A website rebuild brief should answer one question before anyone touches a design tool: what is this site for. Not the colours, not the number of pages, but the concrete jobs it has to do. Book more of the right work, answer common questions, capture enquiries and pass them to whatever fills your diary. Get that written down and every later decision has something to test itself against. Skip it and you get a site that looks fine and quietly earns nothing. This checklist walks through what to put in the brief, in the order that keeps a rebuild honest.
Start with the jobs the site must do
List the two or three outcomes the site exists to produce, in plain language. For most service businesses that is: get found by people nearby, help them decide you are the right choice, and make it easy to take the next step. Rank them. If more booked work is the priority, say so, because that changes how the homepage and service pages get built. A brief that opens with “modern and clean” gives an agency nothing to aim at. A brief that opens with “turn more quote enquiries into booked jobs” does.
This is the moment to think about the single action you want most visitors to take. Designing every page around that next step, rather than around a tour of your services, is what separates a working site from a brochure. Our guide on designing a service website around the next customer action covers how to choose that action and build toward it.
Describe who it is really for
Write down your main audiences and what each one arrives worried about. A homeowner comparing three trades wants trust and a clear price path. A returning client wants to rebook without friction. A referral wants proof they were told the right thing. For each group, note the questions they always ask and the objections you always hear. That list becomes your content plan, and it stops the site from being written for you instead of for the person deciding whether to contact you.
Be honest about content
Most rebuilds stall on content, not design. Decide early who writes it, who supplies photos, and what already exists that is worth keeping. If you want the site to show up in search and in AI answers, the words have to do specific work: clear service descriptions, real answers to real questions, and pages structured so a machine can quote them. Our piece on writing service content that AI answers can cite explains what that looks like in practice. Put a content deadline in the brief. It is the single most common reason a build runs late.
Spell out where enquiries go
This is the part most briefs forget, and it is the part that decides whether the site earns anything. When someone fills in a form, sends a WhatsApp message or emails, what happens next. Does it land in an inbox someone checks, drop into a CRM, trigger a booking, or sit unread until Monday. Name the tools the site must connect to and the path an enquiry should travel from first contact to booked job. If you want quotes, bookings and invoices to talk to each other instead of being re-keyed by hand, plan it now. Our guide on connecting quotes, bookings and invoices without re-keying data is a good starting point. Fast replies matter here too, because a slow response loses work that the site worked hard to win.
Plan the data you are bringing with you
If you already hold customer records, past enquiries or a mailing list, decide what moves to the new setup and in what shape. A rebuild is the natural moment to tidy this, not the moment to lose it. If your records live in spreadsheets and you are moving toward something more structured, our walkthrough on moving from spreadsheets to a CRM without losing the plot covers how to do it without the usual mess. Note in the brief who owns the current data and who signs off that the migration is complete.
Set the standards the build must meet
Some things are not optional, so write them into the brief rather than hoping they get done.
- Speed. Google measures real-world page experience through Core Web Vitals, covering loading, responsiveness and visual stability, and Interaction to Next Paint became one of those core metrics in March 2024, per web.dev. A slow site quietly loses booked work, as we cover in this piece, so make speed a stated requirement, not an afterthought.
- Mobile. Google now indexes the web using the mobile version of pages, confirmed complete in Google’s mobile-first indexing announcement. The phone view is the real site, so brief it that way.
- Accessibility. The recognised standard is WCAG 2.2 at level AA, which UK public sector bodies are required to meet under the accessibility regulations. Even where you are not legally bound by those rules, building to that standard widens who can use your site and is a sensible requirement to state.
Decide how you will judge success
A brief without a measure of success is a wish. Agree what you will check after launch and where the numbers come from. Enquiries per month, calls, form completions, bookings. Add search visibility through Google Search Console, which shows what people searched to find you and which pages they landed on. Write down the baseline you are starting from so the improvement is provable, not felt.
Cover the practical bits
Round the brief off with the boring essentials that cause disputes later: who owns the domain and hosting, who holds the logins, what your budget and deadline actually are, and who on your side is the single decision-maker. If you collect any data through the site, plan your cookie and consent approach in line with ICO guidance on cookies. Small print, big time-saver.
Where a good partner fits
A brief this clear does two things. It gets you comparable quotes, because every agency is pricing the same job, and it gives you a checklist to hold the build against. Kilij Digital builds websites for UK service businesses and connects them to the systems behind them, so an enquiry does not just arrive, it gets answered and booked. Our AI lead assistant, Pala, handles enquiries from the website, WhatsApp, Instagram and email and routes them toward a booking. The point of the brief is not a prettier site. It is a site that captures enquiries and connects them to the work that fills your diary.