A website redesign expands quietly unless you plan it. This week-by-week timeline keeps the decisions in the right order, from working out your goal to testing on real phones and surviving launch day.
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Quick summary
- Write one or two measurable goals before any design work starts, and check them again after launch.
- Audit every page in week two, because outdated prices and finished sales erode customer confidence.
- A template refresh is commonly estimated at eight to twelve weeks, while a full redesign can run four to five months or more.
- Map old addresses to new ones before launch, because search rankings survive a redesign only if redirects are handled early.
- Treat the finished site as a product with an owner, a budget and a backlog so the same problems do not drift back.
A website redesign expands quietly. The designer is still stuck on the homepage, the new copy isn’t finished, and three weeks have passed without a decision. A week-by-week timeline keeps things moving in the right order, so the slow thinking happens before anyone touches the design.
Week 1: Work Out Why You’re Redesigning
Spend the first week on paper, not pixels. Government advice for small businesses says to review your wider business goals before you create a website; a redesign is the same exercise. Write one or two measurable goals, such as doubling the quote requests that come through the site. “Make it look better” gives you nothing to check against.
Be honest about the kind of problem you are solving. One large WordPress agency observes that most companies asking for a redesign actually have an operations problem rather than a design one: a cluttered backend, inconsistent templates, and every small change needing a developer. If that describes your site, fixing roles, workflows and templates may achieve more than a visual overhaul.
Then think like a customer. Google’s guidance on improving websites suggests pretending you are one of your own customers trying to complete a task. Write down the top three things a visitor should be able to do, such as finding your opening hours or requesting a quote.
By Friday you want a one-page brief: the goal, the top customer tasks, and a list of what frustrates you about the current site.
Week 2: Audit What You Have Before You Change It
Week two is an audit of what exists. Map every page on the current site, note broken links, and flag content that is outdated or irrelevant. Google points out that stale details, such as promotions that ended long ago or prices you no longer charge, erode customer confidence in the site and the business behind it.
If you have analytics installed, check which pages perform well and where visitors leave. A redesign that throws away your best-performing pages is a step backwards. If you don’t have analytics, note which pages generate phone calls with questions the page should have answered.
Talk to the people who deal with customers every day and ask what they hate about the current site. Then look at three to five competitor websites and note how they organise content and structure their menus. You are collecting patterns your customers already know, not copying.
Content readiness decides the schedule more than page counts do. Designers need realistic copy to establish hierarchy, and developers need to understand the content before they configure anything. Start collecting prices, service descriptions and photos now. Sorted content in week two keeps the middle weeks on track.
Finish with a new sitemap showing how pages relate to each other, and keep it shallow: visitors shouldn’t need more than three clicks to reach any key page.
Week 3: Set a Budget and Decide Who Does the Work
With the goal and sitemap settled, you can price the job sensibly. A cloud-based content management system with a built-in template and drag-and-drop editing is the cheaper, simpler option, and most owners can run it themselves. A custom design from a designer costs more but is built around your business. A self-hosted CMS sits between the two: more flexible, but more work to set up and maintain.
Whichever path you take, hosting is a separate cost, because your website needs to live on a server connected to the internet. Our first-timer’s guide to website hosting walks through what you are paying for.
Set timeline expectations now too. Published estimates from agencies put a template refresh at roughly eight to twelve weeks and a full single-site redesign at four to five months, and one detailed project planner budgets around 26 weeks of work. This eight-week schedule suits a site where the content is mostly ready. If you are rewriting everything or changing platforms, stretch these weeks.
Before you sign anything, work through our checklist for hiring a web designer, and make sure the quote states what is out of scope as clearly as what is in it. Copywriting, photography and ongoing maintenance are the usual exclusions. Good briefs also record assumptions with consequences: a late delivery of brand guidelines shifts the design start date by the same number of days.
One more thing: check when your domain name is due for renewal before you commit to a launch date. Our checklist for expiring domains covers what to confirm, and fixing a registration problem now beats fixing it during launch week.
Weeks 4 to 6: Brief, Review and Approve the Design
Week four is the brief. Hand the designer your one-page goal, the sitemap, the content audit and any brand guidelines that exist. Government advice on rebrands stresses consistency: your website should reflect the same branding as your other marketing materials. If the redesign is part of a wider rebrand, cover social profiles, signage and printed materials too.
When you review the design, check it against a plain list rather than taste alone:
- The most important information sits at the top of the page, visible without scrolling.
- A distinct headline tells visitors they are in the right place.
- Benefits are scannable, with bullet points doing the work.
- A clear call to action tells visitors what to do next.
- Contact details, address and business hours sit at the bottom of every page, with a map or location link for physical locations.
Ask for mobile to be part of the design, not an afterthought. Mobile devices account for over half of the world’s internet traffic, and Google advises designing a site that automatically adjusts to whatever device a visitor is using. Accessibility belongs in the brief too; the World Wide Web Consortium publishes guidance on designing for people with disability, and meeting it is far easier at design stage than after launch.
Decisions stretch redesign timelines more than page counts or features do. Set review rounds with fixed dates across weeks five and six, gather feedback from everyone at once rather than in a trickle, and nominate one person who has the final say. Approved designs and content loaded into a staging site by the end of week six make week seven possible.
Week 7: Test on Real Phones, Browsers and Connections
Testing week. Shrink a browser window all you like; it won’t show you what the site is like on a phone with patchy reception. Borrow different phones and tablets, open every important page, and check the basics Google recommends for mobile sites: simple navigation, everything readable without zooming in, and a phone number visitors can tap on every page.
Speed deserves its own session. Google advises avoiding lots of images, large images and complex widgets because some customers are on slower connections, and notes that about half of customers are lost while a mobile site loads. Compress photos before they go live.
Then bring in someone who doesn’t know your business. Google’s own tip is to ask someone with far less knowledge of it than you have, a friend or relative perhaps, to find their way around the site. Watch them try to find your hours, contact you or complete your week one goal, and note where they hesitate.
Run the boring checks as well: every form submits, every link works, prices and dates are current, and there are no pop-ups interfering with getting around, which Google warns against directly. If you sell online, place a real test order and confirm the payment and confirmation emails behave.
Launch Week: Redirects, Backups and Search Console Checks
Launch week is mostly about not losing things. Back up the old site completely before anything changes, including the database if the site has one, so you can restore it if the migration goes wrong.
The big one is redirects. Search rankings can survive a redesign, but only if the mapping from old addresses to new ones is prepared before the build and every retired address redirects to its closest equivalent page. Skipping this is how redesigns erase years of accumulated search traffic.
Be careful
Never retire an old page address without a redirect. Map every old address to its new home and test the redirects on the staging site before launch day.
On the technical side, verify the new site in Google Search Console, submit the updated sitemap and watch the error reports for the first few days. Confirm the domain registration and hosting are held in the same name as your business, with contact details you actually read.
If the redesign includes a new brand, launch week doubles as announcement week. Government rebranding guidance suggests announcing through your newsletter, social media and the website itself, explaining why you rebranded and what it means for customers. Update social banners, profile pictures and bios, and reprint anything printed that still shows the old look. If the business name has changed, update your registration, ABN records, domain details and trade marks too.
The First Month After Launch: What to Watch and Fix
The first month is where the redesign earns its budget or doesn’t. Check weekly for broken links, forms that misbehave and content that went stale on day one. Keep your week one goal in front of you and measure it: if the goal was more quote requests, are they rising?
Analytics will show where the new structure helps and where it hurts. Pages that used to perform well and now perform poorly are worth investigating before you start changing things again; sometimes the fix is a heading or a link, not another rebuild.
Set the site up to last, too. The same agency notes that companies avoid redesigning every couple of years when they treat the site as a product with an owner, an ongoing budget and a backlog. Put someone’s name against the site, set aside a small monthly amount for updates, and keep a running list of fixes. That includes keeping the underlying software and any plugins current, which is easier if you already have a habit of staying on top of software updates.
A redesign that launches and then drifts will look like the site you just replaced within a few years, so the habits formed this month matter more than launch day itself.
Start today by writing the one-line goal for your redesign; every decision in the eight weeks that follows should trace back to it.
Your questions answered
Q: How long does a small business website redesign take?
A: It depends on how much needs to change. Published estimates from design agencies put a template refresh at roughly eight to twelve weeks, and a full single-site redesign at four to five months, with larger projects running far longer.
Q: Can I do the redesign myself instead of hiring a designer?
A: Yes, if you use a cloud-based website builder with a template and drag-and-drop editing. A custom design costs more but gives you a structure built around your business, and a self-hosted system is more flexible still but takes more work to maintain.
Q: Why do redirects matter so much at launch?
A: Search rankings can survive a redesign if the mapping from old page addresses to new ones is prepared before the build. Without redirects, every retired address becomes a dead end and years of accumulated search traffic can be lost.
Q: What should I check after the new site goes live?
A: Watch for broken links, misbehaving forms and stale content each week, and measure progress against the goal you set in week one. Fix small problems as they appear rather than letting them build up into another redesign.