A Website Redesign Checklist Built for Enterprise Teams

Most website projects don't fail at launch. They fail months earlier, in a kickoff meeting where nobody wrote down who approves what, which business outcome the site exists to move, or which competitor sites the team actually wants to outperform. By the time those questions surface, the design is half built and the budget is half spent.

We built The Site Summit to settle those questions first. It is a free website redesign checklist and workbook that walks your team through nine chapters of planning before a single wireframe gets drawn. Fill it in, hand it to your project leads, and your design, development, and content teams start from the same blueprint instead of from a stack of assumptions.

Why website projects stall before they start

The guide opens with three patterns we see again and again on enterprise projects.

The first is the aesthetic trap: investing in visual polish without grounding it in what your audience is actually trying to do. The second is the vanity metric loop, where teams celebrate clicks and traffic while the numbers that matter to leadership, such as conversions, qualified pipeline, and revenue, stay flat. The third is structural fragility, a site foundation that looks fine at launch but cannot scale as your goals and KPIs grow.

A good website redesign checklist exists to break those patterns. Each question in the workbook forces a decision that would otherwise get made by default, usually by whoever speaks loudest in the room.

What's inside The Site Summit

The workbook is organized as a climb, with nine chapters that build on each other.

1. Basics

Define the mission, technical constraints, and business objectives behind the project. This is where you set the timeline and budget, list who is involved, and assign each person a role, so your agency knows exactly who approves updates as the work progresses.

2. Strategy

Move from marketing guesswork to a roadmap built on KPIs. You will document why you need a new website, who it is designed for, which actions you want visitors to take, what a new customer is worth, and how you will measure success.

3. Competition

Audit the digital landscape. List your top competitors, name your real strengths and weaknesses, and capture why customers choose you, and why prospects sometimes don't.

4. Design

Replace gut feelings with a visual identity built around specific goals. You will choose the adjectives that describe your ideal site, note which brand standards must carry over, and collect examples of sites you admire both inside and outside your industry.

5. User Experience

Map the path your customers will take. The chapter covers navigation style, site map status, top-level pages, video, animation, and how much of your traffic you expect on mobile.

6. Development

Establish the technical requirements early: your preferred CMS, the sections of the site that will be updated regularly, the applications that need to integrate, and which social channels belong on the site.

7. Content

Decide how your content will be developed, what research and assets need to be shared with a copywriter, what tone fits your brand, and which words and phrases belong on the site, or stay off it. If your content strategy is still unsettled, our guide to content strategy problems to fix before hiring is a useful companion.

8. Search Engine Optimization

Build the keyword and metadata framework before launch rather than after. The chapter prompts you to document current SEO efforts, required tools, redirect handling from your old site, and plans for paid search and content marketing.

9. Launch

Run a disciplined pre-launch checklist: how the DNS will be repointed, who manages and hosts the site, which ongoing server services you need, and how you will promote the new site once it is live.

How to use it with your team

A few habits make the workbook far more useful than filling it out alone.

Start with the people page, then complete the Strategy and Competition chapters in a working session with the stakeholders who own revenue and brand. Those chapters tend to surface disagreements, and it is much cheaper to resolve them on paper than in a design review.

Hand the finished workbook to every agency or internal team you are considering. A vendor who reads it closely and pushes back on your answers is showing you how they will behave during the project. If you are still comparing partners, our list of signs a B2B agency can handle enterprise complexity pairs well with it.

Revisit your answers when scope changes. The workbook is meant to be a living reference, so when a new stakeholder or requirement appears, check it against what you wrote at the start.

Who it's for

The Site Summit is written for marketing leaders, digital product owners, and business owners preparing a redesign, replatform, or new site build, especially on teams where several departments have a say. It works whether you plan to hire an agency, build in-house, or run a hybrid. If you are weighing how design decisions affect revenue, our piece on how UX improves ecommerce sales shows what is at stake.

Get the workbook

You can download The Site Summit from our resource library. Work through it with your team, and you will have a clear brief for any web development or web design partner you bring in.

If you would rather walk through your answers with someone who has run these projects at enterprise scale, book a strategy session with our team. We will review your workbook, flag the gaps, and map a plan for the climb ahead.