What to Check Before Redesigning Your Business Website

A redesign almost always starts with the same line: "our website looks kind of dated." That's an aesthetic diagnosis for a problem that's almost never aesthetic. Someone gets hired, a nice new site gets built, it launches with excitement, and three months later the same old customers show up through the same old channels. The money got spent and the real problem never got touched.

First: what your site is actually for

Before talking about colors, there's a question that sounds basic and that, surprisingly, almost nobody has actually answered: what do you want the person who lands on it to do? Message you on WhatsApp? Book a call? Request a quote? Buy directly? A site that wants all four things at once achieves none of them, because the visitor doesn't know what's expected of them.

If you can't state your site's main action in one sentence, the redesign is going to fail no matter how gorgeous it ends up looking. That's the groundwork, and the designer can't do it for you — you have to, since you're the one who knows how selling actually works in your business.

The five things to measure beforehand

• How many people visit per month and where they come from: Google, social media, paid ads, or people who already knew you.
• What percentage of those visitors take the main action, as a percentage, not a raw number.
• Which pages get the most visits and which ones nobody opens, because that tells you what to cut.
• How long the site takes to load on mobile, on mobile data, not the office wifi.
• What terms people are currently using to find you on Google, if they’re finding you at all.

Those five data points are free to pull from analytics and search tools that already exist, and they completely change the conversation with whoever ends up doing the redesign. With those numbers in hand, the conversation stops being about taste and becomes about what actually needs fixing. Without them, the whole project gets decided by opinion, and in opinions, the person paying always wins, even if theirs isn't the one that sells more.

A redesign without prior data isn't an improvement. It's swapping one problem for another and hoping the new one is more likeable.

What the real problem usually turns out to be

Once that diagnosis is done, the finding is usually one of three things. First: people arrive, but the site doesn't clearly explain what you sell or who it's for, so the visitor leaves within fifteen seconds. Second: the site is fine, but nobody's arriving, in which case the problem is positioning and content, not design. Third: people arrive, understand, want to contact you, and the form or the WhatsApp button is hidden, broken, or points to a number nobody checks anymore.

All three are fixable, but they're fixed differently. Only the first one actually needs a redesign. The second needs months of content and search work. The third gets fixed in an afternoon and is, by far, the one that recovers the most money per peso spent.

How to make the most of the redesign if you’re doing it anyway

There are cases where a new site really is justified: when it's built on technology that can no longer be updated, when it doesn't work well on mobile, when it loads painfully slowly, or when the business has changed so much that the site is telling a story that isn't yours anymore. If that's your case, use the opportunity to do it right from the start: a website designed from day one to load fast, look good on mobile, and be built so Google understands it, instead of a pretty one you'll have to patch all of that into later.

And keep your old numbers. It's the only way to know, six months later, whether the redesign actually did anything or just looks nicer. That comparison is what separates an investment from an expense, and it's also what will give you the argument next time someone says the site looks dated.