Website redesign / Mergers and acquisitions
How to Plan a Website Redesign After a Merger or Acquisition
A merger or acquisition changes more than the visual identity. The website must explain the combined business, preserve useful routes, support existing customers, and move content and systems without creating avoidable confusion.
Decide what the website must communicate during transition
Clarify whether one brand will replace another, both will remain, or an interim relationship needs explanation. Define what customers, employees, partners, and prospects must understand now, what will change later, and which legal or regulatory wording requires review.
Do not let the new homepage become a vague corporate announcement. Preserve clear paths to active products, services, support, locations, and account access while the organization settles the longer-term structure.
Map audiences, offers, proof, and ownership
Create a combined view of customer groups, markets, services, products, sales routes, contracts, and support responsibilities. Identify genuine overlap, meaningful differences, renamed offers, discontinued areas, and new cross-business journeys. Decide which proof and claims remain accurate under the new entity.
Use customer and stakeholder research to test assumptions instead of organizing pages around the deal structure alone. The multiple-audience website guide helps create distinct routes without duplicating the whole site.
Inventory domains, content, data, and connected systems
List every website, subdomain, domain owner, URL, campaign destination, analytics property, form, CRM connection, login, document, feed, cookie, vendor, and search asset affected. Mark what will be retained, rewritten, redirected, archived, or operated separately.
Domain consolidation needs one-to-one URL decisions, preserved access, updated canonicals and sitemaps, and long-term redirect ownership. Use the website consolidation guide for the migration structure and keep email and account dependencies in the plan.
Stage the launch around decisions and customer risk
Separate what must change on the legal completion date from what can follow after research, content, and integration work. An interim notice and stable customer routes may be safer than rushing a full redesign. Define approvals across brand, legal, leadership, marketing, sales, service, technology, and regional owners.
Before each release, test redirects, navigation, forms, support, accounts, tracking, search signals, consent, and crisis rollback. After launch, monitor customer questions and broken journeys, then retire transition messaging only when the combined experience is genuinely ready.
Plan the complete customer journey
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