Website Redesign Checklist: Planning Your WordPress Migration Successfully

A website redesign is one of the most impactful projects a business can undertake. Done well, it revitalizes your brand, improves user experience, boosts conversions, and strengthens your search presence. Done poorly, it destroys your SEO, confuses your customers, and wastes your budget.

The difference between these outcomes is planning. After managing dozens of WordPress redesigns and migrations over 14 years, I have developed a comprehensive checklist that protects what you have built while delivering meaningful improvements.

Phase 1: Discovery and Planning

Define Your Redesign Goals

Before designing a single page, document what you want to achieve. Common redesign goals include improving conversion rates, modernizing brand presentation, enhancing mobile experience, improving page speed and Core Web Vitals, reorganizing content architecture, and adding new functionality. Each goal should be measurable. “Make the site look better” is not a goal. “Increase contact form submissions by 25%” is.

Audit Your Current Site

You cannot improve what you have not measured. Before touching anything, document:

• Traffic baseline: Monthly organic traffic, top landing pages, conversion rates by page.
• Keyword rankings: Top 50 keywords with current positions and traffic volume.
• Technical SEO state: Crawl the entire site with Screaming Frog. Export all URLs, titles, meta descriptions, H1 tags, canonical URLs, and response codes.
• Backlink profile: Export all pages with inbound links from Ahrefs or Semrush. These pages are your most valuable SEO assets.
• Core Web Vitals: Record LCP, INP, and CLS for your top 10 pages.
• Content inventory: Every page and post with its URL, word count, traffic, and business purpose.

Content Strategy

A redesign is the perfect opportunity to audit your content. For each page, decide: keep as-is, update and improve, consolidate with another page, or remove (with proper redirect). Do not automatically migrate content that is outdated, thin, or irrelevant. But never remove a page that receives organic traffic without redirecting it to a relevant alternative.

Phase 2: Information Architecture

Site Map and Navigation

Design your new site structure based on user research and business priorities, not just your organizational chart. Map every page in the new structure and identify which current URLs map to which new URLs. This becomes the foundation of your redirect strategy.

URL Structure

Preserve existing URL structure wherever possible. Every URL change requires a 301 redirect and carries some SEO risk. If you must change URLs, ensure they are clean, descriptive, and follow a logical hierarchy. Avoid URL parameters, unnecessary depth, and date-based structures for evergreen content.

Phase 3: Design and Development

Mobile-First Design

Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning your mobile site is the primary version Google evaluates. Design for mobile first, then scale up to desktop. This is not just a responsive afterthought — mobile design should drive layout, content priority, and interaction patterns.

Performance Budget

Set performance targets before development begins: total page weight under 1MB, LCP under 2.5 seconds, CLS under 0.1. Give these targets to your developer as hard requirements, not aspirational guidelines. It is far easier to build fast from the start than to optimize a slow site after launch.

SEO Implementation

During development, ensure every page has a unique, keyword-optimized title tag and meta description, proper heading hierarchy (one H1 per page, logical H2/H3 nesting), semantic HTML with proper schema markup, XML sitemap generation, canonical URLs on every page, and Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags.

Accessibility

Build accessibility into the design from the start. This includes proper heading hierarchy, alt text for images, keyboard navigability, sufficient color contrast, ARIA labels for interactive elements, and focus indicators. Besides being the right thing to do, accessibility improves SEO and reduces legal risk.

Phase 4: Content Migration

Migrate Strategically

Do not just copy and paste. As you migrate each page, update outdated statistics and references, improve internal linking to reflect the new site structure, optimize images for the new design dimensions, verify that all media (images, PDFs, videos) transfers correctly, and review and update meta titles and descriptions.

Build the Redirect Map

Create a spreadsheet mapping every old URL to its corresponding new URL. This must include all pages (including those being removed — redirect to the closest relevant alternative), all blog posts, media file URLs if they change, category and archive pages, and any URLs with significant backlinks. Implement redirects at the server level for maximum performance, not through WordPress plugins when possible.

Phase 5: Pre-Launch Testing

Staging Environment Review

• Crawl the staging site and compare against your original URL list.
• Verify every redirect resolves with a 301 status code.
• Check all forms, CTAs, and conversion paths.
• Test on multiple devices and browsers.
• Run Lighthouse audits against your performance budget.
• Verify robots.txt allows crawling and XML sitemap is correct.
• Check that canonical URLs point to the correct pages.
• Test the 404 page works properly.
• Verify analytics and tracking codes are installed.

Client and Stakeholder Review

Get formal sign-off from stakeholders before launch. Provide clear review instructions and a deadline. Changes requested after launch are more expensive and risky than changes made on staging.

Phase 6: Launch

Launch Day Checklist

• Deploy during low-traffic hours (typically Tuesday through Thursday morning).
• Never launch on a Friday — if issues emerge, you want your full team available.
• Verify DNS propagation if changing hosts.
• Test the live site immediately: forms, checkout, redirects, SSL.
• Submit updated XML sitemap to Google Search Console.
• Request indexing for your most important pages.
• Verify analytics is collecting data on the live site.

Phase 7: Post-Launch Monitoring

Monitor closely for 4 to 8 weeks after launch:

• Week 1: Check Search Console daily for crawl errors and coverage issues. Monitor organic traffic against your baseline. Review server logs for 404 errors.
• Weeks 2-4: Track keyword rankings weekly. Compare conversion rates against pre-launch data. Address any 404 errors or redirect issues promptly.
• Weeks 4-8: Review overall organic traffic trends. Compare Core Web Vitals against pre-launch scores. Document any ranking changes and investigate drops.

Minor ranking fluctuations during the first 2 to 4 weeks are normal as Google re-crawls and re-evaluates. Drops exceeding 15% warrant investigation. If you followed this checklist, significant drops are unlikely.

Need a Partner for Your Redesign?

At WPRobo, we follow this complete process for every redesign project. Our 14 years of experience means we anticipate and prevent the issues that cause redesign failures. Schedule a consultation to discuss your redesign goals and get a detailed project proposal.