Website Redesign Checklist: Is Your Site Losing Leads?

Websites rarely fail in a way anyone notices. They do not go down. They just quietly convert at 0.8 per cent instead of 2.5 per cent, and because nobody has ever seen the 2.5 per cent version, nobody knows anything is wrong.

This checklist is for working out whether that is happening to you, and what to do about it before signing off on a rebuild you may not need.

First: is it a redesign problem at all?

Redesign is expensive and disruptive, and roughly a third of the sites we are asked to rebuild do not need rebuilding. They need four specific fixes.

Run these three diagnostics before deciding.

Check your mobile conversion rate against desktop. If mobile converts at less than half the desktop rate, and mobile is 65 to 80 per cent of your traffic — which it is, in the UAE — you have a mobile problem, not necessarily a whole-site problem.

Check your page speed on a real phone on 4G. Not on your office fibre. PageSpeed Insights mobile score, and the actual field data at the bottom of the report. Under 50 is a genuine commercial problem. Every additional second of load time costs conversions, and in this market a meaningful share of your traffic is on a phone in a car.

Check where people leave. If 60 per cent of visitors land on your homepage and leave without going deeper, your positioning is unclear. If they get to the service page and leave, your offer or proof is weak. If they reach the form and abandon, your form is the problem. Three different diagnoses, three different fixes, only one of which requires a rebuild.

The checklist: signs your site is costing you leads

Performance

• ☐ Mobile PageSpeed score below 50

• ☐ Largest Contentful Paint over 2.5 seconds on mobile field data

• ☐ Uncompressed images over 500KB anywhere on the site

• ☐ More than three third-party scripts firing before content renders

Speed is not a technical vanity metric. Our client sites launch at an average PageSpeed of 98, and Concept Plus runs a scroll-scrubbed WebGL scene across six divisions and still scores 90. It is achievable; it is just usually deprioritised.

Clarity

• ☐ A first-time visitor cannot tell what you sell within eight seconds

• ☐ Your headline contains the words “solutions”, “innovative” or “empowering”

• ☐ No pricing information or price range anywhere on the site

• ☐ Services buried three clicks deep in a mega menu

UAE buyers are direct and time-poor. Vagueness reads as evasion.

Conversion path

• ☐ Only one way to make contact, and it is a form

• ☐ The form asks for more than five fields

• ☐ No WhatsApp option, in a market that runs on WhatsApp

• ☐ No phone number visible on mobile without scrolling

• ☐ Calls to action that say “Learn more” rather than something specific

Proof

• ☐ No named clients, only logos

• ☐ Testimonials with no attribution

• ☐ No case studies with results attached

• ☐ Team page with stock photography or no team page at all

In Dubai, where a large share of businesses are relatively young and a buyer cannot rely on decades of local reputation, verifiable proof is doing more work than in older markets. This is why we publish seven case studies with the client named and the result attached.

Search and structure

• ☐ Multiple pages targeting the same keyword

• ☐ Thin service pages under 300 words

• ☐ No Arabic version, in a market where a large share of buyers prefer it

• ☐ Broken internal links or orphaned pages

• ☐ Missing or duplicated meta titles and descriptions

Technical hygiene

• ☐ No SSL, or mixed content warnings

• ☐ Analytics not properly configured, or conversions not tracked

• ☐ No structured data

• ☐ CMS your own team cannot use without calling the agency

That last one is more expensive than it looks. A site your marketing team cannot update is a site that goes stale, and stale sites stop ranking.

What to protect during a rebuild

This is the part that gets skipped and it is where redesigns destroy value.

Your URLs. If pages move, redirect them one to one. Not everything to the homepage — that is the single most common way a redesign loses six months of rankings overnight. Map every old URL to its closest new equivalent before launch.

Your content. Pages that rank are assets. Do not shorten them for aesthetic reasons. If the new design cannot accommodate 1,400 words on a service page, the design is wrong, not the content.

Your tracking. Analytics, conversion goals, CRM form connections, ad platform tags. Rebuild them on staging and verify each one before go-live, not after.

Your page speed. New sites are often slower than the ones they replace, because the design added animation, fonts and third-party embeds. Set a performance budget at the start of the project and hold it.

What a redesign should actually deliver

Not “a fresh look”. Three measurable things.

A higher conversion rate. Set the baseline before you start. If you do not know your current conversion rate, you cannot claim the redesign worked. Roxana Aesthetics’ rebuild took enquiries up 310 per cent, but only because there was a before number to compare against.

A faster site. State the target PageSpeed score in the scope document.

A site your team can run. If the CMS requires a developer for routine edits, the project has created a dependency, not an asset. We build on WordPress, Shopify, HubSpot CMS or headless depending on the job — the stack should follow the requirement, not the agency’s preference. Our web design and development team picks per project for exactly this reason.

What it costs in the UAE

Rough ranges for 2026: AED 25,000 to 60,000 for a focused brand or service site; AED 60,000 to 150,000 for a substantial multi-service site with Arabic; AED 150,000 upward for a platform with listings, integrations or e-commerce complexity.

Bilingual adds meaningfully, and it should, because Arabic is a design problem — right-to-left layouts, proper Arabic typography, separate keyword research and hreflang — not a translation line item. German Medical Center’s two disconnected sites became one bilingual site for exactly this reason.

You can price your own scope before speaking to anyone using the website cost calculator or the web design pricing page.

Timeline

Four to twelve weeks for most sites. What extends it is page count, unwritten content and the number of people who have to sign off. Content is almost always the bottleneck; start writing it in week one, not week six.

The honest test

Go to your site on your phone, on mobile data, standing outside. Time how long it takes to load. Try to find the price of your main service. Try to make contact in under thirty seconds.

If any of those three fails, you have your answer, and you did not need a consultant to reach it.

If you want a second opinion before committing budget, send us the URL and the number that has stalled. We will tell you whether you need a rebuild or four fixes — and if it is four fixes, we will say that. Start with our web strategy and consultancy or look at the case studies.