Before design starts.
Export the current sitemap, top landing pages, search queries, conversions and important backlinks. Record the content and functionality that customers or staff already depend on. A redesign brief without a before state cannot tell preservation from accidental loss.
- Name the business outcome and the user tasks that support it.
- Identify every system touched by forms, bookings, payments or accounts.
- Separate content that must migrate from content that has earned removal.
- Agree who supplies copy, translations, photography and legal review.
Before release.
Crawl the candidate build and compare it with the approved inventory. Test keyboard use, contrast, reduced motion, mobile layout and the slowest expected network. Submit forms with realistic validation cases and verify that the record arrives where the operating team expects it.
At release.
Confirm the production deployment is built from the reviewed source. Check canonical URLs, robots rules, sitemap responses and redirects on the live host. Run the critical customer journey again after DNS and cache changes. The deploy succeeded message is not the end to end test.
After release.
Watch crawl errors, indexing, landing page traffic, form receipts and user behaviour against the baseline. Prioritise broken journeys before visual polish. A redesign is complete when the operating system around the site works, not when the final animation renders.