Website planning
What to keep before a website redesign
A practical page-by-page review to decide what to keep, update, combine, or retire.
Open your current website and list its pages before approving a redesign. Check the navigation, footer, and page list in your website editor. Add downloadable documents and pages linked from ads or customer emails. Those links can lead people to pages they will not find through the main menu.
For each address, write the customer question the page answers. “Can you repair my type of equipment?” gives you something to assess. “Services page” only repeats the page label.
Give each page a decision and a reason
Use a spreadsheet or shared document with columns for the current address, customer question, observed issue, decision, owner, review date, and planned address. Open each page as you complete its row. Follow its main link and record a specific defect, such as an expired offer, a booking button for a discontinued service, or location details that need confirmation. Assign uncertain facts to someone who can verify them.
Choose a decision that tells the person rebuilding the site what to do:
Keep the page if its information is accurate and it still helps with a customer task.
Update it if the task matters but some details or the next step need work.
Combine it with another page if both answer much the same question and their useful information can sit together.
Retire it if its purpose has ended. Check whether any information needs to remain available and what should happen to the address. Ask the person responsible to review legal, privacy, or contractual material.
An old publication date alone does not settle the decision. A useful preparation guide may need only a corrected phone number, while a recently published promotion may already have ended.
GOV.UK’s content guidance recommends checking whether content is useful and findable, then addressing problems such as errors or outdated information. This is a useful review principle for a business site. The guidance describes government publishing, not a private-sector requirement. Manage existing GOV.UK content
Review related pages together
Here is a hypothetical repair-business inventory:
| Current page | Observed issue | Decision |
|---|---|---|
Repair services | Lists equipment the business still repairs | Keep after the service manager confirms the list |
Workshop services | Repeats that list but includes useful drop-off instructions | Combine the instructions with the repair page |
Discount week | The promotion has ended | Retire after checking whether customers still need its terms |
Before your appointment | Instructions are useful, but the phone number is old | Update the number and check the appointment link |
When combining pages, put useful information in its planned destination before retiring the old page. Note where it went in the inventory. For the repair pages, that means moving the drop-off instructions onto the repair services page and checking that customers can still find them.
Choose a small group of related pages and review them with the person who handles customer questions. Ask which details customers often need explained. Their answers may point to information worth keeping that is easy to overlook when reviewing pages on a screen.
Use evidence and record gaps
If you have analytics, record the date range you reviewed and what the reports show. Check customer inquiries and links in emails or printed materials too. A page with little recorded activity may still contain information a small group of existing customers needs.
When evidence is incomplete, mark the row “unknown” and assign someone to investigate. Missing data does not establish that a page is unused.
Decide where changed addresses will go
Keep a current-to-planned-address mapping for every page that will move, combine, or retire. Google recommends mapping old URLs to their new destinations when URLs change, and warns against redirecting many unrelated old URLs to the homepage. If content is removed without a suitable replacement, its address may need to return a 404 or 410 response. Ask your developer to review the mapping and confirm how each changed address will behave. Google’s guidance on site moves with URL changes
Treat this as a planning task, not an instruction to remove live pages while making the inventory. Keep the destination decision beside the content decision so the person implementing the change can see both.
Check the plan before launch
Use the inventory to resolve details that could hold up the rebuild: a service list awaiting confirmation, a price awaiting approval, or a booking destination that has not been chosen. Give each item an owner and a date.
When the new site is ready for review, open every retained or replacement page and check the issue recorded in its row. Ask the developer to demonstrate what happens when someone follows each changed old link. Mark the row complete after checking both the content decision and address handling.
Before approving the redesign, make sure each page has a clear decision and an owner, and that every changed address has a planned destination or response.