Website Redesign Discovery Phase What To Expect

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Key Takeaways

• Discovery is the first phase of a properly structured redesign. It is where the project is defined before design begins.
• What comes out of discovery determines everything that follows. Teams that skip it spend the rest of the project recovering from undiscovered requirements.
• As a client, your job in discovery is to provide access to information, clarity on decisions, and alignment among stakeholders.
• Discovery is not a formality. It is the highest-leverage phase of the entire project.

What Discovery Is and What It Is Not

Discovery is not a kickoff call.

A kickoff call introduces the team and reviews the timeline. Discovery is a structured research and alignment process that answers the questions the design team cannot afford to get wrong:

• What is the site currently doing well that should be preserved?
• What is failing and why?
• Who are the visitors, and what do they actually need?
• What do stakeholders expect from the redesign, and are those expectations aligned?
• What does success look like, in specific, measurable terms?

Discovery typically runs one to three weeks, depending on project scope. It produces a set of documented outputs that govern every decision made in design, development, and launch.

What Happens During Discovery

Stakeholder Interviews

The agency or design team will request conversations with key decision-makers and functional leads.

These interviews are not status meetings. They are structured research sessions covering:

• What is the site not doing that the business needs it to do?
• What do customers say when they describe why they chose this company?
• What are the top objections that prevent prospects from converting?
• What has been tried before and why did it not work?
• What does success look like at 90 days post-launch?

Different stakeholders give different answers. Sales will say the site does not generate enough qualified leads. Marketing will say the content strategy is fragmented. Leadership will say it does not reflect the company's current positioning.

All of those answers are useful. Discovery is where they are surfaced, documented, and used to build a project brief that addresses the full picture.

Analytics and Data Review

The design team will request access to:

• Google Analytics or equivalent: traffic data, conversion data, top pages, exit pages, device breakdown
• Google Search Console: organic impressions, clicks, rankings by page and keyword
• Heatmap or session recording data if available (Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, etc.)
• Any CRM data that shows which pages or traffic sources produce the best leads

This data review tells the team what is actually happening on the site, separate from what stakeholders believe is happening. The two are often different.

Competitive Analysis

The discovery team will audit three to five competitor websites for:

• How they structure navigation and information architecture
• How they position their offer and differentiate from each other
• What social proof they lead with and how they present it
• How they handle mobile experience
• What their primary CTA pattern looks like

The competitive audit is not about copying. It is about understanding the landscape the new site competes in, and identifying where there is an opportunity to stand out.

User Research

Depending on project scope, user research in discovery may include:

• User interviews: Conversations with five to ten current clients or recent prospects about how they found the company, what they needed to see before contacting, and where the current site confused them
• Survey data: A structured questionnaire sent to the client list to gather language, objections, and decision criteria at scale
• Usability testing on the current site: Observing or recording real users attempting to complete specific tasks, and noting where they fail

User research consistently surfaces things internal teams did not know: the exact words customers use to describe the problem the product solves, the specific questions they had before making contact, and the parts of the site that made them hesitate rather than convert.

SEO Audit

Before any URL changes, content rewrites, or platform migrations are planned, discovery includes a full audit of the current site's organic footprint:

• Every indexed page documented with its current ranking position and organic traffic volume
• Top keywords identified by page
• Backlink profile reviewed for pages with inbound links worth preserving
• Technical SEO issues catalogued (crawl errors, duplicate content, missing metadata, etc.)

The output is a map of what the new site must protect, redirect, or improve from an SEO perspective. This map is built before design begins, not during QA.

Content Audit

Discovery includes a page-by-page review of every URL on the current site, with a keep, rewrite, migrate, or cut decision for each.

The content audit also evaluates:

• Which pages have strong, relevant content that should be preserved
• Which pages have outdated information that must be updated before launch
• Which pages exist for internal reasons but serve no visitor purpose
• Which content gaps exist relative to what the audience needs

What Discovery Produces

At the end of discovery, the design team delivers a documented set of outputs. A complete discovery phase includes:

These deliverables are approved by the client before design begins. If a key stakeholder disagrees with a finding or direction, that disagreement is resolved in discovery, not after mockups have been delivered.

What You Need to Prepare Before Discovery Starts

Your job as a client during discovery is to provide access and clarity.

Before discovery starts, prepare:

• Analytics access: add the agency as an editor or viewer in Google Analytics and Search Console
• Current site credentials: CMS access so the team can review page structure and existing content
• Brand assets: current logo files, any existing brand guidelines, photography
• Stakeholder availability: confirm that every required stakeholder is available for a 30 to 60-minute interview during the discovery window
• Recent marketing materials: sales decks, email templates, case study documents, any materials that reflect current positioning
• Customer feedback: any NPS data, customer reviews, or support conversations that reveal what customers value

The more accessible this information is at the start of discovery, the faster and more useful the discovery outputs will be.

Knowing how to prepare before hiring anyone means much of this groundwork is done before discovery even begins, which makes the discovery phase itself faster and more focused.

How Discovery Connects to the Rest of the Project

Discovery outputs feed directly into the design phase. Wireframes are built against the project brief. The design system is built against the brand direction agreed on in discovery. Page templates are built against the user journey mapped in discovery.

Without discovery outputs, design decisions are made on assumption. With them, design decisions are made on evidence.

The full phases of a website redesign run from discovery through post-launch monitoring. Discovery is where the project is defined. Everything that follows is execution against that definition.

Preparation for the discovery interviews themselves, specifically the questions you should expect to be asked and how to prepare your stakeholders to give useful answers, is covered in the stakeholder interview questions resource.

A website redesign engagement that includes a properly scoped discovery phase delivers a brief that both client and vendor can hold each other accountable to through the rest of the project.

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What Does a Discovery Phase Look Like at LOW/CODE?

LOW/CODE Agency is a leading AI product team for SMBs and startups. We have shipped 450+ products for companies including Medtronic, American Express, and Coca-Cola.

Every engagement we run starts with a structured discovery phase. Here is what that looks like in practice:

• Week 1: Kickoff call, stakeholder interviews, analytics and SEO access review
• Week 2: Competitive analysis, user research (when included), content audit, initial sitemap draft
• End of discovery: Project brief delivered, reviewed, and approved before design begins

We build in Webflow, which means many of the platform and CMS questions that surface during discovery are answered with known capabilities rather than custom engineering estimates.

Website projects start at $10,000+. Every project starts with a 30-minute call.

If you want to understand what a discovery-first redesign engagement would look like for your specific site, let's talk.