A website redesign brief that arrives at an agency as “make it better” produces a proposal built on guesswork.
The agency fills the gaps with assumptions about your goals, your content and your existing traffic, and every assumption is a place the project can drift off course later. This website redesign checklist is what you work through before you send that brief, not after: it takes an afternoon or two, and it changes the quality of every quote and every proposal you get back.
This is not a guide to whether you need a website redesign, or what one costs. If you are still deciding whether a redesign is the right call, read the signs a redesign is genuinely justified first. If you already know you’re redesigning and want to understand what drives the price, the cost drivers behind a website redesign covers that ground. This article sits between the two: the preparation that makes either conversation shorter and more useful.
Your website redesign checklist starts with goals, not features
“We want a new website” is not a goal. It is a description of the deliverable. A goal names what changes for the business once the new site is live: more enquiries from a specific service page, fewer support calls asking questions the old site didn’t answer, a checkout that more visitors complete, a brand that reads as current rather than dated.
Write down what a lead actually is for your business before you brief anyone. A form submission, a phone call, a booked appointment, an added-to-basket event: these are different things, and an agency that doesn’t know which one you’re counting will design toward the wrong outcome. If more than one of these counts as a lead, say so and rank them.
Separate goals from features. “Add live chat” is a feature. “Reduce the number of enquiries that go unanswered outside office hours” is a goal that live chat might solve, alongside other options an agency should be free to propose. A brief full of features tells an agency what to build. A brief full of goals tells it what to solve, which is a better use of the pitch.
Pull your analytics baseline before you brief
You cannot judge whether a redesign worked if you didn’t record what “before” looked like. Before you approach an agency, export or screenshot the numbers that matter for your goals: sessions, conversion rate on your priority pages, bounce rate on the pages you’re most worried about, and however you currently define and track a lead. If your current tracking doesn’t distinguish a lead from a visit, note that as a gap to fix during the project, not after it.
This baseline does two things. It gives any agency you brief something concrete to design against, rather than a vague sense that “traffic should go up.” And it gives you the only honest way to measure the new site once it launches: the same metrics, the same definitions, compared against the same period last year if your business is seasonal.
Book a call with Agnikii if you want a second opinion on what your current analytics can and can’t tell you before you start briefing agencies.
Inventory your content and list every URL
A website redesign is also a chance to lose things you didn’t mean to lose. Before you provide a web design brief to an agency, list every page on your current site, including the ones that don’t appear in your main navigation: old landing pages, seasonal offers, PDF downloads, blog posts that still bring in search traffic. A spreadsheet with one row per URL is enough.
Against each URL, note three things: whether it earns organic traffic worth keeping, whether the content on it needs rewriting or is still accurate, and where it should redirect to if its URL changes on the new site. This list becomes your redirect map, and handing it to an agency at the brief stage, rather than discovering the gaps after launch, is what keeps search rankings intact through a rebuild. A page that quietly disappears without a redirect is a page’s search visibility disappearing with it.
While you’re auditing, decide what you’re keeping outright: brand assets, case studies, testimonials, any accessibility or performance work already done that shouldn’t be undone by a rebuild. Say this explicitly in the brief. “Keep the existing accessibility features” is an instruction an agency can act on; assuming it will carry over is not.
Set an accessibility and performance baseline
Ask for, or run yourself, a baseline read of where your current site stands on two things: accessibility and performance. For accessibility, the current UK reference point is WCAG 2.1 Level AA; a competent agency should be able to tell you what your existing site meets and where it falls short. For performance, tools like Google PageSpeed Insights report both lab data, useful for spotting specific problems, and field data drawn from real visitors, which better reflects what your actual audience experiences. A sustainability and performance audit can supply this baseline if you don’t already have the tooling in-house.
Recording this now matters because it becomes your comparison point. Without a documented “before,” you have no way to hold an agency to a “the new site will be faster and more accessible” promise, because there is nothing to measure the promise against. Agnikii’s own approach builds accessibility and lean, low-carbon delivery in from the first draft rather than retrofitting them, which is the model worth asking any agency about: is accessibility designed in, or checked at the end?
Confirm who decides, and what they need to see
Name the decision-makers before the brief goes out, not during review. If sign-off needs input from marketing, a director and whoever owns the CMS day-to-day, say so upfront and agree how feedback will be consolidated into one set of comments per round. An agency fielding three separate, conflicting sets of feedback on the same design will burn review rounds resolving disagreements that should have happened on your side first.
Decide, too, what “done” looks like for each stage: what you need to see and approve before design moves to build, and what you need to see before build moves to launch. This single decision, made once at the brief stage, prevents most of the back-and-forth that makes redesigns feel slower than they need to be.
What to ask any agency you brief
With the groundwork above done, you’re ready to ask better questions of the agencies you approach, rather than just comparing quotes:
- How do you handle content migration and redirects for the URLs we’re not keeping?
- Is accessibility designed in from the first draft, or tested at the end?
- What happens to page weight and performance during the build, not just at launch?
- Who owns the content in the new CMS once the project ends, and how do we edit it ourselves?
- What does the maintenance and monitoring relationship look like after launch?
If you’re weighing lean, low-carbon design principles against a heavier, feature-first approach, ask directly how each agency’s process differs on that point, since it affects both your page weight and your ongoing running cost. And ask what happens after handover: a site that isn’t monitored tends to drift, in performance and in accessibility, over its lifecycle, which is worth understanding before you sign anything.
Where to start
None of this preparation requires an agency relationship yet. It is work you can do this week, on your own, with your own analytics and your own content. Once you have worked through this website redesign checklist, briefing any agency, Agnikii included, takes a fraction of the time, and the proposal that comes back will be built on your actual goals rather than an agency’s best guess at them.
Agnikii’s sustainable web design service starts every project with research into exactly the baseline described here: goals, current performance and accessibility, and what the existing site needs to keep. Book a call when your checklist is ready, and bring it with you.