How to Write a Redesign Brief That Agencies Actually Use

Most redesign briefs tell agencies what the company wants the site to look like, not what job the site needs to do. That is why so many redesigns produce beautiful sites that convert just as poorly as the old one.

The agency builds what it is briefed to build. If the brief is about aesthetics, the agency delivers aesthetics. If the brief is about conversion, the agency has something to work toward. The brief is not a formality. It is the document that determines whether the project has a target.

What agencies actually need from a brief

An agency needs to understand what success looks like before they design anything. Not success in the abstract. Specific, measurable success: what the site needs to produce, for which buyers, and what it needs to stop doing wrong.

That means they need a conversion baseline. What does the current site produce right now, in qualified sessions, form completions, and booked meetings? Without a baseline, there is no way to evaluate whether the new site is better. There is also no way to set a design direction that is grounded in what the current site is failing to do.

They need audience definitions with real specificity. “Director-level and above at mid-market B2B software companies” is not enough. Who is the primary decision maker? What do they already know about the problem when they land on the site? What objections do they show up with? What does a qualified lead actually look like? The answers to those questions should shape every page on the site.

They also need to know what the current site is failing to do, stated in evidence-based terms. “It looks dated” is not useful. “The pricing page has a 78% exit rate and our sales team says buyers consistently arrive on calls not understanding the difference between our two tiers” is useful. Specific failures give the agency something to solve.

What most briefs include instead

The typical redesign brief contains competitor site screenshots, a list of feature requests, a direction described as “modern and clean,” and a section about brand values. Sometimes there is a reference to “the user journey” without any data about what the current user journey actually is.

None of this is actionable. A designer can produce something that looks modern and clean without knowing anything about your conversion problem. A developer can build every feature on the list without the site getting any better at its actual job.

The brief is the place where a B2B marketing team has to do the hard analytical work before an agency does any creative work. Most teams skip it, not because they are lazy, but because no one told them that is what a brief is for.

What to include in a brief that actually works

1. Business context

Start with what the company does, who buys it, and what a qualified lead looks like. Be specific. “We sell mid-market B2B companies on a contract data platform. Our primary buyer is Head of Revenue Operations at companies with 200 to 1,000 employees. A qualified lead is someone who has booked a demo and answered three qualification questions.” The agency needs to understand the business well enough to make decisions on your behalf when the brief does not cover a specific situation.

2. Current performance baseline

Traffic by page. Conversion rate by page. Where the biggest drop-offs are. How many qualified leads the site produces per month. How many of those close. If you do not have this data, do not skip the section. That is a signal you need an audit before you need a redesign. The baseline is not optional. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

3. Conversion goals

State what the site needs to produce, not what it needs to look like. “Increase demo requests from organic traffic by 40% within 90 days of launch.” “Generate 30 qualified leads per month from the pricing and solution pages.” Goals that are not tied to output are not goals. They are preferences.

4. Audience definition

Name the primary buyer. Describe what they know when they arrive on your site. List the top three objections they show up with. Explain what they need to believe before they will fill out a form. If you sell to multiple buyer types, rank them. The site cannot be designed equally for everyone. It needs to be designed primarily for someone.

5. Pages and priorities

Which pages carry the most conversion weight? Which pages are most visited by buyers who eventually close? What is the hierarchy? Most B2B sites have three to five pages that actually matter for conversion: the homepage, one or two solution or product pages, pricing, and a contact or demo page. Everything else supports those. The brief should make that clear, and it should tell the agency what is expected of each page.

6. What the current site gets wrong

This is the section most teams write vaguely and should write specifically. Not “the messaging is unclear.” Instead: “The homepage does not explain the product until the third scroll. The solution pages use internal terminology that buyers do not recognize. The pricing page has no anchor and buyers consistently leave without engaging.” Specific problems give the agency specific problems to solve.

7. Constraints

Tech stack requirements. Integration requirements (CRM, marketing automation, chat). Timeline. Budget range. Hosting requirements. These are not afterthoughts. An agency that does not know you are on HubSpot CMS or that you need a Salesforce form integration will design a site that creates rebuild work before it even launches.

8. Success metrics

Define how the project will be evaluated at 30, 60, and 90 days post-launch. What tracking needs to be in place before launch? What conversion events are being measured? Who is responsible for pulling the numbers? A redesign that does not define success in advance has no way to learn from the result, which means the next redesign starts from the same place.

The brief as a diagnostic tool

Writing a good brief forces you to answer questions most marketing teams have not answered. That is not a side effect. It is a feature.

If you sit down to fill out the “current performance baseline” section and realize you do not know what your site’s conversion rate is by page, that is critical information. It means you are about to brief an agency on fixing a problem you cannot yet measure. The brief is telling you to stop.

If you cannot write a specific audience definition because your team has ongoing disagreement about who the primary buyer is, that is a positioning problem. Solving it in the brief is cheaper than solving it mid-redesign when the wireframes are already done.

If you cannot articulate what the current site is failing to do in specific terms, that is a sign the redesign is driven by preference, not diagnosis. Preference-driven redesigns reliably produce attractive sites that perform about the same as what they replaced.

A Web Experience Audit exists exactly for this situation. An audit maps what the current site is producing, identifies where it is losing buyers, and gives you the evidence-based diagnosis that makes a redesign brief specific enough to be useful. The audit output is, essentially, the hard sections of the brief already written. Get the Web Experience Audit before you brief any agency.

FAQ

Common questions

Takeaway

The brief is not the paperwork before the real work starts. It is the work. A brief that clearly defines what the site needs to produce, who it is for, what the current site is failing to do, and how success will be measured gives an agency the constraints they need to make good decisions. A brief built on aesthetic preferences and feature lists gives them a creative project with no feedback mechanism. The difference shows up in the conversion data six months after launch, when you are trying to figure out why a $150,000 site is generating the same number of qualified leads as the one it replaced.