which pages are quietly bringing in customers so nobody accidentally guts them during the redesign. We've seen a redesign drop a business's top organic landing page from the navigation entirely because nobody checked it was generating a third of their enquiries.

URL List for Redirects

Pull a full list of your current page URLs, every one, including old blog posts and product pages. Whatever your new URL structure ends up being, every old address needs to redirect somewhere sensible. This single item prevents the most common and most damaging redesign mistake: an overnight collapse in search rankings because Google suddenly finds hundreds of broken links where trusted pages used to be.

Technical Health Check

Test your current site's mobile speed using a free tool like Google's PageSpeed Insights, note the score. Check whether SSL is active and the padlock shows correctly. List every third-party plugin, tool or script currently installed, chat widgets, booking plugins, analytics tags, and decide which ones are actually still needed. Old, unused plugins are one of the most common sources of security vulnerabilities we find when we take over maintenance of an inherited site.

Competitor Snapshot

Visit three direct competitors and note, specifically, what they do that yours doesn't: online booking, live chat, a pricing page, customer reviews, faster load times. Not to copy them, but to know honestly where you're behind before a designer tells you, so the redesign brief addresses real gaps instead of vague dissatisfaction.

Goals in Numbers, Not Adjectives

Write down what success looks like in a measurable way: more phone enquiries, higher online order completion, more newsletter signups, whatever matters to your business. "Look more professional" is not measurable and can't tell you afterward whether the redesign worked. "Increase enquiry form submissions by 25 percent" can.

What This Audit Actually Saves You

Businesses that show up to a redesign conversation with this audit already done get more accurate quotes, faster timelines, and results that are easier to measure afterward. It also tends to surface that some of "the website's problem" was never a design problem at all, sometimes it's a pricing page nobody updated in two years, or a phone number that changed without anyone fixing the footer.

At WebsNP, we run a version of this audit ourselves before quoting any redesign, but a business that's already done the homework gets a sharper, faster process. Send us your current site and, if you have it, your analytics access, and we'll turn it into a fixed-price redesign plan within 24 hours, targeted at what's actually broken rather than what merely looks old.