A website rebuild often starts with a familiar set of questions about which pages are staying, what needs rewriting, whether new photography is needed and what the new site should look like. They’re all reasonable, but they can come slightly too early.
If the website is going to be part of the business for the next few years, a few bigger things are worth settling first. What should it help the business achieve, and how are people supposed to find it? What should customers be able to do once they arrive, does anything need to happen behind the scenes, and what is likely to change after launch? Those decisions affect the structure of the site, the content you need and even which technology makes sense, so leaving them until halfway through a build tends to make everything harder.
Start with the job the website needs to do
For one business, the website may mainly need to explain its services properly and generate good enquiries. Another might need people to book, buy, register, log in or manage part of their relationship with the business online. It’s worth defining that before thinking about individual pages, by looking at what happens from the point somebody first discovers the business through to whatever you ultimately want them to do. The website might only support part of that journey, but knowing where it fits makes the build much easier to plan.
It also stops features being added simply because another website has them. A booking system is useful if bookings are part of how the business works, and a customer account is useful if customers have something worth managing there. Neither becomes valuable just because it makes the site sound more advanced. We think about this through EDP’s FUTURE Loop, where a digital presence needs to help people Find, Understand and Trust a business, but for some organisations the job continues into Use and Return as well. Knowing how far that relationship needs to go online changes what you’re really building.
Think about search before deciding the structure
SEO is much harder to retrofit once the structure of a new website has been decided. If different services matter commercially, it’s worth understanding how people search for them before deciding they can all live on one general page, and the same goes for locations, sectors and the questions customers ask while comparing their options.
AI search has made this more important. Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and other search experiences need enough clear information to understand what the business does, who it works with and where its expertise sits, and a structure that leaves important parts of the business barely explained makes that harder however good the design looks. Some keyword and competitor research before the build can influence much more than page copy, because it affects which pages exist in the first place and how they connect. The useful question is whether the structure gives the business enough room to properly explain the things it wants to be found for.
Look beyond what the customer sees
A rebuild is also a good time to look at what happens after somebody fills in a form, books something or creates an account. Where does that information go, does somebody copy it into another system, and are staff updating the same details in several places? Does the customer have to contact the business for something they could reasonably manage themselves? In many cases the systems already in place are perfectly good and just need to connect properly with the new website. Sometimes the rebuild shows a chance to make part of the operation easier at the same time, though that doesn’t automatically mean building a large custom platform.
Having that conversation early matters. If bookings, customer accounts, staff administration or integrations could eventually become part of the same setup, knowing it before the build gives you more options than finding out six months afterwards. We’ll go much further into this in the next article, because there’s a point where a website starts becoming part of how the business itself operates.
Work out what you actually need to create
Content is another area where projects slow down surprisingly quickly. A design may be ready for a case study section when nobody has worked out which projects can be featured, a service page needs good photography that doesn’t exist yet, or the homepage is waiting for a video nobody has planned. Before the build gets too far, take stock of what you already have and what’s missing. That covers more than copy, since photography, video, reviews, team information, case studies, FAQs and examples of work all affect how convincing the finished site feels.
It’s worth thinking beyond launch too. If you’re investing in a proper content shoot, there may be a chance to capture material for the website, social media, future articles and email campaigns in one go rather than organising each separately later. Not every website needs an enormous content plan, but the content should be considered as part of the build rather than left to fill the empty spaces once the design is finished.
Decide what you want to learn after launch
A new website should give you a better view of what people are doing. That might mean knowing which services generate enquiries, where visitors arrive from, which pages contribute to conversions or how people use a booking journey, and the useful information depends on what the site is there to achieve. It’s another reason to think about measurement before launch, since adding analytics afterwards and hoping the right data is available rarely works out. You don’t need to track everything somebody does, only enough to tell whether the parts that matter are doing their job and where there’s room to improve.
Leave some room for the business to change
One of the easiest ways to make a new website unnecessarily expensive is trying to predict and build every future requirement from day one. Planning for something is different from building it immediately. You might know that customer accounts could matter later, that another location is likely to open, or that a manual process may eventually move online. Those things can influence decisions made now without being part of the first release.
We approach website projects at EDP with that wider picture in mind. Sometimes the answer is still a relatively straightforward website, and other projects involve search strategy, original content, customer-facing tools and internal systems planned around the same platform. Working out which of those genuinely belong together before the build starts saves a lot of rework later.
Frequently asked questions
Start with what the website needs to achieve, how people should find it, what visitors need to be able to do and what may need to happen behind the scenes.
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