When a business or service website is due for a redesign, the most common mistake is jumping straight into layout and visual changes without first looking at what the site already contains. Start by pulling together a complete list of every page that is currently live. This includes pages that may not appear in the main navigation, such as old landing pages, archived posts, or policy pages that were published once and forgotten. A simple crawl tool or a sitemap export can surface pages you did not remember existed, and finding them now is easier than discovering broken links after launch.
Once you have that inventory, go through each page and check whether the information is still accurate. Business details change more often than people realize: phone numbers, email addresses, office hours, service areas, staff names, and pricing all drift over time. A page that was correct two years ago may now contain a discontinued service or a team member who has left. Mark each page as current, needs updating, or should be removed. This step takes time, but it helps reduce the risk of carrying outdated claims into the new template where they will look even more out of place.
Next, look at how visitors actually use the site before you decide what to keep or restructure. If you have access to basic analytics, check which pages receive the most visits, which ones lead to form submissions or phone calls, and which ones have high bounce rates. A page with steady traffic but a high bounce rate might have useful content that is poorly organized, while a page with almost no traffic might still matter if it answers a question customers ask by phone. Use this information to prioritize what deserves attention during the redesign rather than guessing based on what feels important internally.
Finally, before handing content to a designer or developer, write down the specific questions you still cannot answer yourself. These might include whether a service is still offered in a certain area, whether a pricing structure has been approved for publication, or whether a regulatory notice needs to stay on a particular page. Raising these questions early with the relevant person inside your organization or with an external professional can help reduce the chance of the project waiting on clarification mid-build, though new questions may still come up as the redesign progresses. Keeping a short record of who you asked, what they said, and what remains unresolved gives you a reference point when decisions come up later.