Professional website redesign services
in Baltimore

After launch, somebody will ask whether the new site works better than the old one. Without figures from before the change, the answer is opinion. The baseline has to be recorded while the old site is still live, and that step is easy to forget in the rush to start designing.

Start with what the site is for. Enquiries, sales, sign ups, downloads, calls. Pick the few actions that matter and record how often they happen, from which pages, and on which devices, over a period long enough to include normal variation.

Seasonality can mislead. Comparing a busy month after launch with a quiet month before it flatters the redesign. Comparing against the same period a year earlier, where data exists, is fairer.

Record search visibility page by page. Which pages bring organic visitors, for which queries, and in what positions. A redesign that changes addresses or removes content can lose some of this, and the baseline shows exactly where.

Speed and technical health belong in the baseline too. Load times on real phones, error rates and accessibility scores give a before picture that the new build should beat.

Qualitative evidence counts as well. Recordings of a few people trying to complete common tasks on the old site, and notes from the sales and support teams about what customers complain of, describe problems that numbers alone miss.

Check that tracking is correct before trusting it. Broken tags, duplicate counts and internal traffic are common. Fixing measurement first, and waiting a few weeks for clean data, is better than comparing against a flawed number.

Agree the comparison in advance. Which figures, over which period, measured how. Deciding this before launch prevents a later argument in which each side picks the numbers that suit it.

Include the costs of the old site in the record. Hosting, licences, maintenance hours and the time staff spend on manual workarounds. A redesign is often justified as much by what it saves as by what it earns, and that case needs the old figures.

Keep the baseline somewhere permanent. A short document with the figures, the dates and the method, stored with the project files, outlasts the dashboards and the people who built them.