A Website Redesign Should Start With Your Last 20 Enquiries, Not Your Logo

If you want to know what is wrong with your website, read the last twenty enquiries it produced before you look at a single competitor.

Think about how most redesigns begin. Someone says the site looks dated. A few examples from other businesses get passed around. A designer is briefed on colours, fonts and the feel the company wants. Three months later there is a handsome new site that sends exactly as many enquiries as the old one.

The look was never the whole problem. Nobody checked what the site was actually being asked to do.

Your enquiries are the brief

Every enquiry is a small piece of evidence. Someone arrived with a question, read some of your site, and either got enough answers to contact you or got enough to try. What they wrote tells you which questions your pages failed to answer in advance.

Pull the last twenty. Phone calls count too, if you keep notes. Then sort what you find into four piles:

• Questions the site should have answered. Price ranges, service areas, timelines, whether you do a particular job.
• Wrong-fit enquiries. People asking for something you do not offer, which usually means your pages are vague about what you do.
• Good enquiries. Look at which page they came from and what they said persuaded them.
• Silence. People who started a form and never sent it, or called and hung up. You will only know about these if you track them.

Ten minutes with that list will tell you more than a month of mood boards.

What the pile usually shows

Patterns repeat across businesses, though yours may differ. The same few things come up again and again.

Protect what already works

Before a redesign, note which pages bring in the traffic and the enquiries. Changing their address or stripping out their content can undo years of search visibility. A good redesign changes the parts that fail and leaves the parts that earn.

Then write the one-page brief

With that evidence in hand, a brief becomes short and specific. It states who the site is for, the one action each key page should lead to, the five questions it must answer, and the pages that must not lose their address or their content.

Compare that with “modern, clean, trustworthy”. Any designer can agree with those three words and deliver almost anything. A brief built from real enquiries can be tested: after launch, either the repeated question stopped arriving or it did not.

Where the evidence hides

Your inbox and call log hold the words. Your analytics hold the path. If Google Analytics or Search Console is set up, look at which pages people landed on before they contacted you, and which pages they left from. Even a rough picture helps: the pages that start good enquiries are the ones to protect, and the pages people leave from are the ones to question.

If nothing is tracked yet, fix that before anything else. Add a line to the form asking how they found you, or put a separate tracking phone number on the site. It is a small change, and it turns a redesign from an opinion into an experiment you can check afterwards.

What to do this week

1. Collect your last twenty enquiries from email, forms and call notes into one document.
2. Sort them into the four piles above and count each.
3. For each good enquiry, write down which page they landed on first, if you can tell.
4. List the three questions that appear most often and check whether your site answers them in plain words.
5. Phone your own number from your own website, on a mobile, as if you were a customer.

If you cannot tell which page an enquiry came from, that is the first thing to fix, because without it you will be redesigning on instinct.

What not to expect

Twenty enquiries is a small sample. It points you at problems worth checking, not at proof. If you have far fewer, ask your most recent customers what nearly stopped them from getting in touch. Their answers are worth the same.

A redesign will not fix an offer people do not want, or a price that does not suit your market. It also takes time to show up in results: allow weeks for search engines to reassess a changed site, and judge it over months rather than days.

Begin with the list. By the end of an hour you will either have a sharper brief or a good reason to leave the site alone.