Every existing site contains earned value: URLs that rank, flows people know, content that answers real questions. A good redesign audits that value before touching the visual layer.
Inventory before invention
List every URL, its traffic and its purpose. The list will contain surprises, and those surprises should shape the new information architecture.
Pages that quietly do the work of ten campaigns deserve to survive the redesign.
Redirects are content strategy
A redirect map is not a technical afterthought — it is a statement about which new page replaces which old promise.
Write it while the new structure is still editable, not the night before launch.