B2B Website Checklist: 21 Essentials for Success

You’ve finally convinced the stakeholders it’s time for a website redesign. The current one’s older than your CRM, half the links are broken, and the blog still talks about GDPR like it’s breaking news.

One page even features a stock photo of a man eating a salad while laughing at his laptop. Enough is enough…

But before you gallop into battle armed with moodboards and blind optimism, pause. A B2B website project isn’t just a new lick of paint; it’s a full-blown renovation with strategic foundations. Get it right, and it becomes your best-performing sales rep. Get it wrong, and it’s an expensive digital paperweight.

Whether you’re refreshing a few pages or torching the whole thing and starting over, the key to avoiding regret (and emergency Zoom calls) is proper planning. Enter: the ultimate B2B website checklist.

No fluff. No corporate nonsense. Just 21 questions that will help you dodge bloated budgets, broken journeys and post-launch panic. We’ll walk you through the lot, from content strategy to post-launch sanity checks.

So grab a coffee, cancel your next meeting, and let’s make sure your next website project doesn’t end up in the bin marked “learning experience.”

1. Set Your Strategy (3 Questions)

The existential phase of the b2b website checklist.

Before diving into design sprints or arguing over fonts, you need to nail the fundamentals. Start by asking:

1. What’s the goal of this B2B website redesign?

If your answer is “because the current one feels old,” congratulations, you’ve just failed the first question. Is it lead gen? Brand repositioning? Faster sales cycles? Get specific, or risk building a shiny brochure no one needs.

2. Who actually owns this project?

Web projects die in the grey area between “marketing sort of owns it” and “Steve in IT says he’ll help when he can.” Assign clear roles. And yes, map out the stakeholders early. You’ll thank yourself later when feedback rounds don’t turn into blood sport.

3. What’s the timeline (and what’s immovable)?

Spoiler: websites always take longer than you think. Budget in time for copy, testing, and stakeholder U-turns. The earlier you know your non-negotiables, the smoother the build will be.

A solid strategy sets the tone for everything else. Without it, you’re just making expensive guesses with HTML.

2. Content & Messaging (4 Questions)

Because without content, you don’t have a website, you have a holding page with ambition.

4. Is your content new, reused, or Frankensteined together from 2016 blog posts?

If it’s outdated, off-brand or doesn’t align with your current offering, rewrite it. Repurposing saves budget, but not if your case studies mention clients you’ve not spoken to since Brexit was still theoretical.

5. Who’s actually writing the content?

In-house marketer juggling three other projects? External copywriter? AI with a caffeine addiction? Make sure it’s someone who understands how to write content that works in a B2B sales journey. This isn’t the place for fluff or filler.

6. Have you mapped content to your buyer journey?

Every page needs a job. Every heading should earn its space. Use a proper framework that ties messaging to your personas and funnel stages. This B2B content strategy guide breaks it down nicely.

7. Are your CTAs more than just “Get in touch”?

“Contact us” won’t cut it. Think gated guides, case studies, pricing breakdowns, assets that feel useful, not desperate.

And remember: clear beats clever. Edit ruthlessly. Plan like you’re launching a product.

Because in many ways… you are

3. Design & UX (4 Questions)

Aesthetics, accessibility, and avoiding designs approved by committee.

A good B2B website doesn’t need to win design awards, but it does need to make your prospects think, “Ah, these people get it.”

8. Is this a rebrand or just a facelift?

If it’s a full rebrand, great, you get to rethink everything. Just don’t expect it to be quick. If it’s a facelift, be honest: is the existing brand strong enough to build from, or are you slapping lipstick on a very tired CMS?

9. Are you using a template, or going custom?

Repurposing templates saves time. But beware: poor UX, inconsistent styling and mobile headaches often follow. Custom takes longer but gives you control, especially when your buyers expect sleek, seamless journeys.

10. Who are you really designing for?

Your buyer personas, or your CMO’s “gut feel”? Test your assumptions. Run prototypes past real users. If your homepage feels more like an art project than a lead-gen asset, rethink.

11. Have you tested the UX across devices?

It’s 2025. Your buyers are on mobiles, tablets, and Frankenstein desktop monitors. If your site doesn’t work everywhere, it doesn’t work.

Need a benchmark? The Ultimate Guide to B2B Website Design is your best friend. Use it, steal from it, frame it.

Because smart design doesn’t just look good - it sells.

4. Platform & Build (3 Questions)

AKA: The part where dreams are made and deadlines are broken.

12. Are you choosing a CMS that suits marketers, or developers with a God complex?

Some platforms are built for content creators. Others are built for people who enjoy manually editing XML files at 1am. If your team needs to update pages, publish blogs, or run campaigns without raising a ticket, pick a CMS that doesn’t require a degree in sorcery.

(Hint: HubSpot CMS is marketer-friendly and doesn’t break when you look at it funny.)

13. Is your tech stack as integrated as your pitch deck claims it is?

If your CRM, CMS, analytics and automation tools don’t speak to each other, your b2b website redesign will become an expensive silo. Integration isn’t a luxury, it’s the difference between slick lead nurturing and “Sorry, who downloaded what now?”

14. Is this thing mobile-first, or do we need to zoom-and-scroll like it’s 2010?

If you’re still designing for desktop first, please hand in your credentials at the door. Your buyers are browsing on trains, couches, and phones they’ve dropped three times today.

Responsive design isn’t a feature, it’s survival.

This is the bit of the B2B website checklist where grown-up decisions get made. The right platform won’t just support your site, it’ll support your sanity.

H2: 5. SEO & Performance (3 Questions)

Because what’s the point of a beautiful site if no one can find it, or wait for it to load?

15. Are your redirects ready, or are you planning to orphan half your URLs and hope for the best?

A B2B website redesign without a proper redirect plan is like changing your phone number and not telling anyone. Broken links = lost traffic. Lost traffic = angry sales team. Don’t be that marketer.

16. Has your SEO been baked in, or sprinkled on like sad parsley?

Meta descriptions, H1s, internal linking, keyword mapping, this isn’t optional. It’s what gets your site seen. Following the downloadable B2B lead generation website checklist ensures you’ve covered essentials like site architecture, schema and on-page basics before panic-sweating over traffic drops.

17. How’s your site speed? No really, how is it?

If your homepage takes longer to load than your average B2B buying cycle, you’ve got problems. Compress your images, streamline your scripts, and ditch the oversized background video unless it’s doing serious lifting (it probably isn’t).

SEO and performance might not get you a shiny new brand book, but they’re the reason your site shows up in search and converts more than just your internal stakeholders.

6. Launch & Post-Launch (4 Questions)

This is where websites either go live or go sideways.

18. Have you tested absolutely everything?

We’re talking links, forms, page speed, browser compatibility, mobile responsiveness, metadata, redirects, the full digital MOT. If you launch with a broken CTA or a 404 lurking behind your pricing page, don’t act surprised when bounce rates spike and sales start sharpening their pitchforks.

19. Who’s pressing the “go live” button, and do they know what they’re doing?

Taking a site live is not just clicking a switch. It’s domain updates, DNS settings, SSL, backups, and ensuring no one’s staging site is accidentally indexed. If that sentence made you sweat, bring in someone who’s done it before.

20. Who owns the site once it’s live?

If the answer is “not sure,” you’re in trouble. Someone needs to be responsible for managing updates, publishing new content, checking performance and running CRO experiments. Otherwise, you’ve just launched another digital ghost town.

21. What’s the post-launch plan, beyond ‘hope it works’?

Websites are living things (except the ones that die two weeks after go-live). Assign ownership, schedule regular reviews, and build it into your broader growth strategy. No one wants to be back here redoing this again in 12 months.

A website launch is a milestone, not a finish line. Treat it like the start of the next sprint, not the end of the marathon.

Build Smart. Launch Sharp. Don’t Wing It.

If you’ve made it this far without quietly weeping into your CMS login screen, congrats, you’re already doing better than half the marketers who rush headfirst into a b2b website redesign with nothing but vibes and a Pinterest board.

The truth is, B2B websites fail when they’re treated like design projects instead of business-critical assets. They fail when strategy is vague, content is an afterthought, and “we’ll sort SEO later” is said with a straight face. They fail when no one owns them, no one maintains them, and no one knows why the form submissions are going to someone who left in 2019.

But not you. You’ve got the checklist. You’ve asked the 21 questions. You’ve got the scars, and now, the strategy.

So don’t leave your next big web project to chance, or worse… your CEO’s “vision” sketched on a napkin.

Ready to make your next B2B website your best-performing sales tool? Read through our guide to B2B website design and development so your next website project can hit the mark in terms of design and performance.