Published February 10, 2026
Know who controls the domain
Before any design conversation, confirm who owns and can access the domain registrar. This is the single most common thing that stalls a website project, and it is almost always discovered at the worst moment — the week of launch.
Inventory the pages you already have
List every page on the current site with its URL. Mark each one keep, rewrite, combine or remove. Pages that get traffic or rank for something useful should keep their URL when possible, and get a 301 redirect when they cannot.
Check whether anything is being measured
Confirm analytics is installed and reporting, and that Google Search Console is verified. If neither is working, get them working before the redesign so you have a baseline to compare against.
Test the forms
Submit every form on the current site and confirm where the message lands. Forms that quietly stopped delivering are common, and a redesign is the moment to catch it.
Look outside the website
Your Google Business Profile, directory listings and social profiles all point at the site. If URLs change, those need updating too. A redesign that ignores them creates dead links across the internet.