What to fix before you redesign your small business website

Write down the job.

Name the one thing a visitor should do next: call, book, request a quote, fill in the form. Then do it page by page.

• One primary action per page.
• One sentence on who the page is for.
• If you can’t write that sentence, a new layout won’t write it for you.

Record a baseline.

You can’t prove a redesign worked without a before. Write these down now.

• Core Web Vitals from PageSpeed Insights, mobile first.
• Where inquiries come from today — the form, the phone, email — and roughly how many.
• Which pages people actually land on. Your analytics or Search Console will show it.

If speed is the main complaint, start with our website speed checklist. Some of it can be fixed without a redesign.

Google’s “good” thresholds: web.dev/articles/vitals.

Test the contact path yourself.

Submit your own form. Confirm the message lands, in an inbox someone reads, and note how long a reply takes. Call the number in the header.

A redesign can’t fix a form that sends to nowhere. We send a real test submission after every deploy of our own site, for exactly this reason.

Fix the message before the visuals.

Design wraps the words. If the words are vague, the design will be too.

• In the first screen: what you do, who it’s for, where you work, and the next step.
• Cut the paragraphs that describe your values and not your service.
• Draft the copy, or at least the outline, before you approve a visual direction.

Inventory every page and URL.

List every page on the current site. Mark each one keep, merge or cut.

• Keep the URLs that already get traffic where you can.
• Map every changed URL to its new home with a server-side permanent (301) redirect.
• Don’t point everything at the homepage. Send each old page to the page that replaced it.
• Leave the redirects in place — Google advises at least a year.

Source: Google Search Central, Site moves with URL changes.

Set an accessibility baseline.

Check the basics now, so the new site is built to them from the start.

• Text contrast: at least 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text.
• Alt text on images that carry meaning.
• Keyboard: tab through the menu and the form without a mouse.
• Form fields with visible labels, not placeholder text alone.

Skip the overlay widgets. Accessibility is fixed in the code, not on top of it.

Contrast: WCAG 2.2, success criterion 1.4.3, Level AA — w3.org.

Find out what you own.

Before anything moves, know who holds the keys.

• The domain: which registrar, whose login.
• The hosting and the site builder or CMS.
• Analytics, Search Console, and the inbox the form sends to.
• Whether you can export your content if you leave the platform.

If the answer to the last one is no, that’s part of the redesign decision. You own everything we build — it’s one of our commitments.

Decide: fix or redesign.

Read your list back.

• If it’s mostly speed, copy and a broken form, you may not need a redesign. That’s optimization work.
• If the structure, the message and the platform are all working against you, redesign — and this list becomes the brief.