The impulse after a redesign is to stop looking at the website closely for a while. You're fatigued from the project and relieved it's over. But the first thirty to sixty days after launch are when post-redesign problems are easiest to catch and fix. Waiting until you notice something wrong from inside the organization means problems have already been affecting visitors.
Redesigns frequently break SEO
One of the most common post-redesign problems is SEO damage. When pages are moved or renamed without proper redirects, search engines lose track of the old URLs — and your existing search rankings disappear. If your nonprofit was ranking for terms like "food bank [city]" or "nonprofit financial counseling" and the redesign changed those page URLs without redirects, you may have lost that traffic entirely.
A post-redesign audit should check that redirects are in place for any changed URLs, that page titles and meta descriptions were carried over (not reset to defaults), and that no pages were accidentally marked as "noindex" during the development process.
Accessibility is commonly lost in redesigns
A new theme or template often means new accessibility problems. The old site may have had heading structures that screen reader users relied on. The new design may have introduced color contrast that fails WCAG standards. New animations may be triggering for visitors with vestibular disorders. New form designs may have removed visible labels. These issues are rarely caught during developer testing because developers are testing functionality, not accessibility.
An accessibility audit immediately after a redesign catches these problems when they can still be addressed as launch fixes rather than new development work.
Performance often degrades after a redesign
New themes come with more code. New features add more scripts. New stock photography adds large unoptimized images. The performance of the freshly redesigned site may be significantly worse than the old site — which is a problem, because load time affects your search rankings and your donor conversion rate. If you're redirecting existing donors and volunteers to a new site that's twice as slow as the old one, you'll see that in your engagement metrics.
A GoodSiteReport post-redesign audit checks SEO, accessibility, performance, and trust signals — giving you a clear picture of what needs attention in the first weeks after launch.
Forms and integrations need testing after launch
Contact forms, donation integrations, email signup forms, and event registration systems all need to be tested end-to-end after a redesign. Platform migrations, plugin changes, and configuration differences between development and production environments can all cause these to fail silently — accepting submissions that never arrive.
Test every form. Submit test donations and confirm they process correctly. Sign up for your own newsletter and verify the confirmation email arrives. This testing should happen immediately after launch and again a week later.
The redesign is an opportunity — but only if you verify it worked
You invested in the redesign because you wanted a better website. A post-redesign audit is how you verify that the investment actually delivered what you intended. It's also the moment to establish a baseline for ongoing monitoring — so that any future regressions can be caught against a documented starting point. The organizations that get the most value from redesigns are the ones that treat the launch as a beginning, not an end.