The website redesign questions worth asking are not about colours or templates; they are about what the current site is already doing for you, because a redesign that ignores that is the most common way a business loses the traffic and enquiries it had. Before any design starts, answer twelve questions in three groups: what is working now, what must not change, and what the new site has to do that the old one does not. Most redesign question lists run to twenty-five items for an agency’s discovery call; these twelve are the ones the site owner needs answered, with where to find each answer.
What is the current site already doing?
You cannot protect what you have not measured. Three questions, all answered in Google Search Console and Analytics in under an hour:
| Question | Where to look | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Which pages bring in search traffic? | Search Console, Performance, Pages, last 12 months | Those URLs, titles and content are the assets. They must survive the redesign unchanged or be redirected one to one |
| 2. Which pages produce enquiries or sales? | Analytics conversions, form plugin logs, your inbox | Often not the pages you would guess; a blog post can be the top lead source |
| 3. What do visitors do on the home page now? | Analytics engagement, a free heatmap tool for a week | If 60 percent scroll to pricing, the new home page needs pricing in reach |
If the honest answer to question 1 is “almost nothing”, the redesign is free to change everything. If it is “these eight pages”, the redesign is really a rebuild around eight pages, and the rest is decoration.
What must not change?
| Question | The safe answer |
|---|---|
| 4. Will the URLs stay the same? | Yes wherever possible. Every URL that changes needs a 301 redirect to its replacement, page to page, before launch; Google’s own guidance on site moves applies to redesigns that change addresses |
| 5. Will the page titles, headings and copy on the ranking pages be kept? | Kept, then improved after launch when you can see the effect of each change separately |
| 6. Is the domain changing too? | Ideally not at the same time. Two big changes at once means a traffic drop cannot be diagnosed; changing a WordPress domain is its own project |
| 7. Who owns the current site, domain and hosting, and where are the logins? | You, with every login in your password manager before the project starts. A redesign is when missing logins surface |
Question 4 is the one that decides most outcomes. A designer who plans to “clean up the URLs” without a redirect map is planning to delete your rankings.
Which website redesign questions decide what the new site must do?
| Question | A useful answer looks like |
|---|---|
| 8. What is the one action a visitor should take? | “Book a call”, “request a quote”, “buy”. One primary action per page, visible without scrolling |
| 9. Who is the visitor, and what do they need to see to trust you? | Named customer type, and the proof they look for: reviews, results, prices, faces |
| 10. What is wrong with the current site that design can fix, and what is wrong that design cannot? | Slow, dated, hard to edit: design can fix. No traffic, wrong customers: that is SEO and positioning, and a new template will not touch it |
| 11. Platform: stay or move? | Stay unless the platform is the problem. Moving platform is a migration on top of a redesign; custom design vs a theme covers when a rebuild is justified |
| 12. Who will update it afterwards, and can they? | A named person, on a platform they can actually use, with a handover session |
What should be ready before the designer starts?
- The Search Console export from question 1: a list of every URL with impressions in the last year, so nothing gets dropped.
- A redirect map: old URL, new URL, in a spreadsheet, for anything that changes.
- Copy and photos. The two to four week build timeline on a small site assumes the content exists; it doubles when it does not.
- The answers to questions 8 to 10, written down, so the brief is yours rather than the designer’s.
- A backup of the current site, and a copy of it on a staging address if the platform allows, so the old version can come back in an hour if needed.
What should happen on launch day?
- Test every redirect from the map in a private window.
- Submit the sitemap in Search Console and request indexing for the home page and the top five pages from question 1.
- Check the site on a phone from a Google search, not just by typing the address.
- Confirm forms send, analytics fires and the SSL padlock shows.
- Watch Search Console for the next four weeks. Impressions dipping and recovering is normal; pages disappearing from the Pages report is not.
If you are choosing who does the work, the questions to ask a website designer before hiring are the companion to this list: this post is about the project, that one is about the person. Both are what I go through on the first call for a WordPress redesign, because the answers decide whether the job is a fresh start or a careful transplant.
Frequently asked questions
Which pages bring traffic and enquiries now, what visitors do on the site, whether URLs and ranking page content will be kept, whether the domain is changing, who owns the logins, the one action visitors should take, who the visitor is, what design can and cannot fix, whether to change platform, and who will update the site afterwards.
Only if URLs change without redirects, ranking pages lose their titles and content, or the domain changes at the same time. Keep URLs, redirect anything that moves page to page, and keep the copy on ranking pages until after launch.
No. Do one at a time so a traffic drop can be traced to a single cause. Change the domain first if you must, then redesign once rankings have settled.
Export the Pages report from Search Console for the last 12 months. Any page with impressions is an asset; keep its URL or redirect it to the closest equivalent.
Redesign if the platform works and the site is dated or hard to use. Rebuild if the platform itself blocks what the business needs: speed, booking, selling or ranking.
A list of ranking URLs, a redirect map, your copy and photos, written answers on the main action and the target visitor, all logins, and a backup of the current site.
