Website redesign / Feature planning
How to Prioritize Features for a Website Redesign
A redesign backlog often mixes essential journeys, inherited tools, stakeholder wishes, and attractive ideas. Prioritization turns that list into a launchable product instead of a vote.
Turn requests into problems to solve
Collect feature ideas from analytics, search terms, sales conversations, support questions, user research, content owners, and technical teams. Rewrite each request as a user or business problem. “Add a calculator” is a proposed solution; “help buyers understand likely project range before an enquiry” is a problem that may have several answers.
Audit existing features before rebuilding them. Check use, outcomes, maintenance effort, accessibility, data quality, and operational ownership. Low usage may mean low value, poor placement, or broken execution, so investigate before removing it. The pre-redesign audit guide outlines the evidence worth collecting.
Evaluate value, reach, risk, and dependence
For each candidate, ask how many relevant users need it, how important the task is, what commercial or operational value it creates, and how certain the evidence is. Then consider delivery effort, legal or security obligations, accessibility, performance, integrations, content needs, and failure consequences.
A compliance requirement or a feature required for a core transaction may outrank a highly visible enhancement. A small change that removes a major sales objection may outrank a complex tool with vague benefits. Use the same criteria across requests so seniority or enthusiasm does not become the hidden scoring system.
Check whether the business can operate the feature
A feature is not ready because it can be designed. Confirm the data source, content owner, response workflow, integration, permissions, support process, measurement plan, and ongoing budget. A product finder with incomplete attributes or live chat without available staff will create a polished failure.
Map dependencies early. An account area may require identity, consent, CRM data, and support access; a personalized experience may require reliable segmentation and content variants. Use the custom functionality guide to define rules, states, and acceptance criteria before estimating.
Define a coherent launch and a real later backlog
Group features into must launch, should launch, later, and remove. The launch set should complete the priority journeys end to end, not scatter partial capability across the site. Record why each decision was made and what evidence would cause the team to revisit it.
Give later items an owner, dependency, and review point; otherwise “phase two” becomes a polite graveyard. Validate uncertain, expensive ideas with prototypes or operational trials before committing to a full build. Measure whether launched features change task completion, enquiry quality, revenue behavior, or support demand as intended.
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