Overhead view of project management documents and charts on a desk with a pencil.

17 October 2026

What Happens During a Website Redesign, Stage by Stage

“We’ve signed the quote. So what happens now?” It’s a fair question, and plenty of agencies answer it with a tidy diagram that hides the messy bits. A redesign runs through the same broad stages almost everywhere. Discovery, then structure and content, design, build, testing and launch. The names change from one agency to the next. The order rarely does. So let’s walk through each stage and what you’ll be asked to do. We’ll flag where projects tend to stall as well. That’s usually the bit people wish they’d known.

In brief

Delays usually come from content and sign-offs. The code is rarely the hold-up.
You’ll see a design long before you can click on anything, and that’s normal.
Testing means real phones and every single form.
Launch day isn’t the end. Google can take weeks to settle on your new addresses, so keep watching.

Discovery, or working out what’s actually wrong

Picture a training company whose course pages look fine but whose booking enquiries have quietly tailed off. Before anybody opens a design tool, someone needs to find out why. That’s discovery. It’s a few conversations and a good poke around the existing site, its analytics and its Search Console data, to pin down what the business needs the site to do and what’s getting in the way.

You’ll be asked who your customers are and what they ask before they buy. Which pages earn their keep? Which ones has nobody looked at in a year? If you’ve already put a brief together this goes much faster, and our article on how to write a website brief covers what belongs in one. What comes out of discovery is usually a short document with the goals, the must-have features and anything the site has to talk to, like a booking system or a CRM.

Don’t skip it to save a few quid. A redesign that starts with “make it look more modern” tends to end with a prettier version of the same problems.

Structure and content, the slow bit everyone wants to rush

Next comes the sitemap. That’s just the list of pages and how they’re grouped, but it decides your menus, your templates and a fair chunk of how search engines understand the site. A hotel might land on rooms, dining, weddings and offers. A precision engineering firm could need capabilities, industries served and downloadable spec sheets, because a buyer and an engineer come looking for very different things. There’s more on the thinking behind this in our piece on planning your website structure before design starts.

Then the words. This is where projects slip. Copy that was “nearly done” in the first week is somehow still nearly done a month later. Google’s guidance on helpful content says its systems are built to favour helpful, reliable information created to benefit people, and it asks you to think hard about why each page exists. That’s a handy filter for a redesign. If a page doesn’t help a customer make up their mind, merge it into something else or drop it. Just make a note of its old address, because you’ll need it later.

Designers would much rather work with real copy. Dummy text hides problems. A layout that looks clean with three short lines falls over the moment the real service description runs to six paragraphs.

Design, where you finally see something

Design usually starts with the pages that matter most, typically the home page and a standard service or product page, before the look gets rolled out to everything else. You’ll probably see static mock-ups first. They’re pictures of pages. Nothing clicks yet.

Feedback works best when it’s specific. “Can the phone number sit in the header on mobile?” gets you much further than “it needs more pop”. Look at the phone version first, too. Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking, so anything missing on a phone is missing as far as Google’s concerned. Agree up front how many rounds of changes the quote includes. It saves an awkward conversation later.

Accessibility belongs at this stage as well, because changing a colour or a button size in a mock-up takes minutes. WCAG 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023, and Level AA is the sensible target for a business website. A couple of the newer checks are easy to spot early. Things people tap or click should generally be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or have enough space around them (there are some exceptions). And nobody should have to type the same information twice in the same process (again, with a few exceptions).

The build and the staging site

Once the designs are signed off, the developer builds the site on a staging copy. It’s a private version on a separate address where you can click about without the public seeing it. A charity might use this stage to check its donation page hands over to the right payment provider. A physio clinic will want to see its online booking tool actually working inside the new pages.

Keep that staging site private. Google’s own advice for content you don’t want in search is to put it behind a password. Some developers also block crawling while they work, and that’s fine as long as somebody remembers to lift the block before launch. Forget, and a brand-new site can sit there invisible to Google.

This is also when your content goes in. You’ll be less busy, but expect questions. Where should enquiry emails go? Who on your team needs a login? Ask for training before launch while the developer still has the whole thing fresh in their head.

Testing, which always takes longer than planned

Testing is where corners get cut, usually because the launch date is creeping up. Don’t let it happen. Check pages on actual phones and in more than one browser. Fill in every form and make sure the email lands in the right inbox, and not in spam. An online shop needs test orders run all the way through to the payment confirmation. Our post on website forms that work properly has a fuller list of form checks.

Speed gets tested too. Google’s Core Web Vitals set three targets for real visits. The main content should appear within 2.5 seconds, the page should react to a tap or click within 200 milliseconds, and the layout shift score should stay at 0.1 or below. They’re judged at the 75th percentile of page loads, so a quick result on your office broadband doesn’t prove a great deal.

Then there’s the redirect map. Every old page address needs pointing at its new home. Test those redirects before anybody flips the switch, then again as the new site goes live. Google’s site move docs treat testing them as a core step of the move.

Launch day and the weeks after

Launch itself is often a bit of an anticlimax. The domain gets pointed at the new site, the redirects go live and somebody clicks through the main pages to make sure nothing’s fallen over. Pick your moment, though. Google suggests timing a move for when traffic is lower, so a wedding venue probably shouldn’t switch over just as next summer’s bookings are coming in.

After that you wait, and watch. For a medium-sized site, Google says it can take a few weeks or more before it gradually starts showing the new URLs, and bigger sites take longer still. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console. Update the internal links so they point straight at the new addresses. Keep the redirects in place for as long as possible, which Google puts at generally at least a year. Our article on moving to a new website without losing your Google rankings goes through those checks properly.

Watch enquiries as closely as traffic. If the phone goes quiet in the first fortnight, the cause is often something small. A form still sending to an old email address. A phone number you can’t tap on a mobile. Both take minutes to fix, as long as someone’s looking.

Planning a redesign of your own

If you’d like the wider picture before you commit to anything, our guide to planning a business website from first idea to launch covers goals, briefs, platforms and quotes as well. Our website redesign service follows the stages above, and it sits alongside the rest of our website design work for businesses. Talk to us about where your site is now, and we’ll tell you whether it needs the full treatment or whether a smaller set of fixes would do the job.

Keep reading

Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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