Website Relaunch Checklist

Your website is much more than a digital business card. It is your central sales channel, the heart of your brand and often the first point of contact for potential customers. A website relaunch is therefore one of the biggest strategic opportunities for your company. It's an opportunity to leave outdated technology behind, take the user experience to a new level and realign your digital business goals.

But as great as the opportunity is, the risks are also significant. A hasty or inadequately planned relaunch can have disastrous consequences: SEO rankings built up over years can disappear overnight, familiar user paths lead nowhere and technical errors frustrate visitors and drive them to the competition. In the worst case scenario, you invest a lot of money in a project that fails to achieve its goals and leaves you worse off than before.

That's exactly why we've developed this guide. This isn't just a checklist; it's a strategic roadmap based on the experience of countless successful relaunch projects. As a digital agency, this is our daily business. We will guide you through the three crucial phases - from the initial strategic planning to the precise go-live and the essential aftercare. Use this guide to put your project on a solid footing right from the start and avoid the most common and costly mistakes.

Before even a single line of code is written or a pixel is designed, a watertight plan must be in place. In the planning phase, you define what “success” means for your project, align the expectations of everyone involved and create a clear roadmap. This is your most important tool against “scope creep” (the uncontrolled escalation of the project scope) and budget overruns.

 

✅ Define goals & KPIs: What exactly should the relaunch achieve? (e.g. increase in leads by 20%, reduction in loading time by 50%, reduction in bounce rate, longer dwell time by 25%). How is success measured?

✅ Determine the budget: What financial framework is available for conception, design, development, content and post-launch marketing? Are buffers planned for unforeseen expenses?

✅ Target group analysis: Who should be reached with the new site? Conduct interviews, analyze data and create or update detailed personas and user journeys.

✅ Technology selection: Choosing the right CMS and hosting is a long-term strategic decision. Does the system match your technical resources and future growth plans?

✅ Create a project plan: Record all phases, tasks, milestones and dependencies with a realistic schedule and clear responsibilities in a project management tool (e.g. Jira, Trello, Asana, Monday).

✅ Content audit: Create a complete list of all URLs of the old page. Analyze traffic and engagement to decide: Which content will be carried over 1:1, which needs to be revised and which can be deleted?

The design is the interface between your brand and the user. It's not just about aesthetics, but above all about functionality and intuitive user experience (UX). A good design guides the user effortlessly to their destination, creates trust and ensures that your messages are received.

✅ Create wireframes: The focus here is purely on structure, layout and information architecture, completely without visual distractions. This lays the foundation for logical user guidance.

✅ UI/UX design (mockups): The final visual appearance is designed based on the wireframes. Here, colors, typography and imagery are combined to create a coherent overall picture.

✅ Brand guidelines: Ensure that the new design corresponds 100% to your established brand identity or consciously develops it further. Consistency creates recognition and trust.

✅ Responsive design: Mobile use now exceeds desktop use in almost all industries. Therefore, don't just test the design for different screen sizes, but think about the process from the smallest screen ("mobile first").

✅ Create a favicon: An often overlooked detail, but one that is crucial for recognition in browser tabs, bookmarks and on the smartphone home screen.

Content is the reason why visitors come to your site in the first place. High-quality, relevant and well-structured content is at the heart of every successful website. In this phase, the strategic decisions from the content audit are put into practice. 

✅ Create content: All new texts, blog articles, product descriptions and landing pages are now written. Make sure you use clear language that suits the target group. 

✅ Migrate content: The content that is to be transferred from the old site is transferred to the new structure and formatted.

✅ Meta titles & descriptions: These texts are your flagship in Google search results. They must encourage the user to click and contain the main keyword of the page.

✅ ALT texts for images: ALT texts are not only essential for accessibility, but also help search engines understand the image content, which improves your image ranking. 

✅ Legal texts: The legal notice and privacy policy must be checked or created by a specialist lawyer in order to comply with the current requirements of the GDPR and avoid warnings.

The design is brought to life in the development phase. This is where the technical backbone of your new website is created. Clean, future-proof and high-performance programming is crucial for the stability, security and speed of the site.

✅ Set up the development environment (staging): An exact copy of the live server environment is created on which the site is developed and tested without affecting the current live site.

✅ Install & configure CMS: The selected system is set up and all basic settings (languages, user roles, etc.) are made.

✅ Develop templates/theme: The approved design is converted into modular, flexible and maintainable code templates.

✅ Implement functions: All planned interactive elements such as contact forms, search functions, filters or interfaces to third-party systems (e.g. ERP, CRM) are programmed.

✅ Create the basis for performance: Techniques such as server-side caching, automatic image compression and the minimization of CSS and JavaScript files are implemented right from the start.

A relaunch is the most critical moment for the SEO performance of a website. This is where it is decided whether you retain, increase or lose your visibility. Diligence in this phase is not an option, but an absolute necessity.

✅ Keyword research: Content creation is supported by an in-depth analysis of the relevant search terms for your target group.

✅ Define URL structure: URLs should be short, readable and logically structured. A well-planned structure helps users and search engines to find their way around.

✅ 301 redirect mapping: Create a seamless list that redirects every single URL of the old page to the corresponding new URL. (This is by far the most important technical SEO task during a relaunch. Mistakes here almost always lead to massive and long-lasting traffic losses).

✅ Generate XML sitemap: The sitemap is like a table of contents for Google. Make sure that it contains all the pages of the new website to be indexed.

✅ Create robots.txt: This file gives search engines clear instructions on which areas of the website should not be crawled (e.g. admin areas, shopping cart).

✅ Implement structured data (Schema.org): Tag content such as products, reviews, FAQs or events with structured data to get rich snippets in search results.

"You can't manage what you can't measure." This phase ensures that you are not flying blind after the relaunch. A proper tracking implementation is the basis for all future data-supported decisions to optimize your website.

✅ Create a tracking concept: Define exactly which user interactions (clicks, scrolls, video views, form submissions) are relevant to your business goals and need to be measured.

✅ Set up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console: Set up a new GA4 property. If one already exists, make sure that all settings are correct.

✅ Implement Google Tag Manager (GTM): The GTM is the standard tool for managing tracking codes centrally without having to intervene in the website code every time a change is made.

✅ Set up conversion tracking: The goals defined in the concept are created as conversion events in GA4 to make success directly measurable.

✅ Configure the cookie consent tool: The tool must be configured so that marketing and analysis cookies are only loaded after explicit and informed consent from the user.

This is the last gatekeeper before the launch. The website is put through its paces to avoid errors and unpleasant surprises for the first live visitors. Developers, designers and project managers work closely together here. 

✅ Proofreading: An external person should check all texts for spelling, grammar and style. Operational blindness can easily lead to errors being overlooked.

✅ Cross-browser testing: Does the site work and look identically well in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge? 

✅ Function tests: Click through all conceivable user journeys. Does every link, every button, every form and the entire checkout process work flawlessly? 

✅ Load time test: Measure the load times of the most important page types with tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix and carry out final optimizations. 

✅ Security check: Is the entire site encrypted via HTTPS? Are all components up to date with the latest security standards? 

✅ Protect the staging environment with a password: Make sure that the development page is blocked by password protection (htpasswd) so that it is not indexed by Google before launch under any circumstances.

The big day has arrived. A precise and calm process is now crucial. Go through this list step by step to avoid stress and mistakes. Ideally, carry out the launch at a time with low user traffic (e.g. late in the evening or at the weekend).

✅ Create final backups: Back up the final status of the old live site one last time.

✅ Implement 301 redirects: The prepared redirect file is activated on the live server.

✅ Go live: The files and database of the new site are migrated to the live server. The domain is switched to the new directory.

✅ Remove password protection: The password protection is removed from the new live site. 

✅ Check tracking codes: Are the Analytics tags on the live page firing correctly? Are visits displayed in real time in Google Analytics?

✅ Quick check of the most important pages: Perform a quick manual test of the home page, main navigation items and contact form on the live environment.

✅ Submit XML sitemap to Google: Log into Google Search Console and submit the URL of the new sitemap to speed up indexing.

Your new website deserves attention. Let the world know about the relaunch to immediately generate traffic and boost engagement. 

✅ Communicate the launch: Announce the relaunch on all relevant channels: social media, email newsletter, press release. 

✅ Launch paid campaigns: Update the target URLs in all your Google Ads and social media ads campaigns. 

✅ Inform internal stakeholders: Celebrate the success with your team and make sure all departments (sales, support) are aware of the new features.

In the first days and weeks after the launch, close monitoring is essential in order to be able to react quickly to unforeseen problems.

✅ Monitor Google Search Console: Check daily for an increase in crawl errors (especially 404 "not found" errors) and check the indexing status.

✅ Monitor Google Analytics: Monitor the main KPIs: are there unexpected drops in traffic? How is the bounce rate behaving? Are the conversions working?

✅ Monitor keyword rankings: Monitor the rankings of your most important keywords. Slight fluctuations after a relaunch are normal, but a strong downward trend indicates problems.

✅ Check uptime and performance: Use external monitoring tools to monitor the accessibility and loading time of your site around the clock.

A website is never really "finished". It is a dynamic tool that should be continuously improved. The data and feedback you collect after the relaunch are the basis for future optimization. 

✅ Gather user feedback: Integrate feedback tools or conduct surveys to learn directly from your users. 

✅ Analyze heatmaps & session recordings: Tools such as PostHog, Hotjar or Clarity show you where users click, how far they scroll and where they encounter problems. 

✅ Carry out A/B tests: Test different variations of headlines, images or call-to-action buttons to gradually increase the conversion rate. 

✅ Regular maintenance: Plan fixed cycles for technical maintenance, including security scans, plugin updates and regular backups.