The five numbers we check before redesigning anything

When someone asks us for a redesign, the first thing we do is not open a design tool. We look at five numbers, and roughly a third of the time they point somewhere other than the design, which saves the client a great deal of money and costs us a project we should not have taken.

1. Where the traffic already comes from

If eighty percent of sessions land on three pages, those three pages are the project. We have watched clients spend heavily rebuilding a fifty-page site where only four pages had been visited in a year.

2. Mobile share, and mobile conversion separately

Nearly everyone knows their mobile traffic share. Almost nobody has compared mobile conversion to desktop. When mobile is seventy percent of visits and twenty percent of enquiries, you do not have a design problem, you have a mobile problem, and it is usually in a form or a checkout rather than in the aesthetics.

3. Where the form is abandoned

Field-level tracking on the main form takes an afternoon to add and regularly ends the conversation about a redesign entirely. The most common answer we find is a phone number field marked required, which loses a meaningful share of people at the exact moment they had decided to contact you.

4. Load time on a real device

Not on the laptop it was built on. A mid-range Android on a throttled connection. A site that takes eleven seconds there is not suffering from a dated look, and no amount of new design will rescue it.

5. What people search before they arrive

The gap between the words visitors use and the words on your site is where most of the missed demand sits. A furniture studio calling its products seating solutions while everyone searches for dining chairs does not need a redesign. It needs different nouns.

When the answer really is a redesign

Sometimes it is, and the signals are consistent: the site cannot express what the business now sells, staff cannot change anything without a developer, or it fails accessibility badly enough to exclude real customers. Those are structural and no amount of tuning fixes them.

But going in with these five numbers changes what gets built. You stop redesigning fifty pages and start rebuilding the four that carry the business, which is faster, cheaper, and considerably easier to measure afterwards.