You decided to redesign your website. Now you’re right at the moment before the website redesign should happen. And now you’re wondering: where do I actually start?
This is the part most people skip or underestimate, and it’s the part that makes the biggest difference to how a redesign process actually goes. What you do before the design work starts, the thinking, the gathering, the deciding, is what separates a redesign that feels intentional from one that drags on for months, costs more than expected, or ends up looking beautiful but not quite working effectively and the way you envisioned.
This guide covers everything worth doing in the preparation phase, whether you’re doing a DIY redesign with a new template or preparing to work with a designer on a custom website design experience crafted specifically for your audience. Some of it is practical, backing things up, gathering your assets, and auditing what you have. Some of it is strategic, getting clear on your goals, your audience, and what you actually want your new site to do for your business.
All of it is worth doing before you open a single design file.
Table of Contents
- Step One: Back Everything Up and Protect Your Current Site
- Step Two: Get Crystal Clear on What This Redesign Needs to Achieve
- Step Three: Get Specific About Who You’re Designing For
- Step Four: Audit and Organize Your Existing Content
- Step Five: Gather Every Asset You’ll Need
- Step Six: Make Your Key Strategic Decisions Before Website Redesign Begins
- Step Seven (If Working With a Designer): Prepare for the Process Ahead
- Your Pre-Redesign Checklist: Everything in One Place
- Key takeaway: Before Website Redesign – Now You’re Actually Ready
Step One: Back Everything Up and Protect Your Current Site
Before you change anything, you need a complete, restorable copy of your current website. It may sound obvious, although it’s the step that most people skip because it feels administrative rather than exciting, and it’s also the step that saves you when something goes wrong mid-redesign.
Things go wrong. Pages get accidentally deleted. Plugin conflicts cause layouts to break. A new theme overwrites settings you didn’t realize were tied to the old one. Having a clean backup of exactly how your site looked before you touched anything means you can always go back, with zero data loss, zero panic, and zero scrambling to recreate something from memory.
Create a full site backup
On WordPress, plugins like UpdraftPlus or All-in-One WP Migration let you create a complete backup of your site, files, database, everything, and download it to your computer or save it to cloud storage. Do this now, before any other step. If your hosting provider offers one-click backups (most do), use that too as a secondary copy. Having two backups in different locations is not overkill. It’s just sensible. And it can definitely save you sometimes. There’s no harm in making sure you’re fully safe and covered if anything goes awry.
Export your analytics data
Before anything changes, export a snapshot of your current Google Analytics data. You want a baseline, your current traffic numbers, your top-performing pages, your main traffic sources, your average session duration, and bounce rate, so you have something concrete to compare against after the redesign launches. This data also tells you what’s working on your current site, which is genuinely useful information to carry into a redesign rather than throwing everything out and starting from zero.
In GA4, go to Reports, pull your top landing pages for the last six to twelve months, and export to a spreadsheet. Note which pages are driving the most traffic and any that are ranking well in search. These are the pages you’ll want to be especially careful with during the redesign.
Make a list of all your current URLs
URL changes are one of the most common causes of SEO loss during a redesign. If a page moves from one address to another and you don’t redirect the old URL to the new one, any traffic or search ranking that page had built up simply disappears. Go through your site now and document every page URL. A simple spreadsheet works perfectly, just the page name and its current URL. You’ll use this later to set up redirects if anything changes. I do a bit of a more structured tracking sheet when I work on projects for my clients, but even tracking just the link and the title for simple sites is usually enough.
Step Two: Get Crystal Clear on What This Redesign Needs to Achieve
This is the step that determines whether your redesign succeeds or just looks different. A lot of websites get redesigned for aesthetic reasons. The old one felt dated; you wanted something fresh, and while aesthetics matter enormously, they’re not a goal. They’re an outcome. The goal is what you want your website to do for your business.
Getting clear on this before the website redesign starts means every decision, what pages to include, how to structure the navigation, where to put calls to action, how to write the copy, can be made against a real standard. Without it, decisions get made based on what looks good in the moment, and you end up with a beautiful site that doesn’t perform the way you hoped.
Define your primary conversion goal
What is the single most important thing you want a visitor to do when they come to your site? Not three things, not five, but one. Buy a template. Book a discovery call. Sign up for your email list. Inquire about custom design. Everything else on the site should support or lead toward that primary action. If you can’t name it clearly, your site won’t be able to guide visitors toward it clearly either.
Write it down explicitly: “The primary goal of this redesign is to increase [specific action] by making it easier for [specific audience] to [specific outcome].” That sentence should be the filter every design decision gets run through.
Identify what’s not working on your current site
A redesign is an opportunity to fix real problems, not just update the visual. Before you start, document specifically what isn’t working about your current site. Not vague feelings, but concrete observations. “Visitors aren’t clicking through to the shop.” “My services page doesn’t explain my packages clearly enough.” “People contact me asking questions that are already answered on the site, which means nobody’s reading it.” “My homepage doesn’t make it clear what I do within the first few seconds.”
These problem statements become the brief for your redesign. They tell you, or your designer, what the new site actually needs to solve.
Identify what is working and must be preserved
This is equally important and equally often overlooked. Your current site has things that are working, pages that rank well, content that gets shared, a lead magnet that converts, a portfolio layout that gets consistent compliments. Make a list of those things, too. The goal of a redesign is not to throw everything out. It’s to keep what works, fix what doesn’t, and elevate the whole.
Step Three: Get Specific About Who You’re Designing For
Every good website is designed for a specific person. Not everyone. Not a broad demographic. A specific person with a specific situation, specific questions, and a specific reason for landing on your site. The clearer you are about who that person is before your redesign begins, the more effectively every page can speak to them.
If you’ve been in business for a while, this isn’t a new exercise. You probably already know your ideal client well. But it’s worth revisiting before a redesign because your audience may have shifted since your last site was first launched. The clients you’re attracting now might be different from the clients you were targeting back then. If that’s true, your new site needs to reflect who you’re actually trying to reach today.
Write a clear picture of your ideal visitor
Spend 20 minutes writing a description of the person you most want landing on your website, their specific situation. What problem are they trying to solve? What are they unsure about? What would make them trust you quickly? What would make them leave without taking action? What words would they use to describe their own situation?
This description becomes the voice guide for your copy and the filter for your design decisions. When you’re deciding whether a page section earns its place, the question is: does this help my ideal visitor move closer to trusting me and taking action, or does it slow them down? Always work your way up from the problem to the solution.
Think about where they come from
Are most of your visitors finding you through Google search, Pinterest, Instagram, referrals, or a combination? This matters for how you structure your site because different traffic sources arrive with different levels of context. Someone who finds you through a Google search for a specific service already has intent and some information. Someone who clicks through from an Instagram post may have never heard of you before and needs more orientation.
If Pinterest or Instagram is a major source of traffic for you, think about what those visitors see first and whether your homepage gives them enough context to understand what you do and who you do it for without already knowing your name.
Step Four: Audit and Organize Your Existing Content
One of the most time-consuming parts of a website redesign, whether DIY or a custom one, is dealing with content. What pages do you need? What copy do you keep? What needs to be rewritten from scratch? What’s outdated and should be removed entirely? Doing this audit before design starts saves enormous time later and prevents the common situation where the design is ready, but you’re still writing copy weeks after launch was supposed to happen.
Map out every page your new site needs
Create a simple sitemap, a list of every page your redesigned site will include. Don’t start with what you have; start with what you need. What does your business actually require a page for? Home, about, services or shop, portfolio or work samples, blog, contact, and any specific landing pages for products or lead magnets. Then compare that list to what you currently have and identify what’s being kept, what’s being removed, what’s being merged, and what’s new.
Decide what copy gets rewritten vs. kept
Go through the copy on your most important pages and make an honest assessment. Does it sound like you right now? Does it speak to your current ideal client? Does it reflect what you currently offer? If the answer to any of those is no, mark it for a full rewrite. If the answer is mostly yes with some areas that need updating, mark it for revision.
Be realistic about your timeline here. Rewriting copy takes longer than most people expect, especially when you’re also doing everything else a redesign requires. If you know copy is going to be a bottleneck, start writing before the design work begins rather than waiting until everything else is done.
Flag the blog posts and pages that are ranking in search
Any page that currently ranks in search results has built up some level of trust with Google. That trust is attached to the URL, the page title, and the content. When you redesign, treat these pages with extra care, keep the URL the same if possible, preserve the core content, and if you do rewrite the copy, keep the primary topic and keywords intact. Redesigning a page that ranks well and accidentally losing that ranking is one of the most common and most avoidable mistakes in a website redesign.
Step Five: Gather Every Asset You’ll Need
A redesign stalls most often not because of design problems but because assets aren’t ready. The logo isn’t in the right format. The photos aren’t updated yet. The brand colors are remembered but not documented anywhere with the actual hex codes. Getting all of this organized before you start saves you from the experience of being halfway through a design and having to stop because something you need doesn’t exist yet.
Your brand assets
Pull together everything related to your brand identity and put it in one folder:
- Logo files in multiple formats – you’ll need SVG or PNG with a transparent background at a minimum, and ideally both a primary version and a simplified version for small sizes like favicons
- Brand colors as exact hex codes – not just “dusty pink” but the specific code (#C9A89B, for example)
- Font names and weights – the exact names of every typeface in your brand, including which weight you use for headings vs. body text
- Any brand guidelines document, if you have one
If any of these don’t exist yet, particularly the hex codes and font names, now is the time to document them. A redesign is a much smoother process when your brand identity is clearly defined and documented rather than existing only in your head or scattered across different files.
Your photography and visual content
Go through every photo currently on your site and decide honestly: does this still represent my brand and my work the way I want to be represented? If you’ve had a brand photoshoot since your last design, make sure those images are organized, edited, and ready to use. If you haven’t had one recently and your photography is feeling dated, this is worth addressing before the redesign rather than launching with a new design built around old images.
Also, gather any portfolio images, work samples, or project photos you want to feature. Make sure they’re saved at quality resolution for the web while also compressed and optimized for web use. If your image files are 10MB each, they’ll slow your new site down just as much as they slowed your old one. Tools like ShortPixel or TinyPNG let you compress images significantly without noticeable quality loss.
Your written content and documents
Gather any PDFs, downloads, or documents that are linked from your current site and that you’ll want to carry over to the new one. Check that each is current, well-formatted, and named properly. This is a good time to apply the SEO-friendly file naming practices covered in our upcoming guide on adding PDFs to WordPress [link to PDF article] if you haven’t done so already.
Your integrations and third-party tool list
Make a list of every third-party tool that is currently connected to your website: your email marketing platform, booking system, shop or payment processor, analytics tools, chat widget, social media feeds, and anything else. During the redesign, some of these connections will need to be verified or reconnected. Having this list upfront means nothing gets accidentally missed, and you don’t discover two weeks after launch that your email sign-up form stopped working.
Step Six: Make Your Key Strategic Decisions Before Website Redesign Begins
There are decisions that feel like design decisions but are actually strategic decisions. Making them before the design work starts prevents the most common and most frustrating type of redesign delay: stopping mid-build to figure out something that should have been figured out at the start.
Template or custom? And if a template, which one?
If you haven’t already decided whether you’re going the template route or working with a designer on a custom design, this decision needs to happen before anything else. They require completely different preparation, different timelines, and different types of involvement from you. If you’re still working through this decision, our guide on template vs. custom website design walks through exactly how to choose.
If you’re going with a template, choose it before you start gathering content and writing copy. The template you choose will determine your page structure, the types of sections available to you, and how your content needs to be organized. Trying to fit content written for one template structure into a different template is like trying to fit furniture from one apartment layout into a completely different floor plan.
Your navigation structure
Decide your navigation before the design begins, not during it. How many items will be in your main menu? What will they be called? Are there any pages that need a dropdown? What goes in the footer navigation vs. the main header? These decisions affect every page layout on your site, and changing your navigation structure partway through a design means reworking layouts on every page that’s already been built.
Keep your main navigation to five or six items maximum. Use clear, descriptive names over creative ones. And think about the journey you want visitors to take. Your navigation should guide them through that journey, not just list all the pages that exist.
Your lead magnet and email strategy
If growing your email list is part of your business strategy, and for most photographers and creative entrepreneurs it should be, decide before the redesign how and where opt-in forms will appear on your site. Will you have a dedicated landing page for your lead magnet? A pop-up? An embedded form in the footer, the sidebar, or within specific blog posts? Knowing this before design starts means these placements can be implemented into the structure intentionally rather than bolted on afterward.
Your SEO and URL strategy
If any page URLs are changing in the website redesign, because you’re reorganizing your site structure, renaming pages, or moving to a new platform, plan your redirects now, not after launch. A redirect map is a simple spreadsheet matching each old URL to its new destination. Every URL that changes without a redirect in place is a potential 404 error, a lost visitor, and a lost search ranking. Set this up before launch day, and you won’t have to scramble to fix it afterward.
Step Seven (If Working With a Designer): Prepare for the Process Ahead
Working with a designer on a custom website design experience is a collaborative process, and your preparation directly affects both the quality of the outcome and the flow and efficiency of the design experience. Designers can do their best work when clients come to them with a clear vision, not necessarily with all the answers, but with a genuine understanding of their business, their goals, and their audience.
Create a mood board or visual direction document
Before your first conversation with a designer, spend some time collecting visual references, websites, designs, photography styles, color palettes, and typography that feel aligned with where you want your brand to go. Pinterest is perfect for this. You don’t need to know exactly what you want; you need to be able to show the direction. Include examples of things you love and, equally usefully, things you definitely don’t want.
A good visual reference collection helps a designer understand your aesthetic instincts far more accurately than words alone. “I want something clean and feminine but not too soft” means something different to everyone. A collection of reference images shows exactly what those words mean to you.
Prepare a clear project brief
A brief doesn’t need to be a formal document. It can be a well-organized email or a simple Google Doc. It should cover: who your business is and what you do, who your ideal client is, what the redesign needs to achieve, what pages the new site needs, what you like and dislike about your current site, your timeline, and your budget range, if you have one. The more clearly you can communicate this upfront, the more accurate a designer’s proposal will be and the fewer rounds of revision you’ll need later. If you don’t have one, your chosen designer will probably get you a strategically designed questionnaire to find out what your specific needs for the project are. This is what I do when I work with clients on custom website design experience projects.
Understand your own role in the process
Custom design projects require real involvement from the client. You’ll need to review and give feedback on designs, provide copy for every page, supply images and brand assets, test the site before launch, and make decisions at various points throughout the project. The clients who get the best results from a custom website redesign are the ones who show up to the process prepared, responsive, and engaged.
Knowing this helps you reserve the time and mental energy the project actually needs, rather than discovering halfway through that you’ve underestimated your own involvement.
Your Pre-Redesign Checklist: Everything in One Place
Work through this before the design phase begins. Mark off each item as you go.
Protect and document what you have
- Full site backup created and saved in two locations
- Google Analytics data exported with key baseline metrics noted
- All current page URLs are documented in a spreadsheet
- Top-ranking and top-traffic pages identified and flagged for careful handling
Goals and strategy
- The primary conversion goal is written down clearly and specifically
- Current problems to solve are documented with specific examples
- What’s currently working and must be preserved gets identified
- Ideal visitor described specifically – situation, questions, needs
Content audit
- New sitemap created – every page the redesigned site needs
- Each page’s copy assessed: keep, revise, or rewrite from scratch
- Ranking pages flagged to preserve URL, content, and keyword focus
Assets gathered
- Logo files in SVG and transparent PNG formats
- Brand colors documented as exact hex codes
- Font names and weights documented
- Photography updated, edited, and organized
- All images optimized for web (compressed without quality loss)
- PDFs and downloadable files updated and named properly
- Third-party integrations listed (email platform, booking, shop, analytics, etc.)
Strategic decisions made
- Template or custom design decision confirmed
- If template: specific template chosen before content is written
- Navigation structure decided – pages, names, order, footer vs. header
- Email opt-in strategy decided – placement and lead magnet confirmed
- URL redirect map started for any pages with changing addresses
If working with a designer
- Visual mood board or reference collection created
- Project brief prepared with goals, pages, timeline, and budget
- Time blocked in your calendar for reviews, feedback, and copywriting
Key takeaway: Before Website Redesign – Now You’re Actually Ready
The preparation phase isn’t the most exciting part of a redesign. It doesn’t have the visual payoff of seeing a beautiful new page come together or the rush of hitting publish on a site you’re finally proud to send people to. But it’s the work that makes all of that possible, without the scrambling, the backtracking, or the strange, eerie feeling that something important was missed.
When you come to a redesign with your goals clear, your assets organized, your content audited, and your key decisions made, the design phase flows. Whether you’re doing it yourself with a new template or working with a designer, you’re building on a solid foundation rather than making it up as you go.
If you’re going the template route and you’re looking for a starting point that’s already structured for conversion and designed specifically for photographers and creative entrepreneurs, I’d love for you to browse what we have in the shop. Every template is built to be genuinely customizable with your brand, your content, your business, and with the structural thinking already done for you.
And if you’re preparing for a custom build and would like to talk through what that process looks like, feel free to reach out. I’d love to hear about your project.
Here’s to the site you’re about to build. Can’t wait to see what you’ll be creating!
~ Sandra
