The website redesign checklist for companies over €5M revenue.

A €2M business redesigning its website answers to itself: one or two decision-makers, a marketing budget, a deadline. A €5M+ business redesigning its website answers to a buying committee it may not have realised it had — Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Buying research puts the average B2B purchase decision at 13 internal stakeholders, and nearly 89% of those decisions cross more than one department. A redesign at this scale is exactly that kind of decision, whether or not anyone has called it one yet. The checklist below is not a longer version of the standard redesign checklist. It exists because the standard one assumes a single owner, and at this revenue band that assumption is usually wrong before the kickoff call even happens.

What actually changes above €5M in revenue

The production work barely changes with revenue. What changes is everything wrapped around it — and that wrapper is usually where the budget and the calendar actually go.

Why revenue changes what a redesign actually is

A site earning a company more than a few million a year is rarely just a brochure — it is carrying organic rankings worth real pipeline, integrations into a CRM or ERP that other teams depend on daily, and content that legal, compliance or multiple regional offices have opinions about. The cost of a mistake scales with what is already running through the site, not with the size of the redesign itself. A three-week outage on a €500k business is an inconvenience. On a business where the site is a primary lead channel, three weeks is a material dent in the quarter.

This is also where scope creep gets expensive rather than merely annoying. PMI’s Pulse of the Profession research has repeatedly found scope creep affecting a large share of projects — 52% in its 2018 survey, up from 43% five years earlier — and a redesign with a dozen stakeholders each wanting one more thing added is a textbook case. The fix is not tighter discipline after the fact. It is deciding, before kickoff, who is actually allowed to add scope.

Who actually needs to sign off, and when

Name the approvers before design starts, not when the first draft needs one. At this revenue band the realistic list usually includes a marketing or brand owner, someone from IT or security (especially if the CMS touches internal systems), legal or compliance if the industry or region requires it, finance if the spend needs a budget owner beyond the project itself, and — critically — one executive sponsor who can break a tie. Five names is not bureaucracy for its own sake; it reflects Forrester’s finding that the typical B2B purchase decision already crosses this many functions before anyone from outside gets involved.

What matters more than the list is the rule: one named approver per phase, not five people cc'd on every email. Our own research into why website projects run long found that a single named approver per phase shortens a timeline more reliably than anything about the build itself — and a 2025 survey of 500 marketing and creative professionals found 74% say the approval process itself takes more effort than the creative work under review. At committee scale, that effect compounds rather than divides.

Protecting what already works before you touch it

The single most expensive mistake at this scale is treating the redesign as a blank page rather than a migration. If the current site earns organic traffic, redesigning it without losing that SEO is its own discipline — a redirect map, a pre-launch crawl, metadata that survives the platform change — and it needs to be scoped as a deliverable with an owner, not discovered as a problem after launch.

The same applies to anything the site is quietly load-bearing for: a CRM or ERP integration a sales team depends on, an analytics setup finance uses for forecasting, a set of legal or compliance pages nobody wants to accidentally drop. A Technical Audit before scoping the redesign is the cheapest way to get a full list of what is actually connected to the site today, rather than relying on whoever has been there longest to remember.

The scope decisions that cost the most if made late

Three decisions are disproportionately expensive to reverse once the build has started. The platform choice — whether a headless setup earns its complexity for your content volume and team, or a well-run traditional CMS is genuinely the better call — should be settled with IT in the room during scoping, not discovered mid-build. The regional and language architecture, if the business operates in more than one market, needs to be decided as structure before a single template gets designed, since retrofitting a multilingual rollout onto a single-language build is close to a second project.

The third is accessibility. A business of this size operating in or selling into the EU is very often in scope for the European Accessibility Act, and treating that as a launch-week checklist rather than a design-phase requirement is how it becomes an expensive retrofit instead of a design constraint absorbed for free.

A realistic timeline at this scale

The production work itself does not stretch nearly as much as expectations assume — a multi-page rebuild still runs roughly the same six-to-fourteen-week window our own project-timeline research documents for any business site, and even a genuinely custom platform with heavy integrations is realistically six months or more of build time, not years. What stretches is the governance wrapped around that production window: the same 2025 survey found over 60% of respondents lose up to a full day of their work week specifically chasing approvals, concentrated in exactly the review cycles a committee of this size generates.

Budget for the calendar accordingly. If production is six to fourteen weeks and every phase needs sign-off from a five-person committee with its own meeting cadence, four to nine months end to end is a realistic band for a project this size — not because the work takes that long, but because the approval layer around it does.

How we scope this in practice

A Strategy Session is where we settle the scope questions above — platform, regional structure, accessibility exposure, integration inventory — before anyone opens a design tool, precisely because those are the decisions that are cheap to make once and expensive to unmake later.

From there, a Business Website or Website Upgrade engagement scopes content ownership and the redirect map as named deliverables from day one, and we build the approval schedule around your actual committee rather than assuming a single point of contact who does not exist at this size.

Sources

The stakeholder, scope-creep and approval-delay figures above come from these, checked August 2026. The revenue-band framing and checklist are our own, from client projects.

• Forrester — The State Of Business Buying, 2024 ↗

  The average B2B purchase decision now involves 13 internal stakeholders, and nearly 89% of buying decisions cross more than one department.

• PMI — Pulse of the Profession 2018 ↗

  52% of projects completed in the prior 12 months experienced scope creep or uncontrolled changes to scope, up from 43% five years earlier.

• StreamWork — 2025 Approval Research Study ↗

  Survey of 500 U.S. marketing and creative professionals, October 2025: 74% say the approval process takes more effort than the creative work itself, and over 60% lose up to a full workday per week chasing approvals.