Website Design Checklist 2025: 32 Steps for a Flawless Launch

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Table of Contents

• Pre-Launch Planning
• Mood boards
• Mockups
• Content Strategy & Marketing Alignment
• Wireframes
• Site Development
• Website Quality Check & Testing
• Launch
• Conclusion
• Hire The Best Website Design Company in Australia

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, staying ahead of design trends and user expectations is crucial for creating a successful website.

In 2025, businesses need to ensure their web design not only aligns with their brand identity but also enhances user engagement and meets search engine optimisation standards.

This comprehensive Website Design Checklist for 2025 is your ultimate guide to launching a visually appealing and user-friendly site that captivates your target audience and ranks well in search engine results.

From pre-launch planning to post-launch optimisations, this Website design checklist will help you navigate the web design process with confidence and achieve effective launch success.

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We will cover the website design checklist in distinct phases to ensure a seamless and successful launch.

The phases include Pre-Launch, Launch, and Post-Launch Maintenance. Each phase is crucial in its own right, ensuring that your site is not only visually appealing and user-friendly but also optimised for search engines and tailored to meet user expectations.

By breaking down the process into these comprehensive phases, you can address every aspect of web design and development, leading to a successful website launch in 2025.

Pre-Launch Planning

When you start creating a new website, like for a SaaS business, it’s important to plan its look and purpose. To stand out and attract more customers, you should study your top competitors to make something better. This is where the pre-launch part of the website redesign checklist is useful. By understanding the market, you can design a site that fills gaps and offers a better user experience, matching your brand and engaging users.

1. Ideation

The first part of website design is ideation. This is where you decide what the website will look like, how many pages it will have, and the type of design each page will feature. You’ll map out the exact customer journey and how people will convert or purchase your product. Essentially, this phase is all about brainstorming and creating a rough draft of your website’s structure. Usually, this is done with pen and paper, where you highlight everything that comes to mind about the website and jot it down.

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2. Design inspirations

During the ideation phase, draw design inspiration from your competitors and top websites that resonate with your business offerings. Analyse what they are doing right and wrong, and step into the shoes of your potential customers or clients to understand how they will interact with your website. Capture screenshots of various website designs that inspire you and integrate these ideas into your own. This process helps in forming the foundational design of your site.

3. Swipe Book

There is a common practice in web design known as a “swipe book.” When we refer to a swipe book, we are talking about collecting visual inspirations by taking screenshots of design elements we admire from existing websites, particularly those offering SaaS products or operating within our industry. These screenshots are then compiled into a folder or document, aptly named the swipe book. This resource serves as a visual guide, providing us with design references and insights that will be invaluable when we begin the website creation process.

4. Animations vs Images vs Videos

During the ideation phase, we brainstormed ideas for animations, videos, and images that could enhance the visual appeal of the website. We often take screenshots, screen grabs, or download videos from other websites that inspire us. These are kept as samples, serving as a reference when we start the website creation process.

5. Identifying User Journey

Every website has a core objective, which is to guide the user towards a specific goal, whether it’s filling out a form, generating a lead, ordering a product, or seeking help. This journey is what we refer to as the user journey. Identifying the user journey during the initial planning stage is crucial. In this phase, you create a mind map outlining the user’s path: which top pages they will visit first, how they will navigate to those pages, and where they will go next. This is a fundamental step when designing a website, ensuring that the user’s experience is intuitive and goal-oriented.

6. Functionality on Site

Just as you map out the user’s journey, it’s essential to define the functionalities your website will offer. For instance, on the homepage, consider whether to include a captivating video, a striking still image, or an interactive animation. The choices are vast, and each element contributes to the overall functionality of your website, ensuring it is engaging and effective.

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Mood boards

Once we have completed the ideation phase, the next step is to create mood boards. These mood boards play a critical role in determining the visual identity of our website. They help shape the overall theme, including colour schemes, font styles, and branding elements that will be used. By establishing these design foundations, mood boards guide the creative direction of the website and ensure consistency with our branding activities.

7. Finalising Theme

Having a unified theme for your website is crucial, and this is typically established during the creation of mood boards. Whether you’re working with a web designer or handling it yourself, mood boards provide a range of options for the website’s visual appeal, ensuring consistency in look and feel. Think of it like shopping for an outfit: you consider different colours and styles, matching them like joggers, pants, shirts, and jackets to visualise how they’ll come together. Similarly, mood boards allow you to experiment and finalise the theme of your website by creating a collage of design elements that reflect your brand’s identity and vision.

8. Colour Tones & Fonts

Next, ensure you have various colour tones and fonts ready for your website, or at least decide on them during the mood board phase. This helps visualise how these elements will blend with your selected theme. Finalising your font and colour scheme at this stage is crucial because doing it later, during wireframing or development, can lead to chaos and disrupt the whole process.

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9. Branding

Most companies typically have a creative branding or brand book to guide them in creating their websites, logos, business cards, and other collateral. It’s essential to adhere to these brand guidelines and relevant web design when designing your website. This means ensuring that themes, colour tones, and fonts all align with these guidelines. That’s why it’s crucial to consider them during the planning stage.

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Mockups

After finalising a mood board, the next crucial step is to create mockups for your website. When we mention mockups, we’re referring to the comprehensive design of each page. For instance, there will be a distinct design for the homepage, and separate designs for product web pages, solution web pages, blogs, news web pages, and any other gated content like case studies or white papers. These mockups are typically crafted using tools like Figma, Photoshop, or any software that you or your designer prefers.

10. Understand Your Target Audience’s Reaction

To truly grasp how your target audience will respond to your design, it’s essential to conduct A/B testing or beta tests. These tests provide valuable insights into whether your design choices resonate positively or need adjustments. You can conduct these tests internally within your organisation to gauge initial reactions or extend them to a sample group of around 20 individuals from various industries who could be potential clients or customers. Simply ask them for feedback on the new design and any improvements they’d like to see. This feedback is invaluable for refining your mockups and ensuring that the final design is something people genuinely appreciate.

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11. Industry Best Practices

When you’re crafting a website for a specific audience, it’s vital to nail those industry best practices. Let’s say you’re diving into the banking world—certain design features, like padlock security icons, are a must. They boost the site’s credibility and give users the confidence they expect when dealing with finance. On the flip side, if you’re in the skincare game, you’ll notice a lot of pinks, greens, and light browns. These colours reflect the natural skin tones people gravitate towards. You won’t see many skincare brands rocking black or blue themes because they just don’t vibe with the product. Stick to these industry norms, and you’re more likely to win over users and drive those conversions.

Content Strategy & Marketing Alignment

Once you’ve finalised the website mockups, the next critical step is to develop a comprehensive content strategy that aligns with your marketing goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). This ensures that as you embark on creating the website, you have a clear understanding of the type of content and strategies that will effectively promote your product. By aligning content and marketing objectives early on, you can seamlessly integrate these elements into your business model, enhancing overall success.

12. Number of Pages

When discussing the number of pages for your website, it’s essential to consider two main categories. First, there are the core pages, often referred to as “money pages,” which focus on showcasing your products, solutions, and any other related offerings. These pages are crucial for driving conversions and presenting your corporate identity.

Secondly, there are pages crafted primarily for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes, such as blogs, case studies, white papers, and news sections. While these pages provide valuable information to visitors, their primary goal is to enhance search engine visibility and attract more traffic to your site.

Finalising these pages during the mockup stage is essential, as they guide you in understanding the necessary improvements and content strategies needed to optimise your website effectively.

13. Length of Pages

When it comes to page length, it’s often driven by marketing needs unless the product team has specific requirements. Typically, most websites feature about 6 to 7 sections. However, SEO-focused pages can stretch to 15 or even 20 sections, depending on what the SEO team needs to bolster content depth. Ideally, a well-structured page should have at least 6 to 7 sections. The first section usually includes the CTA and hero panel, followed by sections that detail the product. Next, there’s a section showcasing logos of partner companies to build trust, followed by customer testimonials. Another CTA section typically appears before the footer, which wraps up the page. The number of sections can be adjusted based on your specific needs, ensuring your site remains engaging and effective.

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14. Gated Pages/Demo Pages

When planning your website alongside marketing strategies, it’s crucial to determine the gated content pages you’ll offer. These pages typically include white papers, case studies, ebooks, reports, templates, and other downloadable resources that provide value to your prospects. Deciding on these pages during the website creation phase is essential.

Next, consider the demo pages. These are vital lead magnets designed to help prospects connect with you. When visitors land on your site, the demo page serves as a key touchpoint for engagement. Your primary objective is to maximise the number of visitors who fill out the demo page. In the SaaS industry, the typical conversion rate for demo page completions is around 2% to 3%. However, aiming for a higher percentage can significantly boost your lead generation efforts.

15. Popups/Notification Bars/Site Banners

When crafting your content strategy, it’s essential to decide on the marketing assets that will be integrated into your website. Typically, these include pop-ups, notification bars (often referred to as Hello Bars), and side banners. These elements play a crucial role in keeping visitors informed about the latest happenings on your business or non-profit sites. Whether it’s a new promotion, a special coupon, an upcoming event, or the launch of a white paper, these tools ensure your audience stays in the loop. Visitors can engage with these updates by clicking on the notification bar, exploring the side banner, or responding to pop-ups. These pop-ups can be timed, exit-intent, or other variations. Therefore, determining these assets during the mockup phase is vital to ensure seamless integration into the overall web design.

16. Page Designs & Folds

When planning your content strategy, it’s important to think about the design of each page, including the layout and sections. Websites can have multiple sections, and within those, there can be different column setups like three-column or two-column layouts. As you build the website, you’ll need to decide on these details because each section will need content—some sections might just need headings or calls to action, while others will need more detailed text. The more detailed you are during the content planning, the easier it is to fill in the actual content later. Usually, during the design phase, we use placeholder text, known as Lorem Ipsum, to visualise how the content will fit. Once the mockups are ready, the content team can replace this dummy text with the real content.

Wireframes

Now that you’ve designed the mockups and established a content strategy, which means you have the website content ready, the next step is to create wireframes. Wireframes represent the final design layout of the website. These can be in PSD format or Figma files, which are later converted into HTML. Wireframes are a crucial component of the web design process, providing a visual blueprint for the site’s structure and functionality.

17. PSDs or Figma Files

When creating wireframes, decide whether you will use Photoshop PSDs or Figma files. Recently, Figma has become the preferred choice for many because it allows designs to be exported directly for web development. These designs can be converted into different image formats that developers can easily use, or turned into HTML. Additionally, Figma’s integration with Webflow, Framer, and other new CMS software available in the market makes it a superior option compared to other wireframing tools.

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18. Mobile Responsiveness

When designing your website, it’s crucial to ensure mobile responsiveness. Check if the site displays correctly on mobile devices, identifying any missing sections or faults. Assess whether media queries are effectively utilised and confirm that all buttons function properly on mobile. Decide if you want a granular approach or a distinct design for mobile responsiveness. These considerations are essential, and you must communicate with developers to create a mobile-responsive website that offers a seamless user experience across desktops, mobile devices, and tablets.

19. Functionality Setting

One issue I have personally encountered when creating different websites is determining the functionality of various features. Clients often do not decide on the functionality of features to be added to the website. For instance, if a banner is to be included, decisions need to be made about its design, such as whether it will be vertical, and how it will scroll—vertically or horizontally. These are aspects that need to be determined during the website creation process, but many overlook them. It’s crucial to address these issues as it helps developers avoid multiple iterations. Additionally, it’s important to consult with your audience, as ultimately, it’s your website, and you should have control over its creation.

20. Finalising File Types

An important aspect during the wireframing stage is to determine the file types that will be used. Most people use WebP files for images, as it’s the new format. For videos, the MP4 format is commonly used. When it comes to animations, Lottie or Dot Lottie animations are becoming more user-friendly and easier to use. Previously, similar tasks were done with jQuery or JSON. It’s crucial to finalise the right type of files for your business website.

Site Development

Once we have the wireframes ready, it is time for site development. When we start the site development, we need to consider a few key aspects. Let’s discuss all of them in detail here.

21. Theme Development

The first step is theme development. This involves creating the overall layout and structure that will be used across all website pages. The theme consists of the design assets and elements that define the website’s appearance and functionality.

22. Page Development

After that, the next step is page development. Page development typically begins once you have the theme ready. For instance, when creating the homepage, you first establish the theme, ensuring elements like the footer, header, menu, and navigation are in place, as these are part of the theme. Next, you design the sections, or “folds.” Some of these folds, such as banners, CTAs, and testimonials, are already available in the asset library and can be easily dragged onto the homepage. However, you may need to customise some folds, which is what we refer to as page design. This process is repeated for almost every page, where each needs to be designed comprehensively.

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Website Quality Check & Testing

Once the website has been developed, the next step is to start testing. You need to test multiple aspects of the website to ensure it is functioning correctly. The first thing to check is the speed. Secondly, ensure that the website’s functionality is intact and that it is easy to navigate. Verify that scripts on the website are working properly. There are many elements you need to check, and we have discussed all of them below.

23. Speed Testing

Speed testing is a crucial aspect of website design. Recently, a client approached us with a website that had been designed by an agency, and it was extremely heavy. We examined the website and found that they were using Spline and 3D animations on the homepage and almost every other page, especially in the header and the first fold. This made the website very heavy, resulting in loading times of over 20 seconds, which deterred visitors. We addressed this issue by moving away from Spline to more efficient solutions, which significantly improved the loading speed. This experience highlights the importance of conducting speed testing during the design process to ensure the final website meets speed requirements.

24. Functionality Testing

You might be surprised at how many functionalities are often introduced to a website in its initial stages, many of which lack a clear basis or requirement. That’s why, during the early stages of website development, it’s crucial to reassess whether any of the functionalities you initially considered are truly necessary. For instance, certain features like animations, jQuery scripts, or other types of action scripts may no longer be needed. It’s important to rethink this process during the web design phase to minimise the number of functionalities added. Remember, each functionality involves scripts running either on the back end or front end, and the more scripts you use, the slower your website can become.

25. User journey testing

The user journey is a critical component of any marketing website. As you progress to the development stage, it’s essential to test whether the envisioned user journey aligns with the actual implementation. This involves examining how users will navigate your website, from the moment they arrive to how they interact with various elements and move through different pages. Testing at this stage ensures that the user experience meets your expectations and enhances overall engagement.

26. Security Testing

Another important aspect of website design is security testing. You need to ensure that the website is completely secure and free of vulnerabilities or loopholes. This is achieved by running various security tests to confirm that your server is fully protected. It’s crucial to prevent any SQL injection attacks and to ensure that all patches are applied to the website’s backend, safeguarding against potential data loss in the future.

27. SEO & Marketing Testing

Similarly, the website should also be tested for marketing and SEO activities before launch. This ensures that the site doesn’t have any glitches and can rank properly without technical issues from the SEO perspective. It’s crucial to check for marketing errors like incorrect copy, wrong image sizes, or broken images, which could impact your market presence later on. For instance, we had a client whose previous agency built their website but didn’t test the images properly. The images were around 3MB to 4MB, which were placed on the homepage, significantly increasing the page size. As a result, the site took about 20 seconds to load, deterring visitors. This example highlights the importance of thorough testing to prevent such issues when creating your website.

28. Compliance Testing

Compliance testing is crucial for ensuring that your website adheres to the necessary regulations in various regions, such as the UK, Middle East, or USA. These laws ensure your website meets all required standards, possesses necessary certifications, and operates without any red flags. For instance, if your site involves e-commerce transactions, it must comply with two-factor or three-factor authentication protocols, such as 3D verification, provided by payment gateways. This testing is essential to prevent any involvement in money laundering, terrorism financing, fraud, or scams. Conducting compliance testing during the website creation phase is vital to avoid any potential reputational damage once the site is live.

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Launch

Now that your website is fully developed and has undergone thorough testing, it is time to launch and see how users interact with it. The launch phase is crucial, and there are several steps you should take to ensure a smooth rollout. Let’s briefly explore these key steps in the launching process.

29. Launching Website

Now that your website is ready, it’s time to launch it. Be prepared to encounter some glitches that might not have been identified during the initial testing phase. However, most of these issues should have been addressed. It’s important for your marketing or technical team to document any problems or glitches that arise during the launch. These should then be resolved during post-launch testing and quality assurance.

30. Post-Launch Testing & Phases

Following the launch, several issues may surface that require attention to guarantee your website operates smoothly. These issues often involve aspects such as website quality, speed, or functionality. The post-launch phase generally lasts about two months, with the initial 10 to 15 days focused on identifying and rectifying these problems.

It’s best to launch the website in stages. Initially, some issues will be identified and addressed, leading to a relaunch. This process is repeated in a second phase, where additional fixes are made. Finally, a third phase involves another round of testing to ensure everything is running smoothly.

31. Quality Assurance

Create a detailed list of all identified issues and address them methodically, testing each fix in a staging environment. This ensures the live website remains unaffected while you resolve these concerns. Once all issues are tackled in this initial phase, conduct a thorough quality assurance check before fully launching the website.

32. Regular Site Monitoring

Once the website is live, it’s essential to continue monitoring it regularly. Here are some pointers to ensure smooth post-launch operations:

• Engage with Your Developer: If you’ve hired a web designer or developer, inquire about their post-maintenance services. Many offer a 30 or 60-day post-maintenance period during which they analyse and track any issues that arise.
• Track User Journey: Pay attention to the user journey across your website. Identify how users navigate from entry to exit points and ensure all touchpoints are accessible.
• Monitor User Experience: Regularly check for any problems users might face, ensuring that their journey from entry to exit is seamless.
• Accessibility Checks: Ensure that all touchpoints are functioning correctly and that users can easily navigate through them.

By following these steps, you can maintain a successful website and provide a positive user experience.

Conclusion

Congratulations on successfully creating and launching your website! You’ve followed the comprehensive website redesign checklist, and now it’s time to shift your focus to marketing your site, scaling your business, and generating revenue. So, take the next step and make the most of your new online presence!

Hire The Best Website Design Company in Australia

If you’re looking for one of the best website design agencies in Australia to help you get started, or if you’re stuck in the middle of your website design project and need a helping hand to revamp your website and take it to the next level, then you are at the right place. We at WP Creative have been successfully working with clients to create, develop, and design their websites from scratch, turning them into multimillion-dollar businesses.

Get in touch with us today to get your website successfully started.

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