Once a redesign starts, the temptation is to rebuild everything. Old screens catch your eye, inconsistencies surface, and somebody says “while we are at it”. “While we are at it” is the most expensive sentence in the project — every extra screen adds time, and some of those screens were working perfectly well.
Write the purpose in one sentence first
A redesign usually has one of three purposes: the brand has changed, conversions are not happening, or the site has become hard to maintain. Those three touch completely different screens.
A brand change means colour, type and logo move across every screen while the structure can largely stay. A conversion problem means the handful of screens on the conversion path. A maintenance problem is mostly about templates and components rather than anything visible. If you cannot state the purpose in one sentence, the scope will not settle either.
Let the data set the scope
Take out the entry list from the previous part and sort every screen on two axes: does it bring traffic, and do conversions happen on it. That gives four quadrants, and each one is handled differently.
The first quadrant matters most. A screen that brings traffic and converts is doing so for a reason, and in most cases nobody knows precisely what that reason is. Replace it wholesale and you will not even know what you removed.
If it must change, change the surface
In a brand refresh even the well-performing screens have to take the new look. When that happens, decide in advance what changes and what is protected.
The order of information, the position and wording of the call to action, the page title and the URL sit directly on top of search performance and conversion. Colour, type and spacing do not. Protect the former, change the latter, and the brand arrives new while the results stay put.
Even retiring a page has a procedure
The fourth quadrant invites deletion, but deleting simply turns that address into a 404. “No traffic” means no search traffic; it does not mean no links. Business cards, old campaigns and other people’s sites may still point there. The correct move is to choose a page to merge into and redirect the old address to it — which is exactly the next part.
How to judge what role a screen plays in search is covered in the SEO archive, and if you would rather hand the performance and security work alongside the redesign to one team, see the optimization program.
Next part
The scope is set. But the moment you redraw the information architecture, addresses change — so the next part is why keeping your URLs is a design decision.