With so many different stages to go through when building and launching a website, it’s easy for teams to get overwhelmed.
By using a flexible checklist adapted to your unique business and customer needs, you’ll streamline your design process and make sure you don’t miss any key steps in creating a website your users love.
Our comprehensive 15-task web design checklist will help you tick off essential website design and creation phases to pave the way for a smooth and successful launch.
Use our checklist to bring your site to life, then use Hotjar tools to make sure it’s performing as it should be.
Our checklist is designed to be adaptable—so tailor it to your specific business and user needs. You can follow the list chronologically and check the points off as you go, or just use the steps most relevant to you at the time.
We’ll talk you through the most important research, design, technical, content, marketing, compliance, and testing steps, so you can be sure you’ve got all the bases covered to build an effective site for your users.
Download your free web design checklist (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.
Prioritize research before you begin working on your site design. Strong research helps you understand your users and make sure you’re creating a product that’ll satisfy their wants and needs.
Use qualitative and quantitative user research methods to understand customer problems and create a site that helps solve them.
Once you’ve understood your users, continue doing research to validate early-stage ideas with your target audience. They’ll provide you with invaluable user insights on the right design to move forward with.
Collect insights from your current or test users with Hotjar Surveys. You can also run diary studies, interviews, and focus groups to better understand your users—and whether your design meets their specific needs.
Market and competitor research teach you how your site will fit into an existing market and what you can do to stand out from your competitors.
To create a website that’s visually appealing and functional, you’ll need to prioritize navigation and branding elements that contribute to a great user experience (UX) and user interface (UI).
Start with the big picture and get more granular as you go. Here’s how:
Pro tip: to create a responsive site that looks and works well on different devices, start planning your mobile interface at this stage. To optimize for mobile, you’ll need to modify elements like CTAs, images, and navigation menu placements so they’re easy for users to engage with on smaller screens.
Planning different interfaces early in the design process means more time to test them out with different users—and, ultimately, a successful website.
Once you have a sense of how your site should be laid out for users, put it to the test with wireframes.
Wireframes are two-dimensional illustrations or ‘website blueprints’. Use them to outline:
Don’t include branding elements or graphics at the wireframing stage. Instead, use wireframes to validate and test basic interfaces in the design process so you can identify usability problems early on—before you invest too much time and money into your website.
These popular tools can help you create and test wireframes:
Your website is your company’s ‘home’ online—so it needs to reflect your product vision. Use consistent branding so that when customers land on your homepage, they immediately understand your site’s feel and function.
Make these important site branding decisions early on so you can test them with users:
Technical tasks are crucial in making sure your site runs smoothly. Follow these three steps to design a high-performing site and avoid technical issues, providing your users with a seamless product experience.
Register your domain name early in the process—domain names can be competitive and you don’t want someone else to snatch up your idea before you make it official. But don’t rush into it either: it’s important to take the time to choose the right domain name. A good domain name builds credibility, raises brand awareness and marketability, and helps with SEO rankings.
Here’s how to choose a great domain name:
Choosing a reputable web hosting service has a major impact on the quality of your site. Your hosting affects everything from security to speed to downtime to SEO rankings.
Try a popular, trusted web hosting service like:
SSL certificates are tiny data files that create secure connections between browsers and servers so any information entered into a website is safely encrypted. SSL certificates keep data secure, prevent cybercrime, and verify website ownership but, most importantly, they make users feel safe when navigating your site.
When users visit a website and see ‘https://’ rather than ‘http://’ or see a lock symbol in the upper left-hand corner, they feel secure that the site has their SSL certificates set up correctly.
"Consumers demand data security in the form of an SSL—that lock symbol on their address bar boosts your credibility and gives users peace of mind as they browse."
Co-Founder and CTO , Fig LoansStrong content helps you share key information, elevate your brand identity, make a good impression, and encourage users to convert into paying customers. Here's how to strategically optimize both copy and images on your site:
One of the most common web design mistakes is including bad quality, redundant, or poorly sized images that bore, confuse, and even irritate customers. Your website's images need to capture users’ attention, bring your brand to life, and create a lasting impression.
Use these best practices to make sure you’re choosing—and optimizing—the right photos for your site:
Writing the perfect website copy can be a tricky balancing act: great content should be detailed enough to address specific user needs and communicate your brand identity—but not so long that it seems boring, long-winded, or irrelevant.
Great copy keeps customers informed on your products and helps them form deeper connections with your brand, so it’s essential to get it right.
The best way to create great website copy is by getting to know your customers. Build empathy with your users so you can address their specific problems and pain points in your writing.
Other web design best practices that can help you produce great copy:
You’ll implement much of your marketing strategy after your site goes live. But taking some key marketing steps during the design process can help you get off on the right foot.
A tracking code is a snippet of JavaScript code that should be included in your website’s HTML source code. Tracking codes are small but mighty—they let you monitor where your website traffic comes from and the actions users take, like making a purchase.
Verify that your site's codes work with tools like Google Analytics for effective conversion tracking and conversion rate optimization, ad campaign tracking, and marketing data analysis.
Pro tip: tracking codes provide quantitative data, but they don’t offer qualitative insights on how your users are acting and why they’re acting that way. Pair website analytics with Hotjar's Observe tools like Session Recordings and Heatmaps to get a deeper understanding of customer behavior on your site.
Hotjar Session Recordings let you see your user's product experience as you watch exactly how they navigate your website to improve the customer journey.
Integrations and plug-ins can add extra features and analytics to your site, but connecting too many at once can significantly slow down your loading time.
When deciding which integrations and plug-ins to include, prioritize those most aligned with your user and business goals, and the tools you know you’ll use on a regular basis.
Try these marketing plugins:
Too many large integrations and plug-ins can cause slow page loading times. Be selective—and choose tools like Hotjar that are designed to minimize impact on site performance and speed.
Make sure your website abides by local legislation to build trust with users and avoid complaints or even fines.
Site disclosures, which are legally required in many countries worldwide like the United States, provide users with transparent information about your business and your website, helping you build customer trust. Make sure your disclosures are easily-accessible and are permanent features on your website.
Check whether you need to include these common disclosures on your site:
Compliance with local data privacy and collection regulations is crucial to avoid reports, fines, and user friction. In terms of user trust, it’s also important to be transparent about how and why you collect people’s information, how it’s processed, and what you do with it.
Start by consulting the data protection laws that apply to you, like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Californian Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and incorporate data protection into your web design from the start.
To design a site with compliance in mind:
Now that you've done all the heavy lifting, how do ensure your website is a hit with the people who matter the most—your users?
Once you’ve designed a viable website, test it out with real users before sharing it with the world. Pre-launch testing lets you analyze how well your design is functioning, make last-minute adjustments, address bugs and glitches that come up, and make sure your customers have the best possible experience when it goes live.
"Take advantage of the various tools that exist—heatmaps, for example—and have people not involved in the website design process use it before it goes live. If you find that users are rage-clicking in some areas, or never visiting others, the web development team will gain valuable insight that will drive necessary course corrections before a site is live—significantly improving the user journey and user experience with a given site."
Amanda Foley Managing Partner , KiterocketConducting pre-launch testing with people who didn’t participate in the design process is the only way to eliminate bias and make sure you get genuine user feedback about how well your site is working.
Try these techniques:
The web design process never really ends. Once your site goes live, make sure it’s performing well and serving user needs by proactively testing and collecting product experience insights.
Start by collecting and analyzing basic quantitative data using tools like Google Analytics. Then use Hotjar Observe and Ask products to uncover the how and the why behind the numbers.
Hotjar PX insights tools help you understand how customers interact with your site after launch and beyond.
Use this flexible web design checklist to stay organized, user-centered, and aligned throughout the design process. Keeping users at the center of your web design will help you create a site your customers love using.
Use our checklist to bring your site to life—then use Hotjar's tools to make sure it’s satisfying users.