Start your website redesign with the site you already have. Before you look at a single design, find out which pages bring in search visitors, which pages people are on when they call or fill in a form, how fast the site is on a phone, and what your buyers keep asking that the site doesn't answer. Those four facts tell you what to protect, what to fix and what to add. Design comes after.
Most owners start the other way around, with a competitor's site or a template they like the look of, and ask a designer to make theirs feel like that, which is understandable when the current site looks dated and it's the first thing anyone notices. Fair enough. It's also how good pages get thrown out with the bad ones.
First: four facts about your current site
You can gather all four in an afternoon, with free tools, and none of them needs a developer.
1. Which pages Google sends people to
Open Google Search Console and look at the Performance report, sorted by page, for the last twelve months. Write down the top twenty. These are the pages you can't afford to lose in the redesign, and they're often not the ones you'd guess; an old blog post about a specific repair can quietly outperform the homepage for years.
2. Which pages lead to calls and forms
In Google Analytics, check that your form submissions and phone clicks are set up as key events. Google defines a key event as "an event that measures an action that's particularly important to the success of your business." If nothing is set up, fix that first and let it run a few weeks. You can't measure whether a redesign worked without a before.
3. How the site does on a phone
Run your homepage and your busiest service page through PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting. You won't be alone if it fails. In the 2025 HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 48% of mobile websites passed all of Google's speed checks, which means more than half didn't. Note your scores. They're the benchmark the new site has to beat.
For a broader snapshot, our Free AI Visibility Check looks at your website, mobile speed, whether you come up in a local search, and what an AI assistant says when a buyer asks who to call. No email needed.
4. What buyers can't find
Ask the people who answer the phone. They know which questions come up again and again, and which services callers didn't realize you offered. Every one of those is a missing page or a missing paragraph.
Your estimators and project managers are worth ten minutes too. They hear the objections in person: the worry about disruption to tenants, the question about warranties, the request for references from a similar building. A website that answers those before the first call saves everyone time, and it's the kind of detail an outside designer can't invent.
Second: write down the site's job in one sentence
Something like: "When a property manager in our three counties needs a commercial painter, our site should show them we do their type of building, roughly what it costs, and how to get a site visit this week." That sentence settles a lot of later arguments. Keep it handy. A rotating banner of stock photos doesn't serve it. A page for each building type does.
Third: list the pages before anyone designs them
Make a simple list. One page for each service you sell. One page for each main area you serve, if you work across several. An about page with real people, a contact page, and the top pages from step one, kept at their current addresses if possible.
This list, often called a sitemap, is the actual plan for the redesign. A designer can work from it. Without it, the designer is guessing what the site needs to say, and you'll be the one writing copy to fill boxes that were drawn before anyone knew what would go in them.
What can wait
- Colors and fonts, beyond keeping them readable.
- Animation and video backgrounds. They often slow a site down on phones.
- A blog redesign. Get the service pages right first.
- Choosing a new platform, unless the current one is genuinely stopping you from editing your own site.
If you'd like help from here
You can take the four facts, the one-sentence job and the page list to any good web designer. That's a solid brief.
Or you can hand the whole thing over. With Inbound SDR, we build a website of up to 100 pages in the first month, planned around every service you sell and every area you serve, and we host it, monitor it and handle technical SEO such as redirects, sitemaps and page speed. After launch there's a new blog every business day, posted to up to 3 social platforms, and a dedicated strategist with a monthly report. Packages start at $1,000 per month on a 12-month term. It doesn't include paid ads or email marketing, and it isn't built for owners who want a one-time project with nobody looking after the site afterward.
A few quick ones
How do I know if I need a redesign at all?
If the site fails on mobile, is missing services you sell, or your team can't edit it, yes. If it's just a few years old and works, maybe not.
How long does a redesign take?
Weeks for a small site, longer for a big one. Writing and approving the content usually takes longer than the design and build, so start the writing early.
Abstrakt is a technology-enabled outsourced sales development company that books 100,000+ meetings a year for 2,000 clients.
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