A useful guide does not promise certainty. It gives you better questions, a shared vocabulary and a clear place to start.
Name the decision
Write the single sentence describing what a visitor should be able to decide more confidently after the rebuild.
Inventory before you design
Score every URL on traffic, rankings and usefulness, then decide keep, merge, rewrite or retire.
Protect what has been earned
List the URLs currently earning search traffic and treat their redirects as a build requirement.
Agree the measure
Two or three metrics with today’s baseline written down, checked eight weeks after launch.
Work through this before briefing anyone, including us. If more than three items are unanswerable, the first project is a decision rather than a rebuild.
- The decision a qualified visitor should be able to make, written as one sentence
- The three pages that generate the most qualified pipeline today
- What sales say prospects most often misunderstand
- Every URL currently earning search traffic, exported from Search Console
- A keep / merge / rewrite / retire verdict against each of those URLs
- Today’s baseline for two or three success metrics
- What your team can publish without a developer, and what they cannot
- The constraints that genuinely cannot move: brand, dates, systems, budget
- The single person who can approve direction
- The date, eight weeks after launch, when you will check the metrics
10 items · no email required
Where teams go wrong with this
Four failure patterns we have watched play out often enough to name. None of them is caused by a lack of effort; all of them are caused by sequencing.
Designing before inventorying
Teams commission a new structure without scoring what they already have. The old site then reappears page by page during content migration, because nobody agreed in advance what was being retired.
Treating redirects as a launch task
Redirect mapping done in the final week is how a rebuild loses a third of its organic traffic. It is a build requirement, sized at the start and tested in staging like anything else.
No baseline, so no verdict
Without today’s conversion, traffic and speed figures written down before work starts, the post-launch conversation becomes a matter of taste. Take the baseline in week one, not month four.
Approval by committee
Every additional approver adds a week and subtracts a point of view. One named person should be able to approve direction; everyone else advises.
Questions this guide raises
Two to four weeks for most mid-sized sites, running in parallel with whatever else the team is doing. The inventory is the slow part, and it is the part that pays for itself: every URL you decide about in planning is one you are not arguing about in build.
No, but you should know which ones you do not have. A brief that says "we have not decided who approves direction, and our content inventory is unscored" is far more useful than one that quietly leaves both unresolved.
Restructure first if the site is visually acceptable and commercially unclear, which is the more common case. A visual refresh over a broken structure produces a prettier version of the same confusion — and costs about the same.
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