The Website Redesign Checklist: 52 Items From Baseline to the 30-Day Watch

Search Console keeps performance data for the last 16 months, and a standard Google Analytics 4 property keeps the event-level data behind its explorations and funnel reports for either 2 or 14 months, depending on one setting (Google Analytics Help). A redesign is judged by comparing after with before, and the "before" is deleted on a schedule. That is why this checklist starts weeks before anyone opens a design file.

The 52 items below run in six stages, from the baseline to the 30-day watch. Each has a test for "done", so nobody ticks a box on a feeling. The thresholds come from Google, the W3C and WebAIM; the order is ours.

Stage one: the baseline, before anything changes

This checklist opens with exports, because the data you need on day 30 has to be saved on day one. Our Website Redesign Project Plan Template covers who owns each phase; this is the item-level list underneath it.

Why the API matters. Google's Search Analytics API returns 1,000 rows by default and up to 25,000 per request, with paging beyond that. A long tail of queries runs out of on-screen rows long before it runs out of data.

Why retention matters. On a standard GA4 property, user-level and key event data can be kept for 2 or 14 months. Google says the setting does not touch standard aggregated reports, only explorations and funnels, and that an increase applies to data already collected and not yet deleted. Raise it now and the data you already hold stays reachable.

Why item 9 is there. A redesign that doubles form fills and halves qualified leads has failed, and only the CRM can show it.

If you missed the field data. Chrome's CrUX History API holds the previous 40 weeks, one 28-day collection period per week, for pages and origins with enough traffic. A late baseline for speed is recoverable. A late baseline for search queries older than 16 months is not.

Stage two: inventory and decisions

The decisions in this stage are the expensive ones to change later. They also decide how much of stage four you will need.

Item 13 is a decision. Google's site-move guide says that if you want a new domain, a new CMS and a new layout, you should do them one at a time. If you bundle them anyway, say so in writing, because every extra change widens the list of things that can explain a drop.

Items 15 and 16 are a project of their own on any site that changes URLs. Our post Website Migration Without Losing Rankings: The Redirect Map, the Rehearsal and the 30-Day Watch covers the map's columns and Google's rules on chains and soft 404s, so they are not repeated here.

Item 19 saves the comparison. Google's recommended event for a form submission, newsletter sign-up or demo request is generate_lead. If the old site used a custom name, keep it or map it, so day 30 compares like with like.

Stage three: design and build

Accessibility and speed are cheaper to design in than to fix after launch. WebAIM's 2026 scan of the top million home pages found an average of 56.1 errors per page. Low-contrast text appeared on 83.9% of pages, missing alt text on 53.1% and missing form labels on 51%. Every one of those can be caught in a design file or a CMS field.

The six failure types WebAIM tracks, from contrast to missing document language, account for 96% of the errors it detected, and they have been the same six for seven years. Items 21, 22, 25 and 26 cover four of them. Empty links and empty buttons, the other two, are usually icon links without a label, and they show up in the stage four scan.

We build marketing sites in Webflow, where alt text and SEO fields can live in CMS fields, so we would make them required at collection level rather than trusting an editor to remember.

Stage four: the redesign SEO checklist on staging

This is the website redesign SEO checklist proper. Every item runs on staging, before the public sees anything, and each can be repeated on launch day.

Redirects. Google recommends permanent server-side redirects, 301 or 308. With a temporary redirect, its indexing pipeline does not take the target as the canonical, so the old URL may stay in results. Googlebot follows up to 10 hops, but Google advises redirecting to the final destination, and where a chain cannot be avoided, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5.

Item 29 has a trap in it. Google's noindex documentation says a page blocked by robots.txt is never crawled, so its noindex rule is never seen. Google adds that such a page can still appear in results if other pages link to it, and a launch that copies the robots.txt rule to production blocks the whole live site. Write down which method you used, so stage five can remove exactly that.

Lab tests are not the verdict. Core Web Vitals are assessed on field data at the 75th percentile, segmented by mobile and desktop. Staging has no field data. Lab results tell you whether a template is likely to pass; the verdict comes in stage six.

The Webflow SEO Checklist on this site lists the platform-specific settings behind items 29 to 34 for Webflow builds.

Stage five: launch day

Google suggests timing a move to coincide with lower traffic, including recurring weekday dips. Launch early in the week, with a working day left for fixes.

Item 44 takes a minute. GA4 annotations carry a title of up to 60 characters and a description of up to 150, and appear on every report with a line graph. Six months from now, nobody will remember the launch date. The chart will.

Stage six: the 30-day watch against the baseline

Google says a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move after a change of URLs, and larger sites take longer. The watch below compares the new site against the stage one baseline, not against the week before launch. For the crawl-level checks that sit alongside it, see the 30-day watch table in our migration post named above.

Use the same weekdays. Compare Monday with Monday, and the same weeks last year where you have them, so an ordinary weekly pattern is not read as a redesign effect.

Look for patterns. A dip across every page in the first fortnight is usually recrawling. A dip on one template or on the pages whose URLs changed is more likely a defect, and items 30 and 31 tell you where to look.

Leave the redirects alone. Google advises keeping them for at least a year. Day 30 is a review, not a clean-up.

How to use this checklist

Copy the six tables into one sheet, add an owner and a date column, and do not start stage three until items 1 to 19 are done. Items 2 to 6 take an afternoon and cannot be done later. Items 15 and 16 take the longest and decide most of the SEO outcome. Items 45 to 52 are the only proof the redesign worked.

At Octo we build marketing sites in Webflow on a four-week process, and as a white-label partner to Web Tonic we shipped more than 20 Webflow sites in twelve months, at two to three weeks each. On that schedule we would run stage one in the first days of week one, because the exports are quick and the retention setting needs to be changed before anyone starts arguing about the homepage. If you are planning a redesign, our marketing websites service page explains how we scope it.