What matters for website design

A business website should help visitors understand the offer, judge whether it fits their needs, and contact the right person. The brief needs to cover content and user journeys as well as appearance. Existing search traffic, useful URLs, integrations, accessibility, and maintenance all affect the work. Redesigning without an inventory can remove valuable pages or break form and contact processs that already function.

Find the cause before choosing the fix

Find out when the problem began and what changed around that time. Check website updates, targeting, offers, spending, and how enquiries are handled. Test the basics first: a broken form can look like a campaign problem. Compare similar periods and groups of visitors instead of relying on one headline number.

Choose the most likely explanation and decide how to test it. Make one controlled change where possible, record it, and gather enough data to assess the result. If several things have to change at once, be clear that you may not know which one made the difference. Focus on what helps customers and the business, not simply on improving a dashboard figure.

A practical checklist

  1. Inventory existing pages, useful content, integrations, and search landing pages.
  2. Define the main customer journeys and the information each decision requires.
  3. Agree on content ownership, genuine evidence, and approval responsibilities.
  4. Build responsive layouts with readable text, useful links, and accessible forms.
  5. Test performance, navigation, redirects, and completed enquiries before launch.
  6. Document hosting, updates, backups, and ownership after handover.

Use this checklist to see what is working and what needs attention. Start with the most important change before taking on more work. Record what you change so you can understand the results later.

How to assess the results

Judge the site through completed tasks and business outcomes: qualified enquiries, bookings, successful form delivery, and relevant search traffic. Measure mobile and desktop experiences separately. Performance and accessibility are practical quality checks, but a fast website still needs a clear offer and a functioning response process.

What to include in your brief

Share your current website, the pages and features you need, approved content, and genuine examples of your work. Identify pages that already attract useful search traffic, connected systems, accessibility needs, and anything you want to edit yourself. Agree how content will be moved, what will be tested, who owns the finished work, and who maintains it.

Ask for a proposal explaining what is included, what your team needs to provide, who owns the work, and what it costs. Agree when you will review progress. Broad Promo can help you plan the services you need and explain how they fit together, with the details confirmed before work begins.

Further reading

web.dev: Web Vitals