Website Redesign Checklist for 2026

Not when it looks dated. Plenty of plain sites get the phone to ring. It is time when the site is costing you calls, or when you are embarrassed to send someone to it. Look for these.

• The phone number is not on the first screen of a phone. A visitor has to scroll or open a menu to call you.
• It is slow. Google’s “good” threshold for the main content to appear is 2.5 seconds. If you notice the wait on your own phone, so does everyone else.
• It says things that are no longer true. Services you dropped, a price from three years ago, a technician who left, hours from before the move.
• There is no way to book or request an estimate without calling during business hours.
• The reviews on the site are pasted text from years ago while your Google profile has fifty newer ones.
• You cannot update it. The person who built it is gone, or the login is lost, or every change is a ticket.
• The site is not in Google Search Console. Nobody verified it, so nobody knows what it ranks for or whether it is indexed.
• It was built desktop-first. On a phone the text is tiny and the layout jumps while it loads.

Two of those is a redesign. One of the first three is enough on its own.

The exception is a site that ranks well and gets calls despite looking old. Fix what is broken on the existing pages and keep the addresses. A redesign that resets rankings to zero is not an upgrade.

The parts of a website that took years to earn are invisible on the screen. They live in Google’s index, in your reviews and in your analytics history. A redesign that ignores them starts over.

Addresses that rank

Open Search Console, or verify the site if nobody has, and export every page that got a click in the last year. Each of those addresses either survives at the same URL or gets a permanent redirect to the page that replaces it. Google’s guidance for a site move is to map old URLs to new ones before you switch, starting with the pages that get the most traffic.

The copy that works

If a service page ranks for “tankless water heater installation Long Beach,” the words on that page are doing work. Rewrite for clarity, but keep the service names, the neighborhoods and the questions it answers.

Reviews and the Business Profile

Your Google reviews are attached to your Business Profile, not your website. Do not create a new profile for the new site; update the website link on the existing one. Google says complete and accurate profiles are more likely to show in local results, and that more reviews and positive ratings help ranking.

The domain, the accounts, the history

Keep the domain, the Google Analytics property and the Search Console property, so you can compare before and after. If the old agency holds any of these, get them moved to your own Google account before the redesign starts.

Fix the things that turn a visitor into a call. The table is in order of what usually matters most for a local business.

The speed row is Google’s Core Web Vitals: how long until the largest element appears, how quickly the page responds to a tap, and how much the layout jumps while loading, each measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. Heavy sliders, uncompressed photos and third-party scripts are the usual reasons a small business site fails.

A redirect tells Google and a visitor that a page has moved. Done right, the new page inherits what the old one earned. Done wrong, or not at all, the old address returns an error and the ranking goes with it.

1. Make the map first. Every old URL on the left, its new URL on the right. Include images and PDFs that were linked from elsewhere.
2. Use permanent, server-side redirects. Google says a 301 or 308 tells its indexing system the new address should be the canonical one. A temporary redirect does not.
3. One hop. Google advises avoiding chains, and keeping them under three hops where a chain is unavoidable. Old page to new page, not old page to the home page to the new page.
4. Redirect to the matching page, not the home page. A service page that lands on the home page loses the match with the search that brought the visitor.
5. Keep them. Google’s guidance is to keep redirects for as long as possible, and at least one year.
6. Only use Search Console’s change of address tool if the domain itself is changing. It is not for a redesign on the same domain.

A redirect map is the one document from a redesign that should exist before any design work starts.

Before

• Search Console verified on your own Google account; export pages with clicks for the last twelve months.
• Analytics baseline: one month of calls, form fills, and clicks from Search Console and the Business Profile.
• Redirect map written, old URL to new URL.
• Domain and registrar login in your hands.
• Current services, prices, hours, license number and service area written down.
• Photos gathered from your phone, your Google listing and your crew.

Launch day

• Phone number on the first screen, tap-to-call tested on a real iPhone and a real Android.
• Form submitted, text received.
• Redirects tested one by one from the map.
• LocalBusiness schema validated in Google’s Rich Results Test.
• Sitemap submitted in Search Console; no noindex left over from the staging site.
• Business Profile website link updated.
• SSL padlock present on every page.

After

• Search Console checked weekly for crawl errors and for pages that dropped out of the index.
• Core Web Vitals checked after real traffic arrives.
• Calls, form fills and profile clicks compared to the baseline at 30 and 90 days.
• Old URLs spot-checked at 90 days to confirm redirects still work.

Not by how it looks. By whether more of the people who find you contact you. Four sources cover it, and all four are free.

• Search Console’s Performance report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for every page and query. Compare the month after launch to the month before.
• The Business Profile’s performance section counts calls from the call button, website clicks, direction requests, messages and bookings. If the redesign moved your number up, the call count is where it shows.
• The form-to-text log. Every form fill sends a text to your phone, so the count is on your phone. It is the cleanest before-and-after number a small business has.
• Core Web Vitals from real visits. Passing before launch on a test tool means little; passing after a month of real traffic means the site is fast for your actual customers.

Give it a full quarter before judging rankings. Google reindexes a small site over a few weeks after a move, and local rankings settle after that. Calls and form fills move sooner, because those depend on the page a visitor lands on, not on where it ranks. The numbers come from your own accounts, so you can check them without anyone’s help.

Redesign when the structure is sound and the surface is the problem: the copy is dated, the photos are old, the number is buried, the pages are slow. Those are fixes on the pages you have, at the addresses you have.

Start over when the platform is the problem: you cannot log in, every change costs money, the builder cannot make the pages fast, or the old agency owns the hosting and will not hand it over. In that case the redirect map matters more, because every address is changing.

Either way the price is the same on our side: Standard is $500 down and $49 a month leased, or from $1,500 to own, and covers up to five pages, the redirects, Search Console, the Business Profile, schema and the reviews widget. We build the new site before we talk, so you compare it to the old one on the call rather than imagining it.