The redesign questions worth answering before anyone opens a design tool

A redesign brief usually arrives as a feeling: the site looks dated, it does not reflect where the business is now, competitors look sharper. All of that can be true and none of it is enough to design against.

The projects that go well are the ones where four things are settled before visual work starts. None of them require a designer.

1. Decide what each page is for

Write one sentence per page describing the decision a visitor should be able to make after reading it. If two pages produce the same sentence, you have one page and a duplicate.

This single exercise resolves most sitemap arguments, because it moves the discussion from what departments want represented to what visitors need to do.

2. Audit what is already working

Before deleting anything, look at which pages receive search traffic, which ones people actually read to the end, and which URLs other sites link to. Redesigns routinely delete the three pages that were quietly doing all the acquisition work.

• Export your top 50 pages by organic entrances from the last 12 months.
• Note any page with inbound links from other domains.
• Flag pages with unusually long engagement — they are answering a real question.
• Anything on that list either survives the redesign or gets a mapped redirect.

3. Plan the redirects now, not at launch

URL changes are the most common cause of a post-launch traffic drop. A redirect map is a two-column spreadsheet: old URL, new URL. Build it while the sitemap is being agreed, when the decisions are fresh, rather than during the week of go-live.

Redirect old URLs to the closest equivalent page. Sending everything to the homepage tells search engines the old content is gone and the new site is unrelated to it.

4. Set a performance budget in advance

Performance is a design constraint, not a development task. Agreeing a budget early — for example, a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on a mid-range phone — changes what gets designed. It rules out the autoplaying background video with three webfonts on top of it before anyone falls in love with it.

A budget also makes trade-offs explicit and unemotional. If a section costs more than it is worth, the number says so.

What this looks like in practice

The output is short: a page-purpose list, a keep-or-redirect list, a redirect map and a performance budget. Four documents, none longer than a page, produced before design begins.

They are the difference between a redesign that improves the business and one that simply looks newer for eighteen months.