Website relaunch in five steps
Goals, content and redirects need a plan before design starts. Five steps that protect your visibility and enquiries.
A relaunch is above all a migration.
It is usually triggered by rising bounce rates, ageing technology or content that no longer fits your offer. Pages, content and URLs all move to the new site.
Relaunch or redesign
A redesign renews the visual design and leaves structure and technology largely in place. A relaunch also reworks the information architecture, the content and often the CMS. It takes more effort, but it can fix structural problems.
What a relaunch costs
Costs depend mainly on four factors:
the goals of the relaunch
the CMS and whether you need to change systems
the state of the existing technology
the number of pages, content types and features
Announcing the relaunch
Give existing customers a date in advance, through your newsletter and LinkedIn. They will then recognise the new website straight away.
Five steps to a relaunch
1. Measure the starting point
Record your key metrics before the relaunch. They become the benchmark for success:
visitor numbers and traffic sources
bounce rate and time on page
enquiries, sign-ups and conversions
load times and Core Web Vitals
rankings of your most important pages
Look at your strongest competitors as well. The gaps in their sites show where you can stand out.
2. Set goals
Turn the analysis into specific goals, such as more enquiries, better visibility or a new positioning. Keep them realistic: a regional business will rarely beat large platforms on generic search terms.
Start with the shortcomings that triggered the relaunch.
3. Evaluate visitor behaviour
Google Analytics 4 shows where visitors come from, where they drop off and which pages lead to enquiries. In the EU, tracking requires consent.
Add feedback from chat, phone and email to the numbers. Every reported problem is a pointer for the new plan.
4. Create the plan
Plan the structure
List all existing and planned pages and check what each one is for. Group them by topic and link related pages to one another.
Give every page a goal and a clear next step. Revise or remove pages that serve no purpose.
Create a design guide
A relaunch is the right time to revise the style guide: colours, typefaces, spacing and how the brand should come across.
Wireframes and clickable prototypes settle decisions before development begins. Plan accessibility to WCAG from the outset. Since June 2025 it has been mandatory for many digital services under the European Accessibility Act.
Safeguard search engine optimisation
A relaunch stands or falls with its rankings. These points belong in the plan:
research search terms with relevant volume and compare them with your competitors
check that each page meets the search intent of its main term
remove pages that neither help visitors nor generate enquiries
redirect every old URL to the matching new page with a 301, so rankings and backlinks are kept
5. Test before launch
Test new designs and structures during development, ideally with A/B tests against the recorded metrics.
Before launch, check rendering, load times and image quality on all common devices and browsers.
What else to look out for
Review the content
Decide for every existing page whether it stays, is revised or goes. Much of it will be outdated, and some topics will be missing entirely.
Fix broken links
A crawler finds links to 404 pages before and after launch. It also shows whether every redirect works.
Build topic clusters
An overview page introduces a topic and links to all related articles. This helps readers and search engines alike.
Conclusion
A relaunch shapes your visibility and enquiries for years. Clear goals, a clean migration and testing before launch keep the risk manageable.
If you are planning a relaunch, we support you from analysis through to operations. You can request an initial call via our contact form.