5 Common Mistakes in Website Relaunches—and How to Avoid Them

“The relaunch was actually a success, but for some reason we’re getting fewer inquiries now than before.” We hear this more often than we’d like, usually from companies that had already relaunched their website with another agency before coming to us. Everyone likes the new design, the technology works flawlessly, and yet something is clearly off.

In almost every single one of these cases, the decline can be attributed to one of just a few recurring errors. None of them really has anything to do with a lack of talent or poor design. These are process errors that occur quietly in the background while everyone involved is preoccupied with the visible, obvious parts of the project.

This post goes over the five mistakes we encounter most frequently in website relaunch projects and shows how we can systematically avoid them in our own projects, whether it’s a small tradesman’s website or a large corporate site with several hundred subpages.

Mistake 1: SEO Becomes an Afterthought Rather Than a Foundation

By far the most costly mistake in a relaunch almost always involves search engine visibility—not because it’s completely overlooked, but because it simply comes up too late in the process. When a new site structure, new URLs, and new content have long been finalized before anyone even seriously considers redirects from the old addresses, the damage is often already done long before the new site even goes live.

Every single URL that changes as a result of the relaunch but isn’t properly redirected to its new destination results in a loss of the search engine authority built up there over the years. For a site with several hundred indexed subpages, this can lead to a noticeable drop in rankings after the launch—a decline that only becomes apparent weeks later in the form of falling traffic, by which time the actual cause is no longer obvious. That’s why, for every relaunch, we create a complete, carefully maintained list of all existing URLs and their respective destinations after the migration—not as a quick checklist item right before launch, but as a separate, dedicated step right at the start of the project—even before the actual design phase begins.

Mistake 2: There is no objective against which success can be measured at all

Many website relaunch projects start with a very general goal: “The site should look more modern.” While this is a perfectly valid starting point, it’s not enough on its own to truly assess later on whether the project was actually successful in the end. Without specific metrics from before the relaunch—such as bounce rate, form submissions, and time spent on key pages—it’s nearly impossible to objectively determine afterward whether anything has improved or worsened.

In practice, this leads with surprising regularity to a strange, almost paradoxical effect: A company vaguely notices that “somehow less is happening,” but can’t really substantiate this feeling because no one had previously documented just how much was actually happening before. That’s why, before every relaunch, we set up a brief but thorough baseline analysis using the key metrics from the last few months before the move, so that the actual impact of the relaunch can be objectively assessed after launch—whether positive or negative—rather than having to rely purely on gut feelings.

Mistake 3: Too many decision-makers without a clear approval hierarchy

A relaunch almost always involves several departments at once—marketing, sales, and sometimes even senior management personally. If it isn’t clear from the start who will ultimately give final approval, this leads to endless feedback loops in which each new person in the process introduces their own, sometimes conflicting, requests.

Not only does this waste valuable time, but it often results in a design that’s ultimately the product of a series of small compromises rather than a single, clear, and consistently pursued idea. A layout that attempts to satisfy the wishes of five different people at once often ends up looking indecisive and inconsistent, no matter how good each piece of feedback was on its own. That’s why, for virtually every project, we insist on having a clearly designated point of contact on the client side who consolidates internal feedback and ultimately makes a binding decision, rather than passing every single opinion on to us unmoderated and unfiltered.

Mistake 4: The launch date is tied to internal deadlines rather than actual readiness

An upcoming trade show, the end of the fiscal year, a significant internal anniversary: At first glance, such occasions seem like obvious, sensible times for a relaunch, but they set a date that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual progress of the project. If this date can no longer be postponed, you’ll inevitably end up cutting corners on testing, fine-tuning, or content because there simply isn’t enough time left.

The result is a website that goes live on time, but with errors that could have been avoided with a little more time. A form that hasn’t been tested on all common devices, text that actually needed another round of proofreading, and a redirect that was simply forgotten in the hectic last-minute rush. We therefore recommend treating fixed events, such as trade show dates, as target dates rather than unmovable deadlines, and always planning for a buffer of at least one to two weeks for final testing before a site actually goes live. At first glance, this buffer may seem like wasted time, but in practice, it prevents exactly the kind of hasty, last-minute decisions that cause the most trouble later on.

Mistake 5: There is no plan for the period after the launch

The relaunch itself almost always gets all the attention, while what happens afterward receives significantly less. As soon as the new site goes live, a noticeable lull sets in at many companies—until, months later, it becomes apparent that virtually nothing has changed in terms of content since the launch. Not a single new blog post, no updated services, and no regular review of the analytics data.

However, a website is not a project with a clear, well-defined end date, but rather an ongoing system that must be continuously maintained in order to truly retain its value over time. Without a clear plan for who will be responsible for content, minor adjustments, and the regular analysis of metrics after launch, a significant portion of the effort invested earlier will be wasted within a few months. That’s why we discuss during the project itself who within the company will take on which tasks after launch, and we offer support to companies that lack the internal capacity to handle these tasks, ensuring this issue isn’t simply left unresolved.

It’s not about selling every customer the same standardized service, but about working together to figure out what’s actually needed. Some companies have someone in-house who can regularly update content, but no one to make technical adjustments. Others face the exact opposite problem. Identifying this gap early on—rather than discovering it the hard way after launch—ultimately makes the decisive difference between a new website staying vibrant over the years or slowly becoming outdated.

Why These Mistakes Reinforce Each Other

What makes these five mistakes particularly insidious is that they rarely occur in isolation. A project without a clear approval hierarchy usually drags on, which increases the pressure on the launch date—and this, in turn, means there’s less time left for testing and redirects. A single mistake can usually still be caught, but three or four at once create a cascade of issues that’s nearly impossible to trace back to a single cause afterward.

That is exactly what makes troubleshooting more difficult later on. When a company realizes months after a relaunch that something is wrong, there is rarely a single, obvious cause. Instead, several smaller problems pile up—each one inconspicuous on its own, but collectively making a significant impact. That is why it’s worth considering all five points together from the very beginning, rather than working through them as an independent checklist.

How to Avoid These Mistakes Before the Project Even Begins

All five mistakes share a common characteristic: they don’t arise during the actual implementation, but in the phase leading up to it, when no one is yet talking about design or technology. That’s exactly why, with every relaunch, we deliberately invest time in a structured preparation phase before the very first draft is even created.

This phase involves a comprehensive assessment of the current website, a clear definition of responsibilities on the client’s side, a realistic timeline with built-in buffers, and a brief agreement on which metrics will be used to measure success later on. At first glance, this may seem like extra work that actually only slows down a project. In practice, however, the opposite is true: a project with clear preparation runs faster and more smoothly overall because the most common sources of delays and friction have already been eliminated before the project even begins.

The Difference Between a Fast Relaunch and a Clean Relaunch

A relaunch can almost always be sped up by skipping some of these steps. No redirect list, no benchmarking, no clear approval process—at first glance, this does indeed save time. However, this time savings almost always proves to be illusory once the site goes live, and the preparation that was skipped must be made up for elsewhere, usually with significantly more effort than before.

A thorough relaunch takes a little more time at the beginning, but it yields a result that cannot be corrected later on. We face this trade-off between short-term speed and long-term stability in practically every project, and in our experience, the slightly slower but more thorough approach almost always pays off, especially for websites with a larger reach or a more complex structure.

A real-world example

A client in the technical services sector came to us with exactly the same statement as the one at the beginning of this post: The last website relaunch with another agency was visually quite successful, but inquiries had noticeably declined afterward, without anyone initially being able to pinpoint exactly why. Upon closer analysis, a classic pattern emerged that involved several of the five mistakes mentioned above.

The old URLs had not been properly redirected during the site migration, which led to a clearly measurable drop in rankings for several search terms important to the company. In addition, there were no comparative figures from the period before the relaunch, which meant that the actual extent of the problem remained completely unclear for a long time. It was only after a subsequent, in-depth analysis of historical data from the analytics tool that the actual cause-and-effect relationship became apparent. After correcting the redirects and carefully optimizing the most important landing pages, inquiries rebounded to their previous level within a few months and, shortly thereafter, even exceeded it slightly.

In retrospect, it was particularly revealing how long the actual problem had gone undetected. More than four months passed between the launch and the moment someone actually linked the decline to the relaunch. During that time, various other causes were seriously considered internally—a weaker market, seasonal fluctuations, changing customer needs—before a close examination of the technical data finally revealed the actual cause. This long delay alone likely cost the company significantly more than the actual time it took to correct the redirects in the end.

Afterward, the client also articulated a clear insight for future projects: Setting up a baseline measurement before a major website project requires very little effort—perhaps an hour’s work at most. However, the true value of that one hour only becomes apparent when it’s missing, and unfortunately, by that point, it’s already too late to set it up retroactively.

Conclusion: A relaunch rarely fails because of the design

The five most common mistakes made during a website relaunch have one thing in common: none of them are apparent at first glance when looking at the finished site. They lie in the process leading up to it—in the redirect list, in the lack of benchmarking, in the unclear approval process, in the overly tight timeline, and in the lack of a plan for what comes next. If you take these five points into account from the very beginning, you’ll save yourself significantly more trouble in the end than you would with any additional design iteration.

Perhaps the most striking thing about all five points is that none of them is particularly complicated or expensive to avoid. It doesn’t require any additional software or a larger budget—just a willingness to begin the actual design project with structured preparation. In our experience, it is precisely this willingness that distinguishes the relaunches that actually generate more inquiries from those that quietly fall short after a few months.

Related: The Difference Between Redesign, Relaunch, Rebranding, and Refactoring, and Why Most Web Projects Fail Because of the Brief (and What You Can Do About It) · Services: Web Design for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses and Trades

Are you planning a relaunch right now?

We’ll take an honest look at your project and let you know where the biggest risks lie before we even create the first layout. Send us a quick message using the contact form. We’ll respond within 24 hours—personally and without any sales pitch.