Website Redesign RFP Template: What to Include

A website redesign RFP is not a new-build RFP with the word “redesign” pasted on top. The difference that trips people up: you already have a site that ranks for things, carries traffic, and has URLs other people link to. A redesign RFP has to force agencies to bid on preserving that value while they change the design. If your RFP skips URL mapping, redirect strategy, and SEO preservation, you will get a beautiful new site that quietly drops 30% of its organic traffic the week it launches. That is the scenario this template is built to prevent.

Building a brand-new site from nothing, with no existing traffic to protect? You want the general website RFP template instead. It covers scope, budget, and timeline without the migration machinery. This page is specifically for replacing a site you already run.

What makes a redesign RFP different from a new-build RFP?

One word: inheritance. A new build starts empty. A redesign inherits rankings, backlinks, analytics history, indexed URLs, and user expectations. The RFP has to make that inheritance visible so nobody bids as if it is a greenfield.

• Existing equity. Your current site has pages ranking in Google. A redesign that changes URLs without redirects throws that equity away.
• Migration, not creation. Content has to move from the old site to the new one, and some of it should not move at all.
• Comparison baseline. A redesign can be measured against the old site. The RFP should ask how an agency will prove the new one is better, not just prettier.
• Launch risk. Switching a live site is a surgery, not a launch. The RFP has to ask about downtime, DNS cutover, and what happens if something breaks at 2pm on a Tuesday.

Practical rule: if your RFP never mentions your current URLs, no agency bidding on it is pricing in the work that actually protects your traffic.

The five redesign-specific sections to add

Keep the standard sections from any good RFP: company background, the problem to solve, budget band, timeline, and a scoring table. Then add these five. They are the difference between a quote and a quote that survives contact with your live site.

1. Current-state inventory

List what you have before you ask anyone to replace it. Pull your top 20 to 50 pages by organic traffic from Google Analytics or Search Console, plus any page with backlinks you know about. Attach a full URL export if you can. An agency that sees your real page list quotes real work. One that sees “a few pages” guesses low and change-orders you later.

2. Redirect and URL-mapping requirement

State plainly that a 1:1 redirect map from every old URL to its new equivalent is a required deliverable, not a nice-to-have. This is the single most skipped step in cheap redesigns. When URLs change and nobody maps them, Google hits 404s, rankings drop, and the backlinks pointing at your old pages now point at nothing.

Practical rule: every URL that currently exists needs a destination after launch. A 301 redirect, or a deliberate decision to retire it. Never a silent 404.

3. SEO-preservation clause

Ask each agency to describe, in writing, how they will preserve your organic search performance through the redesign. Good answers mention title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, internal linking, image alt text, structured data, and a pre-launch versus post-launch crawl comparison. Vague answers mention “SEO best practices” and nothing specific. That gap tells you who has actually migrated a ranking site before. If you want the deeper version of this work spelled out, our technical SEO and AEO page covers what migration-grade SEO actually involves, and the SEO and SEM guide covers how it fits the bigger picture.

4. Content migration plan

Decide what moves, what gets rewritten, and what dies. Not every page on your old site deserves a seat on the new one. A page that gets two visits a month and confuses everyone should be retired, not ported. Ask the agency to distinguish between “migrate as-is,” “migrate and rewrite,” and “retire with a redirect to the nearest relevant page.” Deleting pages blindly is how people make a redesign worse. So is dragging every stale page forward out of fear.

5. Launch and rollback plan

A live-site cutover can go sideways. The RFP should ask how the agency handles staging, DNS cutover, SSL, caching, and the plan if the new site breaks after go-live. “We’ll roll back to the old site” is a legitimate answer. “We’ll figure it out” is not. Our website redesign checklist and redesign project plan both walk through the cutover steps in detail if you want to pressure-test an agency’s answer.

The five redesign-specific RFP sections and what each one protects

How to score redesign proposals without getting dazzled

Pretty mockups win RFPs they should not. A redesign proposal should be scored on migration competence first, design second. The design matters, but a gorgeous site that tanks your traffic is a failure with good taste.

• SEO preservation specificity. Did they name actual tactics and a crawl-comparison step, or wave at “best practices”?
• Redirect ownership. Do they commit to the full redirect map as a deliverable with a line item, or is it buried?
• Migration judgment. Did they ask about your weak pages, or promise to move everything?
• Measurable goals. Did they tie the redesign to a business metric, like leads or calls, instead of a vanity refresh? A conversion-focused redesign ties design decisions to what the site is supposed to earn.

Google’s own guidance treats a redesign as a site move event, with redirects and a submitted change of address as core steps, not optional extras. An agency that does not know that is learning on your traffic.

A concrete example of what a weak RFP costs

Picture a Charlotte HVAC company whose page “emergency-ac-repair-charlotte” has ranked on page one for three years and brings in service calls every summer. Their redesign RFP says “modernize the site and make it mobile friendly.” Nothing about URLs. Nothing about SEO.

The cheapest bidder rebuilds everything, lands the money page at a new URL with no redirect, and launches in May. By July that page is gone from Google, the calls dry up during peak season, and the “savings” from the cheap bid get eaten ten times over in lost jobs. The redesign RFP template on this page exists so the HVAC company’s RFP would have forced every bidder to price the redirect and the SEO migration up front. That is the whole point.

What a solid redesign RFP includes, start to finish

Here is the full section list. The first block is standard to any RFP. The second block is what makes it a redesign RFP.

1. Company background. Who you are and what the business actually does.
2. The problem to solve. The specific pain the current site causes, in plain terms.
3. Goals and success metrics. The business outcome, measured, not “looks modern.”
4. Budget band and timeline. A real range so agencies can scope honestly.
5. Current-state inventory. Your top pages, URL export, and known backlinks.
6. Redirect and URL-mapping requirement. 1:1 map as a named deliverable.
7. SEO-preservation clause. Written tactics plus a before/after crawl.
8. Content migration plan. Move, rewrite, or retire, decided page by page.
9. Launch and rollback plan. Staging, cutover, and what happens if it breaks.
10. Scoring table. Weighted so migration competence beats mockup polish.

I have been building and rebuilding websites in Charlotte since 1998, and the redesigns that go wrong almost never go wrong on the design. They go wrong on the migration nobody scoped. The RFP is where you fix that, before a single mockup exists.

One more thing: AI can mock up a redesign in minutes

AI tools can generate a slick homepage comp fast, and some agencies will lean on that to win your bid. Fine. We use AI openly too. The part AI cannot do is own the migration, the redirects, and the call at 2pm when the cutover breaks. AI can build a website. It cannot be responsible for one. Score the proposal on who is accountable for your traffic after launch, not who had the prettiest generated comp.

Your next step

Short version: a redesign RFP has to protect what your current site already earns, not just describe what the new one should look like. Add the five migration sections and every bid you get back will be comparable and honest.

Here is the question worth sitting with: if your new site launched tomorrow at new URLs with no redirects, how many of your current ranking pages would vanish? If you do not know the number, that is the gap to close first. Pull your top pages from Search Console today, add them to your RFP as the current-state inventory, and you have started the only part of a redesign RFP that actually protects your business. Want a second set of eyes on a redesign RFP or a migration plan before you send it? Reach out.