Website relaunch checklist: 12 points against nasty surprises

A relaunch is like renovating a house while it stays open for business: the visible part usually succeeds, what gets lost is the invisible. These twelve points make sure the new website does not launch with a crash.

Before the project

1. Set the goal, one sentence. “The new website should …”, bring more enquiries? Be found better? Finally be maintainable? Without this goal, the relaunch turns into a matter of taste.

2. Content inventory. A list of all pages with an honest verdict: keep, revise, cut. While you are at it, check which pages actually have visitors, often five pages carry ninety percent of the traffic.

3. Build the address list. Document every existing page address. This list is worth gold, see point 8.

4. Ownership check. Domain, access credentials, content: what belongs to you, what to the old provider? Clear this up before cancelling the old contract, here is the guide: Who owns your website?

During the project

5. Structure before design. First the question “which pages, in which order, for which visitors?”, then colours and images. The best looks cannot rescue a confusing structure (how order rescues a broad offering is shown by the Alianto project).

6. Produce content in parallel. Text and images are the most common cause of delay. Start on them on day one, not when “the design is done”.

7. Check mobile first. The majority of your visitors come from a phone. Every review round begins on the phone, not on the large screen.

8. Redirect plan. The most important invisible point: every old address (the list from point 3) gets a permanent redirect to its new counterpart. Without it you lose Google rankings and every link ever placed, details in the migration article.

On go-live day

9. Test forms and functions, for real. Actually submit every form once and check that the message arrives. The classic among relaunch mishaps: the lovely new site collects enquiries for two weeks that nobody receives.

10. No day without a website. The old site stays online until the new one demonstrably works. Switch over outside business hours.

11. Let Google know. Submit the new page overview to Google (keyword Search Console), so changes are picked up faster.

12. Watch for two weeks. Do the redirects work? Are enquiries arriving? Do the rankings hold? Only then is the relaunch finished, and only now do you cancel with the old provider.

The honest note

Points 1 to 4 you can and should handle yourself, nobody knows your content better. Points 5 to 12 are our craft: relaunches done so that nothing is lost on go-live day and the website belongs to you afterwards. Examples of real relaunch times can be found under projects; your framework is named by the price calculator.