How to Audit Your Stone Website Before a Redesign
A redesign without an audit is like resurfacing a road without checking the foundations. You might end up with a beautiful new site that repeats all the problems of the old one – because nobody took the time to understand what actually needed to change.
Before you brief a designer or agency, do this audit first.
Start With Analytics
Your first stop is Google Analytics (or whatever analytics platform you use). You want to answer these questions: Which pages get the most traffic? Where do visitors enter the site (not just the homepage)? Which pages have the highest bounce rate? Where do visitors drop off in the buying journey? How much traffic comes from mobile vs desktop?
This data tells you which pages matter most and where the current site is failing. If your most-visited page is a product category page that converts poorly, that’s a priority for the redesign. If most of your traffic comes from mobile and your site is desktop-only, that’s an urgent structural fix.
Inventory Your Content
List every page on your current site. For each one, note: Is the content accurate and up to date? Is it genuinely useful to your target buyers? Does it have a clear purpose and call to action? Is it indexed in Google, and does it rank for anything?
This inventory will tell you what to keep, what to update, and what to cut. A common mistake in redesigns is migrating all old content automatically – including pages that are outdated, irrelevant, or dragging down the site’s overall authority.
Assess Technical Health
Run your current site through a technical audit tool (Google Search Console is free and excellent). Look for: broken links (404 errors), duplicate content, pages with missing or duplicate meta titles, slow page speed scores, mobile usability issues, and crawl errors.
These issues should all be fixed in the new site – which means documenting them now so they aren’t accidentally carried over.
Review Your SEO Footprint
If your current site has any pages ranking in Google, you need to know about them before you redesign. A redesign that changes URLs without proper redirects can wipe out years of search equity in days.
Use Google Search Console to identify which pages receive organic traffic. Export this list and ensure that your redesign either keeps these URLs or sets up permanent redirects from old URLs to new equivalent pages.
Gather Buyer Feedback
The most underused audit input: talk to the people who actually use your website. Ask a few existing clients what they look for when they visit, what they find confusing, and what they wish was easier to find.
Even three to five conversations can reveal usability issues that no analytics tool will surface. B2B buyers will often tell you directly: ‘I can never find your technical data sheets’, or ‘I didn’t realize you stocked that material’. That’s valuable design input.
Document What Works – and Why
Not everything needs to change. If a particular product page template is working well, understand why before you redesign it. If a certain type of project content drives inquiries, make sure the new site maintains that structure.
A redesign should solve problems and build on strengths – not reinvent everything for the sake of newness. The audit is how you distinguish between the two.
