How to plan your new website's pages before a redesign

The best way to plan the pages of your new website is to start with the questions customers ask you on the phone, not with the menu of your old site or a competitor's. Each common question becomes a page or a section of one. Then sketch the whole site on a single sheet of paper, check it against your old page list, and give every page one job. An hour of this before a redesign saves days of back-and-forth once building starts.

Old menus grow by accident. Someone adds a page for a promotion, another for a new service, and after ten years you have "Solutions", "What We Do" and "Services" all saying roughly the same thing. Copying that menu into a new design copies the confusion.

Instead, take a notepad and spend a week writing down what people ask when they call, email or walk in. If you have staff who answer the phone, ask them too. You will usually end up with three kinds of questions:

"Do you do...?" Do you fix tankless heaters, do you cater weddings, do you take my insurance. These point to service pages.
"Where and when?" Do you come to my town, are you open Saturday, where do I park. These point to a service-area or contact page.
"Can I trust you, and what will it cost?" How long have you been doing this, are you licensed, roughly what does it cost, what happens after I call. These point to an about page, reviews, and a section on prices or process.

That list is your real site plan. The pages exist to answer those questions before the customer has to call to ask.

Turn the questions into a page list

Group the questions and give each group a page. For most local businesses that lands somewhere between five and twelve pages:

Home. Says what you do, where, and how to reach you, on the first screen. Shows your best work and a few reviews. Points to the main services.
One page per main service. If customers search for "roof repair" and "gutter installation" separately, those are separate pages. Writing a page for each service you offer explains when one page per service helps.
About. Who you are, how long you have done this, licenses, the people customers will meet.
Service area or location. Towns you cover, or address, parking and directions.
Reviews or past work. A gallery of jobs, before-and-after photos, testimonials.
Contact. Phone, form, hours, address.
FAQ, if the questions are many. If customers ask the same ten small things, an FAQ page saves you calls.

Resist pages that answer nobody's question. "Our Mission", "Why Choose Us" and "Blog" often exist because other sites have them. Keep one only if it has something specific to say.

Draw the site map on one sheet of paper

A site map is just a drawing of your pages and how they connect. Take a sheet of paper and draw it like a family tree:

Put Home in a box at the top.
Underneath, draw a row of boxes for the pages in your main menu. Keep it to five to seven. More than that and the menu gets hard to use on a phone.
Under each menu item, draw any pages that belong to it. Your individual services sit under "Services".
In a corner, list the pages that live only in the footer: privacy policy, careers, anything most visitors do not need.

Then look at the drawing as a customer. Can someone with a leaking roof get from Home to "Roof repair" in one tap? Can someone looking for your hours find them without guessing which page they are on? If you need more than two taps to reach anything important, move it up.

Check the plan against your old site

Now bring back your old site, because the plan has to respect it in one important way: page addresses. Every old page has an address, like yourbusiness.com/water-heaters.html. Google, other websites and printed flyers may point there.

Make a two-column list. On the left, every page of the old site. On the right, the page in your new plan that replaces it. You will find three cases:

Same page, maybe a new name. Mark it so the old address forwards to the new one, or better, keeps its address.
Merged. Three thin pages become one good one. All three old addresses forward to the new page.
Dropped. A service you no longer offer. Forward it to the closest relevant page, usually the services overview, rather than leaving an error.

That list is the most useful thing you can give whoever builds the site. Old page addresses: why forwarding them matters explains the reasoning.

Decide what goes on each page

For each box on your map, write a few bullet points of what it must contain. Not the finished text, just the ingredients:

The question it answers, in the customer's words.
The facts: prices or price range, areas, hours, steps, licenses.
The photos that belong there, by file name or description.
The action you want: call, form, booking link.

For service pages, this is also when you check you are using the words customers use. If they say "furnace" and your page says "heating solutions", change the page. How to find what customers search for shows simple ways to check.

How many pages is right?

There is no ideal number. A one-person bookkeeping practice may need four pages. A contractor with eight services and fifteen towns might need twenty. What matters is that each page answers a real question and is not a near-copy of another. If two pages would say almost the same thing, make them one.

Your one-hour planning session

Write down the twenty questions customers ask most.
Group them into five to twelve pages.
Draw the site map on one sheet, with at most seven menu items.
Give every page a one-line job.
List every old page and what replaces it.
Note the ingredients for each page.

Take that sheet to whoever is building your site. If you would rather start from what you already have, a rebuild uses your existing pages as the starting point, so you can see your site rebuilt first and then use your plan to ask for the pages that should be added, merged or dropped.