A real scenario: a company relaunches its website after four months of work. The new site looks great. Two months later, organic traffic is down 40 percent. Three blog posts that were quietly driving most inquiries have new URLs with no redirects. A service page ranking on page one has been rewritten and dropped off entirely.
Nobody broke anything on purpose. Nobody audited what was working before they started.
Before a single wireframe is drawn, run these four audits. They take less time than fixing the damage after launch.
Plain Terms (Quick Reference)
- 301 redirect — Tells browsers and search engines a page has moved to a new URL, preserving its ranking value
- Organic traffic — Visitors arriving from search engines without clicking a paid ad
- Conversion rate — The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action: form fill, purchase, inquiry
- Crawl — How search engines discover and index pages on your site
1. The SEO Audit
Document this before anything changes:
- Every URL receiving organic traffic, even low volumes
- Keywords each page ranks for in the top 20 positions
- Pages with inbound backlinks from external sites
- Current title tags, H1 headings, and meta descriptions on ranking pages Why it matters:
If a URL changes without a 301 redirect, its ranking history disappears. If a well-optimized H1 gets replaced with a cleaner but vaguer heading, rankings drop within weeks. Backlink targets that get deleted waste accumulated authority that took months to build.
A pre-redesign SEO audit is cheaper than recovering lost rankings after launch.
2. The Traffic and Analytics Audit
Export this before the project kicks off:
- Top 20 pages by organic traffic over the last 12 months
- Top 10 pages by conversion events
- Pages with high engagement: time on page, scroll depth, low bounce rate
- Exit pages: where users most commonly leave Why it matters:
High-traffic, high-conversion pages are not candidates for experimental redesigns. They are the benchmark the new design has to beat. It is also common to discover that the page driving the most conversions is not the one the team assumed was most important. That finding changes priorities for the entire project.
3. The Content Audit
Go through every page and make a decision:
- Migrate — High-performing content with traffic, rankings, or backlinks attached
- Consolidate — Thin pages covering similar topics, merged into one stronger page
- Improve — Pages worth keeping but with outdated or weak content
- Remove — Pages with no traffic, no backlinks, no ranking value, and no business purpose Every page that migrates without review is a page that may carry outdated information into the new site.
4. The Conversion Audit
Before replacing any form or CTA, document:
- Current conversion rates on every form on the site
- Heatmap and session recording data on high-traffic pages
- Where users drop off in multi-step flows
- Device split: what percentage of conversions come from mobile vs desktop Why it matters:
A contact form converting at 5 percent should not be replaced with a new design that has not been tested. It should be the floor the new design has to beat before going live. If mobile converts at 0.8 percent while desktop converts at 4 percent, the redesign has a clear priority that no amount of visual polish will fix without addressing it directly.
The One Document That Should Travel With the Project
Combine all four audits into a single reference document:
- URLs that must be preserved or redirected, with specific destinations
- Pages that must not be significantly altered without sign-off
- Conversion benchmarks the new site must hit within 60 days of launch
- A PageSpeed floor the new site must achieve before go-live
- Content migration decisions: migrate, consolidate, improve, or remove Without this, the team building the new site has no map of what made the old one valuable. With it, success has a definition beyond how it looks on launch day.
If you are planning a redesign and want the audit and build handled together, web redesign and development done with pre-launch groundwork protects the organic and conversion value you have already built.
What did your last redesign break that you did not expect? Was it caught before launch or after?
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