Your website has probably been working for your business longer than you realise, greeting strangers, answering questions late at night and passing enquiries to your inbox while you were with customers. Wanting to give it a fresh look shows that you care how your business is seen, and that is a good place to begin.
Before design work starts, a website developer in Melbourne will often suggest reviewing what sits behind the design, because some problems live in the structure, content and settings. A new layout will not remove them. The ten checks below move from planning, to the site itself, to measurement.
1. Set Clear Goals for the New Website
Every redesign needs a purpose. Phone calls, quote requests, online sales and bookings each call for a different page structure, so a vague goal leaves designers guessing. Write down one main goal and one or two supporting goals, then attach a target to each, such as thirty enquiries a month.
2. Speed Up Your Pages
Oversized images, heavy plugins and low-cost hosting cause much of the slow loading on business sites, and a new design will not fix any of them. Google’s Core Web Vitals set the benchmarks for a good experience: main content loading within 2.5 seconds, responses to a tap or click within 200 milliseconds, and a layout shift score of 0.1 or less. Test your current pages against those figures first.
3. Repair Broken Links and Dead Pages
Dead links frustrate visitors and waste the time search engine crawlers spend on your site. A free crawling tool can list the errors for you. Record three things:
- Each live URL
- Each URL returning a 404 error
- Pages that other pages link to
Keeping this list on file saves time at launch.
4. Update Outdated and Thin Content
Pages written years ago often describe services that have changed or prices that no longer apply. Mark each page as keep, update or delete. A plumbing company, for instance, may find three near-identical suburban pages saying the same thing, and merging them into one strong page is cleaner than moving three weak ones into a new design.
5. Test the Mobile Experience
Open your site on a phone and try to complete your main goal. Tiny buttons, text that needs zooming and awkward forms point to structural problems that a new colour scheme will not repair. A website developer in Melbourne would usually test on several devices, so check both Android and iPhone, since each can behave differently.
6. Strengthen Your Calls to Action
Vague buttons such as “Submit” or “Click here” give visitors little direction, while “Request a quote” or “Book a site visit” states what happens next. A cafe owner, for example, might replace a generic “Contact” button on the catering page with “Get a catering quote”. Each page should lead to one clear next step.
7. Close Accessibility Gaps
Low-contrast text, images without descriptions and forms without labels shut some visitors out. The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for standard text at level AA, a figure that is easy to check with a free contrast tool. Fixing these faults during design usually costs less than correcting them after launch.
8. Protect Your Search Rankings
The current URLs of your site carry its ranking history, so export your top landing pages and rankings before anything changes. Google’s guidance on moving a site states that when addresses change, each old URL should permanently redirect to its new equivalent so search engines can transfer ranking signals. Without those redirects, traffic can drop after launch even when the new site looks better.
9. Check Security and Hosting
Confirm that the site uses HTTPS, that software and plugins are current, and that regular backups exist. An outdated plugin can give attackers an entry point, and a redesign built on top of it inherits that risk. Review the hosting plan as well, because a plan that struggles with today’s traffic will struggle more with a richer design.
10. Verify Your Tracking and Analytics
Incorrect analytics setup makes it hard to judge whether the redesign worked. Check that form submissions, phone clicks and purchases are recorded as conversions. Then save a report covering the past twelve months of traffic and leads, which gives you a fair comparison once the new site is live.
Winding Words
Once the checks are done, put your findings together in one brief for your web design team. Include your written goals, the saved reports and the pages that earn the most enquiries, along with a few sites you admire. A brief this specific can shorten the design phase and reduce revisions. It is also worth agreeing on a launch checklist and a date for reviewing results.
Planning a redesign and unsure where to begin? Our team at Make My Website can review your current site and help you set priorities before design work starts.
