What a website redesign should include

Ask three agencies what a website redesign includes and you will get three lists of deliverables: wireframes, mockups, a style guide, a CMS, a launch. They are not wrong, but they are the wrong shape. A deliverable is what you get handed. What a redesign has to include is what has to be settled, and most of it is settled before anyone opens a design tool.

Here are the seven, in the order they happen. The first and the sixth are the two most proposals leave out, and they are the two that decide whether the new site costs you what the old one earned.

1. An audit of what already works

Before anything is drawn, somebody has to list which pages bring you visitors and enquiries today, which search terms they arrive on, and which links from other sites point at them. That list is the thing a redesign most often destroys by accident: a page gets renamed, merged or dropped, its address changes, and the traffic it had goes with it. Search Console gives you the list in an afternoon. If a proposal does not mention it, ask where it is. A redesign should not cost you the rankings you already have.

2. The structure

Which pages exist, what each one is for, and how a visitor moves between them. For a B2B company this is usually fewer pages than you have now, written for the people who buy rather than the departments that exist. The structure is decided by what each page has to say, which is why the next part comes before the design, not after.

3. The content

A redesign is a content project before it is a design project. The headline on a page decides the layout of that page; a layout drawn before the headline is a template waiting for words that never quite fit. The copy should be written, or at least drafted, before the visual design starts, by whoever is doing the redesign, with you correcting the facts and the voice. "Client to supply copy" in a proposal is the line that adds three months to a timeline.

4. The design system

Not a set of page designs: a set of parts (type, colour, spacing, buttons, cards, sections) with rules for how they combine, so that the twentieth page looks like the first and the marketing team can build the twenty-first without a designer. If the proposal shows you ten page mockups and no system, you are buying ten pages.

5. The build

The site, in a CMS your team can run. Ask who will build it and whether the people designing it have built the last one. A design handed to a separate build team loses something at every handover, and the thing it loses is usually the detail that made the design work.

6. The migration

Every old address that had traffic or links points at its new home, permanently, before launch. Every page that has been merged or dropped redirects to the page that replaced it. The sitemap is submitted, and the list from part one is checked against the new site in Search Console in the first week. This is unglamorous and it is the difference between a launch and a loss.

7. The handover

Documented components, the CMS set up so marketing can publish without asking, a short list of what to measure, and fixes in the first weeks as part of the job. Then a decision: does the studio stay on for the pages and features that come next, or is the system good enough that you do not need them to?

What it does not need to include

A new logo, unless the brand is the problem. A blog "to get started", unless somebody is going to write it. Animations that nobody asked for. A pricing page, unless you are prepared to put numbers on it. The list above is long enough; the way to keep a redesign on time is to refuse the things that are not on it.

How long and how much

Three to four months is normal for a B2B site of ten to twenty pages done this way; Servebolt was three months from concept to live. On cost, we have written the bands honestly in how much a website costs in the UK. If you want the number for your site, the brief writer takes four questions and about a minute, and the reply comes with a price and a date.