Essential Site Structure Checks Before a Website Redesign
Learn the essential site structure checks you need to perform before a website redesign. We cover URL architecture, hierarchy analysis, redirect planning, and other commonly overlooked items in a practical checklist format.
About to kick off a website redesign? The biggest trap we see in client projects is jumping into visual design with an incomplete picture of the current site. Teams usually notice dead links, orphan pages, or missing redirects only days before launch.
Here are five checks worth running before you touch a single mockup — most can be completed in minutes with a single crawl of the live site.
1. URL architecture and directory hierarchy
List every URL first. A flat CSV is enough. Look for:
- Inconsistent directories (
/service/vs/products/) - Stale campaign pages that no one remembers
- Mixed upper/lowercase URLs
- Inconsistent trailing slashes
This is where you sort each page into keep / merge / redirect / delete. The quality of your new URL scheme almost entirely depends on this triage.
2. Internal links and reachability
Even live production sites typically contain orphan pages that nobody links to— but that still pull organic traffic. Surface them before the redesign erases them.
- Hops required from global nav or footer
- Pages with an unusually low inbound link count
- Per-page inbound link counts across the site
3. Broken links and redirect chains
Catalogue all 404s before you migrate. Preserving a broken URL into the new site only moves the SEO problem forward. Also look for legacy redirect chains (/old/ → /new/ → /newer/) — Google penalises chains with three or more hops, so flatten them down to a single 301 during the migration.
4. SEO metadata (title / meta / canonical / noindex)
- Empty or duplicate titles
- Missing or overly long meta descriptions
- Canonical URLs that disagree with the page URL
- Pages accidentally marked noindex
- Number and content of H1 tags
When a redesign drops one specific page's ranking, the root cause is almost always duplicated titles or mis-configured canonicals.
5. Page count and structural scale
"How many pages does this site have?" is a question nobody can answer confidently at the proposal stage. A single crawl gives you an accurate count, the depth distribution, and the maximum depth reached.
Pre-redesign checklist
- Export the complete URL list (CSV / sheet)
- Sort pages: keep / merge / redirect / delete
- Identify orphan pages and plan the new link graph
- Catalogue 404s and redirect chains
- Snapshot current SEO metadata
- Build the old → new URL mapping table
sitemora produces all of the above from a single URL entry, compressing several days of manual audit into a few minutes.
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