Skip to main content

WEB DESIGN & BRANDING · September 2026 · ~9 min read

What to prepare before a web project starts

Five things, and gathering them takes about a week. Your logins, a list of every page you have now, your photos, your service and location list, and your current traffic and inquiry numbers. Projects that start without them stall while waiting on the owner, and the waiting never appears on the invoice.

On this page

Nobody warns you about this part. You sign, you expect design, and instead you get a request list. Then the project waits on you, and the waiting is invisible on the invoice but very expensive in your week.

Do it in advance and the build moves at the speed of the builder rather than the speed of your inbox.

01

What logins do I actually need?

Four, and you should hold all of them in your own name.

The domain registrar. Not the reseller, the actual registrar account. This is the single most important asset in the project. If your previous developer registered it under their account, resolve that now, before anything else happens.

The current host. Even if you are moving, somebody needs access to pull the files and the database.

Your analytics and Search Console. These hold your history. Losing them means losing the ability to compare before and after, permanently.

Your Google Business Profile. It is not part of the website but it is the thing most local customers actually see, and web projects routinely change a phone number or address without updating it.

If any of these sit with a former agency, that is a conversation to have early and calmly. It is a common enough problem to have a name, and owning your domain, your site, and your data is worth reading before you make the call, because knowing exactly what to ask for changes how those conversations go.

02

What content do I need to gather?

Start with an inventory, not with new material.

List every page on your current site with its address. Most site tools will export this, or you can walk the menu. Google's own documentation on site moves with URL changes describes this list as the first step of the whole procedure: map old URLs to new ones, redirect permanently, and then, in Google's words, "keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year." You cannot map a list you never made. Migrating a website without losing your search rankings is almost entirely a function of whether this list existed early.

Then note which pages get traffic. Usually a handful carry most of it, and those are the ones that must survive the rebuild in some form.

Then gather photos. Real ones, of your actual work, your actual space, and your actual people. This is the item that delays projects most, because it needs a scheduled afternoon, not a search of your camera roll.

Then write the service and location lists. Every service in customer language, every city where you genuinely work. That list determines the page count, and it should be settled before anybody designs a template.

The gathering is not preparation for the project. On most builds it is the critical path.

03

What does the waiting actually cost?

Worked example

Here is the calculation, and it is the one that changes how owners treat this list. Substitute your own numbers.

Step one, count the asks. A typical small business build needs somewhere around 14 separate things from the owner: four logins, the page list, the traffic numbers, the service list, the location list, photos, staff names, licence details, pricing decisions, form recipients, and the copy approvals.

Step two, price a single round trip. When a request arrives cold in your inbox during service, three days to a reply is normal and generous. Some take a week.

Step three, run it serially. Fourteen requests at three days each, arriving one at a time as the builder reaches them, is 42 days of pure waiting (derived). Nobody is working during most of it.

Step four, run it batched. Gather all 14 in one prepared week and the same 42 days becomes 5. You have removed 37 days (derived) from the calendar without anybody working faster.

Step five, put it against the schedule. On a build quoted at eight weeks, that 42 days of waiting is roughly six extra weeks, so the project lands at fourteen weeks instead of eight, an overrun of 75%derived caused entirely by inbox latency.

Rerun it with your own honest reply time. Most owners find the number is worse than three days, and that is the argument for spending the week up front.

04

What numbers should I record first?

Whatever you have, recorded before anything changes.

Monthly visits. Monthly inquiries, calls and forms separately if you can. Your rankings for the three terms you care about most. Your current page load time on a phone.

Take a speed reading against Google's published thresholds rather than a score out of 100. Largest Contentful Paint is good at 2.5 seconds or below, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 milliseconds or below, Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or below, each measured at the 75th percentile of visits, and all three must pass. Speed affects behavior, but the relationship is not the simple one used to sell optimization packages, and separating the page speed myth from the measurement will tell you whether your current site has a real problem or a scoring-tool problem.

Confirm Search Console access this week rather than after launch, because some of its data does not backfill. When Google introduced its Search generative AI performance reports in June 2026, giving impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, the reporting started from a fixed date with no historical backfill. That view also publishes only impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates. Clicks, click-through rate, position and the user's prompt are explicitly not available. Worth knowing before a vendor offers you a report showing your rank inside an AI answer, because that is not a number anyone can read.

Take these numbers in the same week the project starts and save them somewhere outside the site. Screenshots are fine. Without them, six months from now you will have an argument about whether the new site helped, and no way to settle it.

05

What decisions should be made before anyone designs?

Three, and they belong to you, not the designer.

Who approves. One person. Projects with three approvers produce compromise designs and endless rounds, and the cost lands on your timeline.

What the site is for. Name the one action that matters most. Booked appointments, quote requests, phone calls, catering inquiries. A site optimized for everything is optimized for nothing.

Which business you are building for. This sounds obvious and it is the most common miss. Companies change what they sell and never update the site, so the rebuild quietly inherits the old positioning. The signs your website was built for a business you no longer run are easy to spot on somebody else's site and hard to spot on your own.

06

What can I safely leave off the list?

Two things that will be offered to you, and both are declinable.

Directory listings at volume. There will be a vendor offering to build hundreds of citations as part of the launch. Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report, in which 47 local search experts scored 187 factors, notes that citations lost about half a percentage point of weight this edition, continuing a downward trend. That is expert opinion rather than a controlled test, and it is enough to decline a volume package without worrying. Whether citation building is worth doing or is theatre has the longer answer.

The launch checklist item that says "submit your XML sitemap for rankings." Submitting a sitemap is genuinely useful during a move, and Google's site move documentation says to do it, because it helps Google discover the new addresses faster. What it does not do is improve where you rank. In that same Whitespark survey, "presence of XML sitemap" scored 28, which places it fifth from the bottom of 187 factors, in the company of social follower counts and keywords in meta descriptions. A sitemap is a discovery tool, not a ranking tactic, and anyone selling it as the latter is padding a scope. Ask for it as a launch step, not as a line item.

07

What to do this week

Open a folder. Anywhere, as long as it is yours and not the agency's.

Day one, logins. Confirm you can sign in to the registrar, the host, analytics, and your business profile. Reset passwords if you have to.

Day two, the page inventory. Every address on your current site in one list.

Day three, the numbers. Traffic, inquiries, rankings, phone speed test. Screenshot everything.

Day four, the lists. Services in customer words, locations you truly serve, and the five questions customers ask most.

Day five, photos. Book the shoot or block the afternoon. This is the one that will slip if you leave it unscheduled.

Do that and any competent builder can start immediately, whether it is us or somebody else.

08

Where does this break down?

Two places worth naming.

When the prep becomes the project. Some owners spend three months perfecting a brief and never start. The list above is a week. If it has run past two, you are avoiding the build, and the fix is to ship the site with the photos you have and replace them in month two.

When the builder does not want it. A vendor who cannot tell you what they need and by when has not scheduled your side of the work, which means the delay is coming and it will be described as your fault. Ask for the request list before you sign. Its absence is information.

Be honest with yourself

When you do not need this

If the project is a single landing page for one campaign, skip most of this. You need the analytics access and the offer, and nothing else.

If your site is being repaired rather than replaced, the inventory and redirect work does not apply. Fixing forms, speed, and tracking on a site you keep is a much lighter job with almost no prep.

And if you have not decided whether to rebuild at all, do not start gathering. Take your baseline numbers, fix the obvious faults, and give it sixty days. Preparation is not a commitment device, and starting a build to justify the prep work is backwards.

Sources

Related reading

12

Questions about getting ready for a build?

Email me at eric@seod.com with your business name and website address. I will send back the prep checklist filled in for your situation, including which of your current pages carry traffic worth protecting and which logins I would chase down first. No call, no proposal, and it is just as useful if you are hiring someone else.

More on running projects well in the web design and branding library.

Call Eric Email Eric