Today, creating a website can take as little as a few minutes. With tools like Webflow or Wix, combined with AI-powered content services, you can quickly produce a decent-looking site. However, just because you can build something fast doesn’t mean it will achieve your business goals. Without proper website planning, it’s like constructing a house without a blueprint.
I’ve spent 10 years in project management, with half of that focused on website projects (50+ over 5 years). In my experience, poorly planned projects always require more time for corrections. Here, I’ll share what I’ve learned about how to plan a website effectively and avoid unnecessary rework throughout the project.
What is website planning
Website planning is a series of processes that take place before the development phase. These include website structure prototyping, page wireframing, content planning, creating technical requirements, and more. Proper website planning ensures smooth transitions between project phases, reduces risks by identifying potential issues early, and improves communication by establishing a clear and agreed-upon foundation.
In simple terms, website planning provides clarity about the website’s purpose and defines the steps needed to achieve its goals.
Why website planning is important
No website builder or AI assistant can guarantee that visitors will take the actions you want - whether that’s subscribing to a service, reading a page to the end, or making a purchase. This is where website planning demonstrates its critical value.
Without a clear plan, you risk ending up with a website that fails to meet your expectations or the business objectives of the project.
A detailed plan not only minimizes stress but also reduces challenges your team might face during development. In fact, 100% of website project errors stem from poor planning. For example, in 2019, a client overlooked specific requirements for the localized version of their website in the design brief. This oversight resulted in extra costs, additional work, and a delayed go-live date.
Key benefits of website planning
- Clear scope: Establish an accurate project estimate and track progress against the plan.
- Cost-efficiency: Spot errors early to avoid expensive fixes later in the process.
- Improved user flow: Prototype the user journey to identify areas for optimization, leading to better conversion rates and increased engagement.
- Better SEO: Plan keywords to help search engines index your pages more effectively, boosting your site’s ranking in search results.
- Streamlined communication: Use the plan as a reference and knowledge base to replace lengthy discussions with clear, actionable guidance.
- Clear purpose: Align everyone involved around a shared goal, keeping the project focused and on track.
Website planning process
Every step of the website planning process builds on the previous one, ensuring a seamless progression. Each phase adds layers of detail, ultimately creating a comprehensive set of documents. These serve as a blueprint for designers and developers, providing clarity on what needs to be done, where it should be implemented, and how it should function.
Step 1: Determine website's purpose
Clear goals are essential assets that guide your team through project challenges and help streamline decision-making. Don’t rely on assumptions - write everything down, review it, and confirm its accuracy.
Start by answering these questions:
- What am I trying to achieve with the website? Is it to promote or sell a product, distribute information, reach a broader audience, or a combination of these?
- What is the website expected to accomplish for my business? What measurable benefits should the project deliver?
Feel free to expand on these questions. The more you explore, the clearer your goals will be.
The more specific your goals are, the more thorough your planning and data-based assumptions need to be to ensure those objectives are fully met.
Step 2: Identify your target audience
Understanding your target audience is invaluable. It provides key insights into their interests and behavior, which are essential for creating a website that resonates with them. Depending on your business, audience interests can vary significantly across age groups, geographic locations, education levels, and other factors.
For example, imagine designing a website for a toy store chain but mistakenly assuming children are the primary visitors. In reality, it’s likely their parents who make purchasing decisions and are, therefore, the target audience.
Building a new website may aim to attract a new audience or engage an existing one - both scenarios require a thorough analysis of user behavior in a digital environment. Data sources for this analysis are virtually limitless, ranging from surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to competitor analysis, market reports, social media insights, and website analytics tools.
User persona
Creating a user persona is a valuable method of analyzing your target audience. This involves developing a hypothetical user profile with specific details such as age, occupation, education, interests, and goals. It simulates a real person interacting with your website to achieve certain objectives.
By using user personas, teams can better visualize how their work benefits the intended audience rather than designing generically for "people aged 30-45 in the hospitality sector."
Note: This method is particularly useful for larger projects where the target audience is unfamiliar to the team, and their behavior isn’t fully understood.
Step 3: Competitors analysis
Don’t fear competition - learn from their mistakes and adopt tactics that work. While there are countless ways to approach this step, I’ll share my favorite techniques:
SWOT analysis
This method helps identify internal and external factors that influence goal achievement:
- Strengths: Features of the competitor's website that provide an advantage and help achieve goals.
- Weaknesses: Elements that create obstacles to reaching goals.
- Opportunities: Features that, if implemented, could support goal achievement.
- Threats: External factors that may hinder success.
SWOT analysis is excellent for identifying competitive advantages, but be cautious of personal biases when evaluating key factors.
User flow
Put yourself in the user’s shoes and explore a competitor’s website to complete a specific goal, like purchasing a product, subscribing to a service, or posting content. Observe how easy or difficult it is to achieve the goal, how many clicks it takes, and whether the process is intuitive. Document both positive and negative aspects to inform your own user flow planning.
Landing pages
Gather full-page screenshots or printouts of competitors’ landing pages. Arrange them side by side and step back to view them collectively. While smaller details fade, larger shapes and structures become apparent. This perspective helps identify which elements or sections competitors emphasize to guide the user journey effectively.
SEO
Analyze how competitors optimize their websites for search engines and what keywords they target. This can also offer insights into their target audience.
Note: while SEO analysis can be performed during content planning, conducting it early provides a competitive edge in your planning process.
Step 4: Plan structure of the website
Website structure is the best starting point for planning - it is a bird's-eye view on a whole planned website. Think of the structure as the skeleton of your future site - everything else will be built on top of it.
At this stage, you don’t need finalized titles or detailed content. The goal is to organize pages in a way that aligns with your website's purpose, ensuring a smooth and clear user journey to maximize visitor conversion rates.
Most websites use a hierarchical structure, allowing for multiple user flows that cater to different target groups. Begin with the homepage at the top and work level by level, adding pages that address your audience’s needs and interests.
Pro Tip: While planning the structure, always ask yourself: “What will my target audience be looking for on this website?”
- If it’s contact information, include a Contacts page.
- If they want to learn about your company, add About Us and potentially a Team page.
- To persuade visitors to purchase your product or service, dedicate pages to product details, benefits, and pricing.
- If your audience seeks updates about your business, include a Blog or News section. This can also significantly boost SEO if executed properly.
Octopus was originally created for internal use because existing tools didn’t meet our needs. Some lacked the necessary details, while others weren’t intuitive for client presentations. Today, Octopus leads the way in website planning, helping users create websites that deliver results.
Step 5: Wireframing
Just as structure forms the foundation of a website, wireframes define the layout and content of individual pages. At this stage, each page should be fleshed out with details about the type of content it will host and its role in the user journey.
Wireframes come in two main types: low fidelity and high fidelity, both of which are effective tools for planning pages. The key difference lies in the level of detail:
- Low fidelity wireframes: Ideal for focusing on user flow without distractions from specific layouts, shapes, or design elements. These are great for mapping the user journey early on.
- High fidelity wireframes: Focus on detailed layouts, providing a clearer impression of how elements will look and function.
Start with the page you can visualize most clearly, keeping your target audience's goals in mind. Gradually add elements, page by page, building the user journey brick by brick while following the structure you’ve already planned.
Pro Tip: Low fidelity wireframes are particularly useful for identifying and fixing user flow errors early in the project.
Step 6: Plan content and SEO
I cannot emphasize enough how critical content is - well-crafted website content not only captures visitors’ attention but also guides them seamlessly toward completing their goals.
From my experience, the best person to write website content is always a subject matter expert. Their deep knowledge enables them to create insightful, meaningful, and engaging drafts. However, this initial draft is rarely the final product - it often requires a copywriting, marketing, and SEO touch.
In the past, many of our clients turned to professional copywriters to refine their drafts, and the results were exceptional - engaging, polished, and easy to read. But with the rise of AI tools, the content creation landscape has shifted. Today, for most small to medium-sized websites, AI has become the go-to solution for tasks like proofreading, implementing SEO keywords, adjusting tone, and more. While professional copywriting still offers unmatched expertise, AI tools deliver tremendous value at a fraction of the cost.
SEO isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity for building a successful website. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz can help identify the right keywords to attract your target audience via search engines. Incorporating these keywords strategically into your content will improve search visibility and drive more traffic to your site.
For additional tips, check out our blog on Content Planning.
Step 7: Brandbook
A website is a vital brand asset, and like any other asset, it must align with general brand guidelines to strengthen your identity - not dilute it. A visually stunning website that feels disconnected from other assets, such as your logo, business cards, social media presence, or even office décor, can create confusion and undermine your business goals.
If your brand is strong and cohesive, I recommend adhering to your existing design guidelines. Leverage your established brand power by integrating its elements seamlessly into the website. However, if you don’t have a formal brandbook but still consider your brand modern and effective, use your design assets - such as your logo, typeface, color palette, and visuals - as references during the design phase.
There’s another case, however. Brand visual assets are heavily outdated, which is a risk of creating a weak website with those. Or finding yourself tied to the old logo after investing much in the new website - trust me, this happens more often than I could have imagined. Imagine if the Windows logo (1992) had to be considered for a modern website - it would limit how Microsoft could utilize modern trends and reach the desired audience.
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Brands don’t change logos for fun - there are trends they must follow to attract and retain their audience.
Step 8: Create a design brief
A design brief is a concise document outlining the expectations for the design development phase. Its contents are flexible and can include visual references, moodboards, examples to avoid, or even a textual description of the feeling the website should evoke. Think of it as a bridge of expectations between the client and designer.
The brief can be prepared by the designer during interviews with the client or by the client themselves and then used by the designer as a reference. It’s vital for the project team to recognize and respect the brief to avoid situations where the final design fails to meet expectations - no one wants to end up in an expectation vs reality meme.
Recommendation for redesign projects: When redesigning an existing website, aim for a balance between freshness and continuity. A new design should feel modern and exciting without confusing existing users. This can be achieved by retaining familiar elements like color schemes or keeping the layout changes subtle. For example, in 2024, YouTube experimented with moving the title, description, and comments to the sidebar. After public backlash, they reverted the change (source). While such experiments are valuable for discovering new approaches, this case highlights how they can also lead to additional costs if not well-received.
Step 9: Technical brief
If a website were a car, the previous steps planned the interior and exterior. Now it’s time to outline the requirements for performance, steering, and maintenance.
Here's a list of aspects to consider when creating a technical brief:
- Integrations: If you plan to accept payments, connect to a CRM, ERP, or any other system, integrate a third-party blogging solution, or link any external tools, list them all. Some integrations might take an hour if toolkits and instructions are available, while others may require weeks of custom development.
- Data migration If you have large amounts of data to transfer (e.g., blogs, press releases, product descriptions), data migration is essential. This can significantly impact the budget, so detail what data needs to be migrated, its source, and its destination.
- CMS A CMS allows you to edit website content without involving developers. Opt for a widely used CMS with an active community and regular updates, ensuring long-term support and ease of troubleshooting.
- Integrations: Choose a CMS that supports built-in or third-party integrations. For example, WordPress has thousands of plugins to cover diverse system needs, while Webflow offers an all-in-one hosted solution.
- SEO Management: A CMS should enable you to manage SEO (e.g., meta titles) without constant IT support.
- Access Control: If your team will work with the CMS, check for role-based permissions (e.g., content creators vs. admins).
- Maintenance: Chances are you will be updating the website over the years - not only changing content, but also changing layout, adding new type of pages, creating new integrations, updating version of the CMS, etc. Choose easy maintainable system with clear instructions and larger community.
There are CMS with built-in or easily added integrations, for example, WordPress, the most popular CMS in the world, have thousands of 3rd party plugins to cover almost any system integration. Some come with hosting, like Webflow - consider such if you like all-in-one solution.
Best if you can manage SEO in CMS without need to call IT maintenance every time you need to change meta-title. If you intend to involve your team work with CMS, check if there are different access rights settings, allowing creating content-creator role, an admin role, etc.
- Hosting Hosting is where your website lives. Choose hosting based on these requirements, tailored to your project:
- Security: Look for SSL certificates, firewalls, and regular backups. Example: An e-commerce site must ensure encrypted transactions and data protection.
- Performance: Fast servers, sufficient bandwidth, and optional CDN support for smooth operation. Example: A news site should handle simultaneous traffic during peak hours.
- Scalability: Opt for elastic resources and load balancing to handle growth. Example: An online store needs extra capacity during sales events.
- Accessibility: Ensure high uptime and quick access through global data centers. Example: A weather website must load fast for users worldwide.
- Cost: Match hosting to your budget, checking for hidden fees like extra bandwidth or storage. Example: A small blog can start with shared hosting and later upgrade to VPS as traffic grows.
- Reliability: Aim for high uptime guarantees (99.9% or better) and redundant systems. Example: A government portal must minimize service interruptions.
- Support: 24/7 support is essential for immediate troubleshooting. Example: An e-commerce site requires quick assistance if the payment gateway fails.
- Load Time Performance isn’t achieved with a single measure - it’s a mix of hosting, technology, and data size. Establish a load time benchmark to assess performance and identify areas for optimization.
Step 10: Estimate costs and create project budget
By now, you should have all the details required to make an accurate project estimate. Always involve designers and developers in this process. I also recommend getting a second opinion - either to confirm the estimate or to identify discrepancies between evaluations and understand why they differ.
Breaking down costs by project phases and pages enables better monitoring and control of expenses at any stage. This approach allows you to make adjustments before running out of budget with only 60% of the website completed. While this scenario may not happen, all projects carry risks, and it’s in their nature to evolve. Your role is to stay prepared to act when changes arise.
Remember when I mentioned Octopus was originally created for internal use? Not many know this, but it includes a project estimation tool. Once your website structure is ready, open the estimation panel and assign time to each page or to the entire project. When finished, you can share the link with the client instantly. Why send a static PDF when you have this feature?
Conclusion
Planning a website isn’t just an extra step - it’s the key to long-term success. A solid plan ensures every decision serves a purpose, saving time, money, and frustration down the line. If you’re doubting, remember: planning isn’t a delay - it’s your fastest route to a website that delivers.