Most ecommerce redesigns don’t fail because the new design looks bad. They fail because the team rushed in without a checklist, treating the build like a creative project instead of a commercial one. Here’s the list we work through before every store rebuild at WebAwesome.
1. Audit what’s actually broken
Before you redesign anything, look at your data. Which pages do people leave on? Where do carts drop? Which products get views but no add-to-carts?
You can’t fix what you haven’t measured. Pull heatmaps, funnel reports, and customer support ticket patterns. The biggest wins almost always come from fixing the worst-performing journey, not from a fresh coat of paint. We’ve written before about why functional sites convert, not just beautiful ones – the audit is where that principle starts.
2. Define one primary goal
“More sales” is not a goal, it’s a wish. Pick one metric the redesign must move: conversion rate, average order value, returning customer rate, or organic traffic. Write down the baseline number.
Without a baseline and a single target, you’ll argue six months in about whether the project “worked.”
3. Sort out the catalogue before design starts
Every ecommerce project derails when someone realises the product taxonomy is a mess. Categories overlap, filters return nonsense, and PDPs are missing specs or use inconsistent sizing.
The catalogue is the foundation of an ecommerce site, not the design. If your filters don’t match how customers actually shop, no amount of clever UI will save it.
4. Redesign PDPs and search, not just the homepage
Homepage traffic is a small share of most stores’ revenue. Product pages and internal search do the heavy lifting.
Make sure the redesign treats PDPs as a priority: clear imagery, scannable specs, reviews, a prominent add-to-cart, working variant pickers, and genuinely related products at the bottom.
5. Plan the checkout like its own conversion project
Baymard’s research has put cart abandonment rates near 70% for years. Most of it is friction: surprise shipping costs, forced account creation, clunky payment steps, and slow pages.
Checkout needs its own line item on the checklist. Don’t accept the platform default. Strip it down, test guest checkout, surface the total cost early, and make sure mobile checkout works end to end.
6. Design mobile-first, not mobile-last
Most ecommerce traffic in the UK is mobile, and the share keeps growing. If your redesign starts on a desktop artboard, you’ve already biased the project.
Sketch the homepage, a PDP, the cart, and the checkout on a phone screen first. Tap targets, thumb zones, and form input quirks all matter here.
7. Don’t leave SEO until the end
Redesigns are one of the most common ways ecommerce stores lose rankings. URL changes, missing redirects, content migrations, and image rewrites can quietly wipe out years of organic traffic.
Include a technical SEO pass as part of the build, not as a cleanup at the end. Crawl the old site, map URLs, write redirect rules, and preserve structured data. The broader playbook lives in our SEO strategies guide.
8. Add trust signals where decisions happen
Returns policy, delivery dates, secure checkout badges, real reviews – none of these matter if they’re only on the homepage. They belong on PDPs, in the cart, and at checkout.
Accessibility sits in this bucket too. Keyboard navigation, contrast, alt text, and clear error messages are now table stakes, and they widen your audience at the same time.
9. Soft launch, then watch
The worst ecommerce launches hide bugs for weeks. Plan a phased rollout: go live with a small slice of traffic first, monitor errors, watch real session recordings, and fix before opening the floodgates.
Keep the old site running in parallel until you’re confident. Then turn it off properly, with redirects in place and analytics double-checked.
What to do next
If you’re staring at a redesign brief and a tight deadline, the fastest path forward is a 30-minute conversation with someone who’s done this before. We’ll look at your store, walk through the checklist with your actual data, and tell you where the biggest wins are sitting.
Book a free discovery call and we’ll talk through your ecommerce redesign – no pitch deck required.