Competitor analysis for a website redesign
By Owen Fisher·Updated 24 July 2026·10 min read
Start a redesign by capturing the landscape: three direct rivals, two aspirational sites, and your own site as it stands today, dated. Compare information architecture, homepage promise, navigation depth, pricing presentation and the phone experience. Run a working session on the captures, then distil what you saw into a handful of redesign principles.
Why a redesign starts with the competitive landscape
Somewhere in the first stakeholder review of every redesign, the question arrives: "what do the others do?". Arrive without an answer and the meeting fills with recollections of rival sites, half right and unfalsifiable. Arrive with dated captures on the wall and the same conversation takes ten minutes and ends in agreement.
There is a deeper reason than meeting survival. Your visitors do not experience your site in isolation. They arrive from a rival's pricing page, or three tabs into comparing you against two alternatives. The landscape sets their expectations for what a homepage promises, where pricing lives and how navigation behaves. A redesign that ignores those expectations is guessing.
Build the comparator set: three rivals, two aspirations
Five sites is the working number. Enough to show patterns, few enough that a team can hold them all in mind during a session.
| Slot | How to choose it | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| Direct rival 1 to 3 | The sites your buyers actually weigh you against: the names that come up in sales calls and sit beside you in search results | The baseline the redesign must clear, and the conventions your visitors already expect |
| Aspirational site 1 | A site outside your category admired for one named strength, such as how it presents pricing | A pattern worth borrowing that no direct rival has found yet |
| Aspirational site 2 | A second out-of-category site with a different named strength, such as navigation or explaining a complex product simply | A second borrowed pattern, and proof the first was not a one-off taste call |
Two rules keep the set honest. Pick each aspirational site for a specific strength you can name, not for fame: "in the set because of how it handles plan comparison" is a reason, "because it is Stripe" is not. And stop at five. Every added site dilutes the session, and past seven, nobody remembers which pricing page belonged to whom.
Capture your own site first
Before touching a rival's site, capture your own: every key page, full-page, desktop and phone, dated. This is the "before", and it earns its keep twice.
First, in the working session. Your own pages on the same wall, at the same size, judged by the same eyes, is the fastest cure for internal folklore about the current site. Weaknesses that survived years of familiarity become obvious in thirty seconds of honest comparison.
Second, months later. The strongest slide in any redesign launch deck is the before and after, and the before can only be captured now. The day the redesign ships, the old site stops existing, and the Wayback Machine may hold only a broken, desktop-only echo of it.
What to compare
Comparing everything produces a scrapbook. Five dimensions cover what a redesign actually has to decide.
| Dimension | The question | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Information architecture | How do they group and name what they offer? | The main navigation, the footer, and how the product splits into pages |
| Homepage promise | What does the first screen claim, and to whom? | Headline, subheading, first visual, and the primary call to action |
| Navigation depth | How many clicks from landing to a decision page? | The path from homepage to pricing, and to the main product page |
| Pricing presentation | How do they frame cost and the step between tiers? | Tier names, the featured plan, what is shown openly versus gated behind a call |
| Mobile experience | Is the phone version the same argument, or a cut-down one? | The same pages captured at phone width, set beside the desktop versions |
For a deeper treatment of the flow-level comparison, UX competitive analysis picks up where these five dimensions stop.
Run the working session on the wall
The captures become useful in a room. Print them large or project them, and group by page type, not by site: all six homepages in one row, all six pricing pages in the next. Like beside like is where patterns jump out. Grouped by site, the session becomes six polite tours; grouped by page type, it becomes a comparison.
Start with fifteen minutes of silent review, sticky notes in hand, so the loudest voice does not set the findings. Then discuss row by row. Keep observation and interpretation labelled as you go: "four of five rivals show pricing in the main nav" is an observation, "a buried pricing link costs trust" is an interpretation. Both belong on the wall, marked as what they are, a discipline borrowed from the teardown method.
From a wall of evidence to redesign principles
The output of the session is not a feature list and not a favourite rival to copy. It is four to six redesign principles, each one traceable to something on the wall. "Pricing reachable in one click from every page: four of five rivals do it and the fifth buries it" is a principle with evidence attached. "Make it cleaner" is a mood.
Principles written this way keep earning for months. When a stakeholder pushes for a carousel in week nine, the answer is not an opinion, it is a pointer back at the wall. Decisions grounded in captured evidence get relitigated far less than decisions grounded in taste.
The full process, start to finish
- 1
Write the redesign question
One sentence stating what the redesign must fix, agreed before any capturing. "Visitors cannot tell within ten seconds what the product does" gives the analysis a target; "the site feels dated" does not.
- 2
Pick the five comparator sites
Three direct rivals your buyers genuinely compare you against, plus two aspirational sites outside the category, each chosen for one named strength.
- 3
Capture your own site, dated
Every key page, full-page, desktop and phone. This is the before record for the launch deck and the honesty benchmark for the session. Date it and store it before anything changes.
- 4
Capture the comparator pages
The same page types across all five sites, desktop and phone. In Stravue, paste each site with what you are after, pick from the proposed pages, and the captures arrive clean, with cookie banners and chat widgets removed.
- 5
Run the working session grouped by page type
Print or project the captures in rows by page type. Silent review first, then discussion, keeping observations and interpretations labelled. Pin notes on the captures as findings land.
- 6
Write four to six principles
Distil the wall into principles, each citing its evidence. These, not the captures, are what the design team carries into the redesign.
- 7
Keep everything for the launch deck
The dated before captures and the annotated comparison become the opening slides of the launch presentation, months from now, when the redesign has to justify itself.
The captures become the before slide
When the redesign launches, the deck that presents it opens with the before and after: the old homepage beside the new one, desktop and phone, both dated. Then the principles, each backed by a capture from the wall. The research that started the project closes it, which is what separates a redesign that can defend itself from one that just happened. The single-site teardown shows annotated captures of one site done properly, and how to present competitor research covers the deck itself.
Stravue's role across the whole process is the capture layer: clean, dated, full-page captures on desktop and phone, pins for the session findings, and exports to PowerPoint, PDF or a share link when the wall has to travel. The comparison, the principles and the redesign are yours.