Before the project
1. Make your goals measurable
“Look more modern” is not a goal. Define what the new website should actually achieve: more enquiries, less support workload, better job applications, higher shop conversion. Record where things stand today, so you can prove the impact later.
2. Measure the current state
Export the pages with the most visits, clicks and backlinks from Google Search Console and your analytics tool. These pages carry your visibility. After the relaunch, you’ll need an equally strong or better equivalent for each of them.
3. Build a content inventory
List every existing URL and decide, page by page: keep, rework, merge or delete. Thin, outdated or duplicate content gets cut; strong content gets better.
4. Define audiences and page structure
Who should find what on the website? Navigation should grow out of the key tasks your visitors come to do, not out of your company’s org chart.
During development
5. Design mobile first
Most visits come from smartphones, and Google primarily evaluates the mobile version. So design and test for small screens first.
6. Write content for people and for search engines
Every page needs a clear topic, a compelling main heading, a distinct page title and a meta description. Answer the questions your customers actually ask, in enough depth to be genuinely helpful.
7. Get the technical foundations right
- Clean, readable URLs (e.g. /services/webdesign instead of /page?id=12)
- Structured data for your business, articles and FAQs
- Short load times: optimised images, minimal scripts, good Core Web Vitals
- Accessible implementation: contrast, keyboard operation, alt text
8. Build the redirect plan
The single most important step for your ranking: every old URL that has visits or backlinks gets a 301 redirect to the matching new page. Without this plan, visitors and search engines land on error pages, and the visibility you’ve built up over years is lost.
9. Test on a staging environment
Test forms, redirects, how the site displays on different devices, and load times before the website goes live. The staging environment itself should be password-protected or set to noindex, so Google doesn’t index it as a duplicate.
Go-live and beyond
10. Plan the go-live
Choose a quiet moment, not Friday evening. Check straight after switching over: SSL certificate, redirects, forms, tracking, robots.txt and the XML sitemap.
11. Tell Google
Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and watch the page indexing and 404 error reports over the first few weeks. Missing redirects show up here first.
12. Measure, learn, improve
Compare against the goals from step 1 after four weeks and again after twelve. Fluctuations in the first few weeks are normal; if an important page stays behind long-term, it’s usually down to content or a missing redirect. Both can be fixed.
A relaunch isn’t an endpoint — it’s the starting signal for a website that grows with your business.
Planning a relaunch?
We support relaunches from analysis through to monitoring after go-live, including the redirect plan. Book a free initial consultation or estimate the cost in advance with our pricing calculator.
