Most redesigns go wrong before a single mockup is drawn. The site gets rebuilt, it looks better, and six months later the enquiries are the same or fewer, and nobody can say why. Usually it is because a few unglamorous questions were never asked.
These are the ten I ask first. You can answer most of them yourself in an afternoon.
1. What is the website for?
Pick one job. Generate enquiries, sell products, support existing customers, recruit. A site that tries to do five jobs does all of them badly. If you cannot say it in one sentence, the redesign will inherit the confusion.
2. What do visitors actually do today?
Open your analytics and look at three things: the pages people visit most, where they come from, and where they leave. Then look at your contact page. If hardly anyone reaches it, that is the real problem, and a new colour scheme will not fix it.
3. What is already working?
Some pages bring in traffic from search. Some old blog posts quietly send you customers. Find them before anyone touches the site. A redesign that changes those addresses without proper redirects can throw away years of search visibility.
4. How fast is it today?
Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights on mobile and write the numbers down. That is your baseline. Without it, nobody can tell later whether the new site is faster or merely newer.
5. Who needs to edit what?
List the people who update the site and what they change. A weekly news post needs a different setup from a price list updated twice a year. This question decides the technical approach more than most people expect.
6. What do you own?
Check that you hold the logins for your domain name, hosting and analytics, and that they are in your company's name, not an ex-employee's or a former agency's. Check that you have the rights to your photos and fonts. It takes ten minutes and prevents the most miserable kind of delay.
7. Which third-party tools are connected?
Forms, chat, booking, payments, email sign-ups, tracking pixels. Write every one down. Each is something the new site must keep working, or something you remove on purpose.
8. What does the site need to say?
Write the words before the design. Headings, offers, and the answers to the questions customers ask you on the phone. Designing around placeholder text produces layouts that fall apart the day the real copy arrives.
9. What could break on launch day?
Contact forms that stop sending, tracking that stops recording, redirects that point nowhere, a checkout that fails on a phone. Make a short list and test every item before the switch, not after.
10. How will you know it worked?
Choose two or three numbers now: enquiries per month, mobile speed, sales from the site. Write down today's value and the one you are aiming for. If you do not decide in advance, success becomes whatever people feel it was.
Where to go from here
If you can answer all ten, you are in a far better position than most businesses that commission a redesign. If you cannot, that is useful too, because the gaps are where the money gets wasted.
If you would like help working through them for your own site, send me the address. I will tell you what I would check first, and whether a full redesign is even the right move.