Good website redesign goals name a number you can read before launch and again 90 days after it. "Faster" is not a goal; "LCP under 2.5 seconds at the 75th percentile on mobile" is, because Google's web.dev guidance defines that threshold and the HTTP Archive's 2024 Web Almanac found only 43% of mobile sites had good Core Web Vitals across all three metrics.
Below are twelve goals B2B teams set for a redesign, each with its metric, the tool that reports it and the baseline to save first. Thresholds come from Google, the W3C, WebAIM and the other publishers listed at the end.
Why most redesign goals fail before launch
Most redesign briefs open with three goals: modernise the brand, improve the user experience, generate more leads. None of them can fail, which is the problem. Nobody can say in month three whether the project worked. Nielsen Norman Group's guidance on UX benchmarking makes the same point: "better" only means something against a reference point measured the same way before and after.
The fix is mechanical. Every goal gets a metric two people would compute the same way, a tool that reports it (GA4, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, the CRM or a usability test), a baseline saved somewhere that survives the launch, and a target range with a read date: day 30 for technical goals, day 90 for anything involving search or pipeline. The vague goal can stay in the brief as the reason for the project; the measurable version underneath it is what gets reported.
If you are still deciding whether the site needs a redesign at all, our guide on whether to rebuild, redesign or refresh covers that call. This page assumes the decision is made and the goals are next.
12 website redesign goals and the metric behind each
| # | Goal | Metric | Where to read it | Baseline window |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | More qualified demo or contact requests | Demo request key event rate per session | GA4 key events, CRM | 90 days |
| 2 | Keep organic traffic through the move | Clicks to the top 50 landing pages | Search Console | 3 to 12 months |
| 3 | Pass Core Web Vitals | LCP, INP and CLS at the 75th percentile | PageSpeed Insights, CrUX | Last full month |
| 4 | Faster key templates | LCP of home, pricing and product templates | CrUX, lab tests | Last full month |
| 5 | More engaged visits | GA4 engagement rate | GA4 | 90 days |
| 6 | Accessible templates | Automated WCAG 2.2 AA errors per template | WAVE, axe, manual check | One audit |
| 7 | Marketing can publish alone | Days from brief to live landing page | Project tracker | Last 5 pages |
| 8 | A clearer message | First-visit task success rate | Moderated or unmoderated test | 5 to 8 users |
| 9 | More pipeline from the website | Opportunities with a website first touch | CRM | Two quarters |
| 10 | Shorter paths to pricing or demo | Path completion from home to form | GA4 funnel exploration | 90 days |
| 11 | Cheaper paid leads | Landing page conversion rate by source | Ad platform, GA4 | 60 days |
| 12 | A site that stays current | Share of new pages built from existing sections | CMS, page inventory | Last 12 months |
Source: Octo Agency framework; thresholds from web.dev, W3C and Google Analytics Help, 2024 to 2026
Goals 1 and 2: leads in, rankings kept
1. More qualified demo or contact requests. Mark the form submission as a key event in GA4 and divide by sessions. Google's own help notes that you cannot mark page_view as a key event, because every page view would then count; create a specific event for the thank-you state instead. Then add the share of those requests that sales accepts, from the CRM: doubling form fills while halving the accepted share is not a win. For context on what a normal visitor-to-demo rate looks like, our demo request conversion rates benchmark collects the published medians.
2. Keep organic traffic through the move. This is a defensive goal and often the most valuable one. List the 50 pages that earn the most clicks in Search Console, map each to its new URL, and set the goal as "clicks to the mapped set within 10% of baseline by day 90". Google's site move guidance says that for medium-sized websites it can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to replace the old ones, with ranking fluctuations expected while Google recrawls. Read it at day 90, not day 7. Our website redesign checklist lists the redirect and crawl items that protect this goal.
Goals 3 and 4: speed you can prove
3. Pass Core Web Vitals. Google's thresholds are public and stable: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less. A page passes when it meets all three at the 75th percentile of real visits, across mobile and desktop. Write the goal as "all key templates pass on mobile field data by day 60", because field data comes from real visits and a fresh launch needs a few weeks of traffic before it reflects the new site.
The bar is lower than it sounds in practice. The HTTP Archive's 2024 Web Almanac found 43% of mobile sites had good Core Web Vitals with INP, up from 37% in 2023 and 31% in 2022. Passing still puts a site in the better half.
4. Faster key templates. For the templates that sell (home, pricing, product, demo), set a finer target such as "pricing template LCP from 3.4 seconds to under 2.0". Deloitte's 2020 study "Milliseconds Make Millions", commissioned by Google, found a 0.1 second mobile speed improvement went with an 8.4% rise in retail conversions and an 8.3% improvement in bounce rate on lead generation information pages. It is a vendor-commissioned study on consumer sites, so treat it as a direction, not a forecast for a B2B site.
Goals 5 and 6: engagement and access
5. More engaged visits. GA4 counts a session as engaged when it lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a key event or has two or more page views. Engagement rate is the share of sessions that qualify, and bounce rate is its inverse. It reacts within weeks, but a forced second click inflates it without helping anyone, so pair it with goal 1 rather than setting it alone.
6. Accessible templates. WebAIM's February 2026 analysis of the top one million home pages found detectable WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of them, up from 94.8% in 2025, with an average of 56.1 errors per page. Low-contrast text was the most common issue, on 83.9% of home pages, followed by missing image alt text at 53.1%. A redesign is the cheapest moment to fix this, because components are rebuilt anyway. Set the goal against WCAG 2.2 level AA, the current W3C Recommendation: "zero automated errors on every template, plus a keyboard and screen-reader pass on the main form". Automated tools only catch part of WCAG, so the manual pass belongs in the goal.
Goals 7 and 8: the team and the message
7. Marketing can publish alone. For many B2B teams this is the real reason for the redesign: every new landing page needs a developer. The metric is days from approved brief to a live page, measured on the last five pages built before the redesign and the first five after. A second metric is the count of developer tickets for content changes per month. We build marketing sites in Webflow largely for this reason, and our guide to a website your marketing team can edit covers what makes the difference in the build.
8. A clearer message. "Clearer positioning" sounds unmeasurable, but it is one of the easier goals to test. Give five to eight people who match your buyer the home page for a short, timed look, then ask what the company does and who it is for. Score each answer as right or wrong against a one-sentence answer key written before the test. Run it on the old site and the new design. The metric is the task success rate, one of the benchmark metrics Nielsen Norman Group lists. Small samples lack precision, but they expose a home page that three people in a row misread.
Goals 9, 10 and 11: pipeline, paths and paid traffic
9. More pipeline from the website. The goal sales cares about. Count opportunities created in a quarter where the first recorded touch was a website visit or form, and the value of that pipeline. It needs two quarters of baseline because B2B deal cycles are long, and consistent CRM source fields; if those are unreliable, use goal 1 until they are fixed.
10. Shorter paths to pricing or demo. Google's HEART framework, published by Kerry Rodden and colleagues at CHI 2010, describes a process for mapping product goals to user-centred metrics, and task success is the one that fits a marketing site best: did the visitor finish the path they started? Build a GA4 funnel exploration from home to pricing to demo form and set the goal on its completion rate, or on the median number of pages before the form.
11. Cheaper paid leads. If paid traffic lands on dedicated pages, include them in the redesign. Unbounce's 2024 conversion benchmark puts the median landing page conversion rate across all industries at 6.6%; compare your own pages by traffic source rather than against the headline. Then keep testing after launch. Optimizely's analysis of 173,000 experiments found only 12% produced a statistically significant improvement on the primary metric, so the goal should be "launch with a testable page system and run two tests a month", not "double conversion".
Goal 12: a site that does not need the next redesign so soon
Databox's 2024 survey found about 49% of responding companies had run a full redesign within the past two years, and the practitioners it quotes suggest every three to four years for tech companies and four to five for most other industries.
The metric is the share of new pages in the following year built entirely from existing sections in the CMS, without new design or code. A target of 80% or more means the component library was designed for how the team actually works. Read it at month six and month twelve.
How many goals, and who owns them
Twelve is a menu, not a target. Most redesigns need three to five: one commercial (1, 9 or 11), one protective (2), one technical (3 or 6) and one or two tied to why the project started.
Give each goal one owner who will read the number on the agreed date. Marketing usually owns 1, 5, 10 and 11; whoever runs SEO owns 2; the build team owns 3, 4 and 6; sales operations owns 9. Our website redesign process shows where the baseline and the 30-day watch sit in the six phases. On our own projects, including the USLege legal-tech redesign, goals are agreed in the first week of a four-week marketing-site process, before design.
What this means for your redesign brief
Write each goal as metric, tool, baseline, target range and read date, choose three to five of them, and save the baselines before the old site changes. Technical goals can usually be met by launch; commercial goals depend on traffic and sales, so give them 90 days and a range. Our marketing websites service page explains how we scope a redesign around goals like these.
