What's included
Redesigns rarely fail on design. They fail on the two unglamorous tracks nobody staffs properly, moving the content and mapping the URLs, so the template gives both their own phases with their own dependencies:
- Discovery, Stakeholder interviews, analytics and Search Console review, competitor and user research, and agreed requirements and success metrics. Milestone: discovery sign-off.
- IA & content audit, Full URL inventory and crawl, a keep/merge/retire decision on every page, sitemap and navigation design and wireframes for the key templates. Milestone: IA approved.
- Design, Visual direction, the design system and components, key page designs, and a responsive and accessibility review. Milestone: design sign-off.
- Build, Environment and CMS setup, template and component development, integrations and forms, and analytics instrumentation. Milestone: build feature complete.
- Content migration, The migration mapping sheet, rewriting and optimizing content, media migration and the actual load into the CMS. Milestone: content freeze on the old site.
- SEO & redirect mapping, Old-URL-to-new-URL mapping for every page that changes, redirect rules built and tested, metadata and schema, canonicals and the XML sitemap. Milestone: redirect map signed off.
- QA, Cross-browser and device testing, accessibility audit, Core Web Vitals, a full redirect crawl on staging and stakeholder UAT. Milestone: QA sign-off.
- Launch & monitoring, Go/no-go, DNS cutover, post-launch redirect verification, sitemap submission and thirty days of crawl error and ranking monitoring.
Who uses this template
Digital project managers, web teams, and marketing leads use this to run a site rebuild without losing traffic. It covers discovery, content audit, design, build, content migration, SEO redirect mapping, QA, and launch monitoring, keeping the redesign on schedule while protecting search rankings through the cutover.
How to customize it
- Start the URL inventory in week one; the crawl of your existing site is the input to the content audit, the migration sheet and the redirect map.
- Add a row per content type or section if you are migrating thousands of pages, a single "migrate content" bar always hides a month.
- Extend the content rewriting bar honestly; it is usually the most underestimated task in the whole project, and it needs writers, not developers.
- Keep a content freeze milestone on the old site so the migration is not chasing a moving target.
- Set the redirect crawl on staging as a hard predecessor to go/no-go rather than a QA nicety.
- Stretch the post-launch monitoring bar to at least thirty days, search engines take weeks to recrawl and reprocess a changed site.
Scheduling tips
- Crawl the old site before anything else. You cannot audit, migrate or redirect what you have not inventoried, and most organizations have significantly more live URLs than they think.
- Do not launch on a Friday. Redirect and indexing problems surface within hours and need people available to fix them.
- Test redirects on staging with the real map. A spot check of ten URLs proves nothing; crawl the full old-URL list against staging and check every response code.
- Keep the old analytics running in parallel. Without a comparable baseline you cannot tell whether a post-launch traffic dip is seasonal or self-inflicted.
- Write content before the templates are finished. Content waiting on design is the most common cause of a launch date slipping twice.
- Baseline at design sign-off. Before that the scope is still moving; after it, variance is what the steering group should be looking at.
Related templates
- Marketing Plan Gantt Chart Template
- Free Content Calendar Gantt Chart Template
- Software Development Gantt Chart Template
- Browse all Gantt chart templates
Frequently asked questions
How long does a website redesign take?
Typically 4-9 months for a mid-sized site, driven mainly by content volume rather than design or build. The template uses a roughly nine-month schedule you can compress by cutting scope, not by cutting migration time.
What is a redirect map and why does it matter?
It is a row-per-URL mapping of every old address to its new one, implemented as 301 redirects. Without it, every changed URL loses its accumulated search equity and any inbound links pointing at it. It gets its own phase here for that reason.
When should content migration start?
As soon as the content audit is done and the mapping sheet exists, well before the build is finished. Content is the long pole, and starting it after templates are ready adds months.
What should I monitor after launch?
Crawl errors and 404s, index coverage, rankings for your priority terms and organic traffic against the pre-launch baseline, for at least thirty days. All four are on the chart as real tasks.
Is the website redesign template free?
Yes. Free Excel, PowerPoint and CSV downloads, and free online editing with no account and no watermark.