Let’s be honest: redesigns are fun. New fonts, new layouts, a fresh colour palette, a launch party if you are feeling brave. Upkeep is not fun. Nobody has ever celebrated a successful plugin update with cake. But if you have been itching to redesign your website, I’d like to suggest a small detour first. Spend an afternoon running the checklist below on the site you already have. Half the time, the things that make a site feel old are not the design at all. They are faults you can fix in an afternoon, and if you skip them, they will simply move into the new site with you.

Grab a coffee, open your CMS in one tab and a notes document in another, and work through it in order. Tick things off honestly. If you find something you cannot fix right now, write down who will fix it and by when.

Part one: the engine room

• Core software: Is your CMS on a supported, current version? Updates carry security fixes, and an out-of-date core is the most common way sites get into trouble.
• Plugins and extensions: List every one. For each, ask whether it is active, whether it is still maintained by its author and whether you actually use it. Deactivated plugins that are still installed are leftovers you can remove.
• Theme and child theme: Check that custom changes live in a child theme or equivalent, so an update does not wipe them out.
• Users: Look at who has access. Former staff, old agencies and long-forgotten test accounts should lose their logins today.
• Backups: Confirm one exists, that it is recent and, importantly, that somebody has actually tried restoring from it.

Part two: content that has aged

Open your pages list and sort by last edited. The oldest entries are your first suspects. Read each with a visitor’s eyes and ask three things: is this still true, is this still wanted, and does it lead somewhere useful? Anything with outdated prices, retired services or an event from years back should be updated, merged with a better page or removed with a redirect to the nearest relevant alternative.

It helps to compare what you have against a sensible baseline. Our overview of the pages every business website should include makes a handy yardstick: if a core page is missing or hopelessly dated, repair that before anything else. The same goes for your service descriptions, which we discussed in how clear service pages help turn visitors into enquiries. A dated service page quietly loses business.

Part three: links and forms

This is the section that surprises people. Walk through your navigation menu, footer, buttons and the links inside your best-performing articles. Then do the same for your contact forms: submit a test entry and make sure it arrives where it should, with a sensible confirmation message. Forms break silently after email changes or plugin updates, and a broken enquiry form is worse than no form, because visitors believe they have contacted you.

Checking links by hand is fine for a small site, but it does not scale to every profile, newsletter and social bio that points at your pages. Teams who maintain a lot of outbound and inbound addresses sometimes use a link-management platform. URLSnow is one such service; it keeps your published links together and its automatic health checks log whether each one still responds, so a dead address is flagged rather than discovered by a prospective client.

Part four: speed, search and housekeeping

• Open the site on a phone over a mobile connection. Is it still pleasant to use?
• Look at the largest images and replace oversized files with properly sized ones.
• Check that each important page has a clear title and a short description written for people, not for robots.
• Review your category and tag structure. Duplicated or near-empty categories confuse visitors and search engines alike.
• Clear spam comments, abandoned drafts and unused media files.

None of these steps require a developer. Most are a few minutes each in the dashboard. The effect adds up, though: a tidier site loads faster, reads better and is easier for whoever inherits it next.

A quick word on ownership

Every item on this list needs a name beside it. Who updates the plugins? Who answers the form enquiries? Who decides when a page has outlived its usefulness? In small teams the honest answer is often “whoever notices”, which means nobody. Assign each area to one person, even if that person is you wearing a different hat on Tuesdays. A site with clear owners ages gracefully; a site with shared responsibility tends to age in public.

Part five: the decision at the end

Once the list is done, look at your notes. You will usually have three piles. The first is quick wins you fixed on the spot. The second is things you retired, which makes your site lighter. The third is genuine design limits: layouts that cannot show what you need, navigation that fights your content, a theme that has stopped being supported. That last pile is your real argument for a redesign, and it will be a much shorter and more convincing brief than a vague feeling that the site looks tired.

Going into a redesign this way also saves money. Agencies charge for every page they migrate, every redirect they set up and every plugin they have to reconfigure. Hand them a clean site with an honest list of limitations and you pay for the work that matters rather than for archaeological digging.

Make it a habit, not a rescue

The best outcome is that you never need a rescue again. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar and run a lighter version of this checklist on a schedule. Keep a one-page log of what you checked, what you changed and what you decided to leave. After a couple of rounds you will know the personality of your site: which plugin always needs attention, which page ages fastest, which form is touchy.

And when you do finally launch the shiny new design, you will do it from a position of strength. The foundations are sound, the content is current, the links work and the forms deliver. The party can have cake after all.