Use this school website redesign checklist to plan a rebuild that genuinely improves things. Work through these items and your relaunch will land smoothly instead of limping live.
Before you redesign: the checklist
Content audit
List every page on the current site and decide: keep, rewrite or delete. Most schools can safely remove a third of their pages, which are outdated, duplicated or never visited. A leaner site is cheaper to rebuild and easier for parents to use.
Stakeholder input
Survey parents, staff, pupils and governors about what works and what frustrates them. Ten minutes of listening now saves months of rework after launch. Pay special attention to office staff, who field the complaints the current site generates.
Statutory review
Check every required publication against current DfE guidance before migrating anything. A redesign is the perfect moment to fix compliance gaps, not to copy old problems into a new design. Keep a checklist signed off by leadership.
Photo and brand refresh
New photography transforms a redesign more than any layout trick. Book a photographer for a real school day to capture authentic moments. While you are at it, review whether the logo, colours and fonts still represent the school well.
The redesign in three phases
Step 1: Plan
Agree goals, success measures, sitemap and content owners in writing. Write the brief your designer will actually use, including must-have features and explicit non-goals. Get leadership sign-off before any design work starts to avoid mid-project direction changes.
Step 2: Build
Design, develop and populate in visible stages with regular reviews. Check progress on phones as well as desktops throughout, not just at the end. Populate with final content, never placeholder text, so what you approve is what parents will see.
Step 3: Launch and bed in
Set up redirects from old URLs, announce the launch to parents, train all content editors, and fix the inevitable small snags quickly in the first fortnight. Schedule a review after one term to capture lessons and plan improvements.
Redesign the content first and the visuals second. Pretty pages with stale content still fail.
Key takeaway: The unglamorous preparation work, audits, stakeholders, redirects, determines whether a redesign succeeds or merely looks different.
How long does a redesign take?
Typically one to two terms from brief to launch, depending on how ready your content is and how quickly decisions are made. Rushing usually costs more than it saves.
Will we lose Google rankings?
Not if redirects are planned properly. Map every old URL to its new equivalent before launch day, and monitor search performance for a month afterwards.
Should we change our domain?
Usually not. Keeping your established domain preserves search equity and avoids confusing parents. Only rebrand the domain for strong strategic reasons. If you do change it, run both domains in parallel for a full term with proper redirects before retiring the old one.
Ready to grow?
We manage school redesigns end to end, from content audit to launch day and beyond. Firm fixed price once we understand your project.
