WeSolve educational guide · Website development
A new website can look impressive and still make it harder for customers to find information, trust your business, or reach the right person. Before you hire a developer, it pays to ask the right questions.
For a Canadian small or mid-sized business, redesigning a website is more than a visual exercise. It affects how customers discover your services, how your team manages content, and whether existing search visibility survives the transition.
Start here: Define what the redesign must improve, document your current pages, and insist on a clear testing and handover plan. Use the 12 questions below as a practical checklist when comparing proposals.
The 12-question website redesign checklist
1What business problem are we trying to solve?
“Make it look modern” does not establish a business outcome. Are customers struggling to navigate the site? Is mobile use frustrating? Is the service offer unclear, or are requests reaching the wrong team?
Write down two or three observable challenges. A home-services business may need clearer service-area information and estimate requests. A consultancy may need better explanations and consultation paths.
2Who is our primary audience?
Identify the people who need the site most, their questions, and the action they should take. A prospective customer, referral partner, and existing client looking for support may each require a different path.
Ask your developer to explain how the navigation and content structure will serve those priorities.
3Which existing pages are worth keeping?
Review service pages, resources, FAQs, and content already useful to customers. A redesign is a chance to update outdated information, but indiscriminate deletion can discard helpful material and create missing pages.
Keep a basic content inventory marked retain, improve, merge, redirect, or remove.
4How will we protect existing SEO visibility?
Find out who owns the URL mapping, redirects, titles, headings, canonical settings, XML sitemap, and internal links. If a valuable page's address changes, it may need a permanent redirect to its replacement.
After launch, verify that priority pages can be crawled and indexed, and that development-site restrictions were not left enabled accidentally. Website redesign and search engine optimization should be planned together.
5What must work smoothly on a phone?
Test tasks rather than judging only by screenshots: finding hours and services, using click-to-call links, submitting forms, reading key information, and booking an appointment without pinching and zooming.
Check real narrow-screen layouts, embedded tools, and error messages. A page can look attractive on desktop and still create friction on mobile.
6How accessible will the site be?
Ask about heading order, keyboard navigation, readable text, contrast, labeled forms, image descriptions, and captions or transcripts for video content.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines offer a useful technical reference. Specific legal obligations vary by business, jurisdiction, and context; a redesign checklist is not a legal compliance assessment.
7Who owns the domain, hosting, content, and accounts?
Confirm who controls the domain registrar, hosting, website platform, analytics property, contact forms, email services, and design assets. The business should understand what access and files it would retain if it changed service providers.
Require a documented ownership and permissions handover. Avoid depending on one contractor's personal login for business-critical systems.
8Can our staff edit content after launch?
If your team needs to update services, staff profiles, opening hours, or article content, clarify how those edits will work and whether training is included.
Ask for a short editing demonstration and clear guidance on which changes are safe for internal staff versus changes that require developer support.
9Where do website inquiries actually go?
Trace the journey after someone requests a quote, books a meeting, or submits a question. Does the customer see a proper confirmation? Does the correct person receive the inquiry? Can someone recover from a form error?
Plan authorized test submissions before launch. A form's appearance alone does not establish that follow-up works.
10How are security and privacy handled?
Discuss HTTPS, updates, access management, backups, recovery procedures, spam protection, third-party scripts, and secure treatment of submitted information.
If you collect personal information, confirm that your organization's notice and handling practices have been reviewed against applicable Canadian privacy obligations. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada provides guidance, but requirements may differ by context and province.
11What is included in the quote—and what isn't?
Break the estimate into design, development, content, photography or licensing, integrations, hosting, maintenance, support, SEO migration, training, and revisions.
Ask how scope changes will be approved. A cheaper headline price can become costly if basic deliverables are considered extras.
12How will the new site be tested and launched?
Agree on a written launch checklist covering pages, navigation, links, responsive layouts, forms, booking paths, redirects, search indexability, analytics, backups, and handover.
Determine who approves the finished work and who will correct post-launch defects. Plan a review of search visibility and real customer feedback after launch.
How to compare website development proposals
Instead of comparing providers solely on design examples, ask every team to explain the same essentials:
- What customer problem will this website address?
- Which content and existing search visibility will be preserved?
- How will mobile experience and accessibility be tested?
- What systems and accounts will your business own?
- How will forms, bookings, and essential customer tasks be checked?
- Which costs and post-launch responsibilities are included?
You do not need the longest proposal. You need a realistic scope, clearly assigned responsibilities, and evidence that the project will serve actual visitors.
Before you sign a website redesign agreement
Create a concise project brief describing your customers, the site problems to solve, the content worth preserving, the most important customer actions, and the tools the new site must connect with.
Ask providers to show how they will protect existing pages and make it straightforward for people to understand your services and reach you. A successful website redesign is an improvement to the customer experience—not merely a new colour palette.
Planning a new website or redesign?
WeSolve Digital and Marketing Solutions helps businesses connect website design, search-ready structure, clear messaging, and straightforward inquiry paths. Explore our approach before deciding what your next website needs.
Explore WeSolve Web Development →This article is general educational information, not legal or technical compliance advice. Confirm requirements for your business and region with qualified professionals when necessary.
