Website Redesign Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for a website redesign project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of redesigning an existing website.
What a Lessons Learned is
A lessons learned is what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Lessons Learned. On a website redesign project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for a Website Redesign project
Website Redesign projects live or die on redesigning an existing website. A well-built lessons learned gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how website redesign projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
Website Redesign-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail website redesign projects:
- Scope creep
- Content migration
- SEO preservation
Example
On a real website redesign project, the lessons learned would be shaped by redesigning an existing website. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — scope creep, content migration, SEO preservation — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.