Website Discovery & Strategy Checklist

A structured checklist to guide your project’s discovery phase, aligning business objectives, user needs, and technical requirements before design or development begins.

Discovery is where a project earns its budget back. Every hour you spend agreeing on goals, audiences and constraints is an hour you do not spend rebuilding a page that answered the wrong question. Work through the sections below before a single screen gets designed.

Business goals

• Write down the one commercial outcome the site must produce in the first year.
• Name the metric that proves the outcome: leads, signups, orders, applications.
• Record the current baseline for that metric, even if the number is poor.
• Set a target and a date. “More leads” is not a target.
• Identify who signs off on the project and who can veto a decision.
• List the internal deadlines the launch date depends on: campaigns, events, funding rounds.

Audience and demand

• Define the two or three audience segments the site must serve, in priority order.
• Write the question each segment arrives with, in their own words.
• Collect the objections sales hears most often on calls.
• Pull the search terms that already send traffic to the current site.
• Pull the search terms competitors rank for and you do not.
• Interview at least three customers. Ask what nearly stopped them from buying.

Competitive and content position

• List five direct competitors and the promise each one leads with.
• State in one sentence what you offer that they do not.
• Audit existing content: keep, rewrite, merge, delete. Decide per URL.
• Identify the proof you can show: case studies, numbers, logos, reviews, certifications.
• Flag the claims that legal or compliance must approve before publication.

Scope and structure

• Draft the sitemap. Mark each page as new, migrated or retired.
• Agree the primary navigation. Cap it at seven items.
• Define the conversion paths: the route from each entry page to the action.
• List every form and what happens to the data after submission.
• Decide which pages the client’s team must be able to edit without a developer.
• Write down what is explicitly out of scope for this phase.

Technical constraints

• Confirm the CMS and the hosting platform, and who pays for each.
• List the systems the site must integrate with: CRM, ERP, booking, payments, email.
• Confirm who controls the domain and the DNS, and get access before build starts.
• Record the accessibility standard the site must meet, usually WCAG 2.2 AA.
• Record the languages and regions the site must serve at launch and later.
• Confirm data residency and privacy obligations, including GDPR duties.

Measurement and handover plan

• Decide the analytics platform and who owns the account.
• Define the events to track before design starts, not after launch.
• Agree how success will be reviewed, and on what date.
• Name the person on the client side who owns the site after launch.
• Agree the training and documentation the handover includes.