How do you plan and execute a HubSpot website redesign or relaunch?

A redesign needs a goal you can measure after launch, such as more demo requests from the pricing page. Write down the current figure for that measure before anything changes, along with the date range it covers. That gives you something to set the new site's results beside later.

The numbers show what visitors do and not why, so ask people as well. Lean Labs' article on the three stages of growth-driven design advises talking with customers, sales and support to find the questions buyers ask. Those questions then shape which pages the site needs and what each one says.

An inventory is a spreadsheet with one row for each live URL. Each row records the page's traffic, the forms on it and one decision. The page keeps its address, moves to a new address or gets folded into another page.

Suppose a freight tracking software company has a 45-page site hosted on HubSpot. The inventory shows 30 pages that will keep their URLs and get new design and copy. Ten product pages will move under a new /solutions/ folder. Five thin pages will be folded into pages that stay. Those numbers set most of the launch work, because the 30 can be replaced in place and the other 15 need redirects.

The inventory should also cover what the pages depend on. Forms, tracking scripts, the shared header and footer, templates and any HubDB tables all have to work on the new site. HubDB is HubSpot's built-in database for page content. Give each of these a named owner.

You can work through the whole inventory before launch, or release the most important pages first and handle the rest afterward. The second approach is the launchpad in growth-driven design, which we explain in what a launchpad website is. The choice changes how long it takes to launch and how much the redesign costs, so make it before design starts.

Lean Labs' three-stages article prices one version of that choice: a launchpad, including strategy and the build, at $30,000 to $70,000 or more over 9 to 13 weeks. It describes messaging, design and development sprints of roughly four weeks each, adjusted to the scope. That is one agency's published offer, and the HubSpot subscription is a separate purchase.

The growth-driven design launch process recommends time-boxed work and one accountable stakeholder for each page. Name that person before design starts. They can gather feedback from others, but one name signs off. In the 45-page example, the head of product could own the ten product pages, so comments from other teams reach the developer through one person.

HubSpot's content staging tool lets you build on a sandbox subdomain while the live site keeps running. A staged replacement keeps the original page's analytics. Content staging is a separate tool from a developer sandbox account.

Templates, global content such as the header, and HubDB tables are shared with the live site, so editing one in staging can change live pages. HubSpot recommends cloning them first.

A page that keeps its URL needs no redirect, which covers 30 of the 45 pages in the example. When a staged replacement publishes with a changed URL, HubSpot creates a permanent redirect from the original URL, which covers the ten moving pages if they are staged as replacements. The five folded pages need redirects you add yourself.

HubSpot's URL redirects tool handles those. It creates standard redirects from one URL to another and flexible ones that follow a URL pattern, and it accepts a CSV file for bulk uploads. A new redirect is permanent (301) by default. The tool works only for domains connected to and hosted in HubSpot. If an old URL's domain is served somewhere else at launch, its redirect has to be set up there. HubSpot says a redirect can take up to 48 hours to propagate.

Google's guide to site moves with URL changes explains what to map. Each old URL should point to the page that corresponds to it. Google warns against sending many old URLs to one unrelated page such as the home page, which it may treat as a soft 404. Content merged into one page is the exception, and those old URLs can point to the combined page. Its advice on chains is to redirect straight to the final address.

The guide also asks you to update internal links, canonical tags and the sitemap to the new URLs, and to keep redirects in place, generally for at least a year. Rankings can still fluctuate while Google recrawls the site, so a correct redirect map doesn't promise unchanged traffic.

Give launch day a short list of jobs with a name beside each. One person publishes the staged pages. Others submit every form and confirm that the contact appears in the CRM, load each old URL that changed to check its redirect, and confirm that the tracking code is on the new pages. Search Console shows how the new URLs are being indexed.

After launch, set the new numbers beside the ones you recorded at the start. Use the same measure and a date range of the same length. The comparison shows what happened after the launch, but by itself it can't separate the redesign from a season, a campaign or a search change in the same period.

Growth-driven design treats the time after launch as a repeating improvement cycle. The team plans around one focus metric, builds the change, studies the result and passes what it learned to marketing and sales. Lean Labs' growth-driven design program runs that cycle in 30-day sprints. If you chose a smaller first release, the pages you deferred become the first items in that cycle, along with whatever the launch numbers showed.