Website Redesign Checklist: 5 Steps to Audit & Evaluate Your Website

There are two ways to know your website needs a redesign:

1. When you know, you know.
2. Perform a thorough evaluation of your site’s technical and user-facing elements.

If you fall firmly in the former category, we can help with that.

If you fall in the latter category, we can also help with that.

Below, you will find a checklist you can use to self-audit your website. This will not only ensure that a redesign is needed but also lay the foundation for a well-planned and effective redesign.

A 5-Step Checklist for Auditing Your Website

A website redesign is about more than updating the look and feel of your site. There are lot of moving parts to a website, and a redesign is an opportunity to evaluate and improve them all.

Here are five areas to evaluate as part of a website audit:

1. Technical SEO Audit

A website with a solid technical foundation enables search engines to crawl, index, and rank your site effectively, paving the way for a healthy organic presence.

What you need to do:

• Run a site crawl using tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to identify broken links, duplicate content, and indexing issues.
• Check your site’s indexation status in Google Search Console to ensure critical pages are being indexed.
• Analyze site speed and performance with Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to identify areas for optimization.
• Evaluate mobile responsiveness to ensure your site is optimized for mobile-first indexing.

2. Content Audit & Analysis

Not only is content king, but it is the cornerstone of user engagement and SEO performance.

What you need to do:

• Assess content quality and relevance to determine if it aligns with user needs and business goals.
• Identify and remove duplicate content to prevent keyword cannibalization and improve ranking potential.
• Ensure content aligns with SEO best practices and is structured for readability and user intent.
• Review metadata for optimization and keyword alignment.

3. User Experience (UX) Evaluation

An intuitive and user-friendly design improves engagement and conversion rates.

What you need to do:

• Examine site navigation and user pathways to ensure visitors can easily find key information.
• Review design elements for consistency and branding to create a seamless experience across all pages.
• Analyze site architecture and internal linking to improve content discoverability and flow.
• Test interactive elements and forms to ensure they function correctly and enhance user experience.

4. Competitive Analysis

Evaluating your competitors’ websites will help you better understand where yours stands apart and where it may have fallen behind the competition.

What you need to do:

• Research competitor websites to identify successful design elements and engagement tactics.
• Identify areas for differentiation by highlighting unique value propositions and content strategies.
• Benchmark your site's performance against industry leaders to identify areas for improvement.

5. Website Performance Analytics

Website analytics are key to understanding how your website is performing, and a performance evaluation is an opportunity to rethink your KPIs and benchmark your metrics.

What you need to do:

• Benchmark current website metrics such as traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rates.
• Evaluate your key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine whether they are relevant to your goals and objectives as a business.
• Establish clear and measurable goals moving forward, with or without a redesign.
• Plan for continuous monitoring and optimization to refine performance based on data insights.

Lay the Groundwork for Your Website Redesign Strategy

A website redesign is about more than aesthetics — it’s about performance, user experience, and building a website that grows with your business. By following this checklist, you can ensure that your redesign aligns with strategic goals, enhances usability, and drives measurable results.

If you want to learn more about the website redesign process, let's chat.