Reviewing a build against its design sounds simple: open the page, open the frame, compare. In practice the hard part is the middle step. Which frame is the approved one? Is the blog template “Blog Post” or “Article / Desktop / v3”? Which of the four homepage frames did the client sign off?
If you can't answer that in a few seconds, design reviews get skipped. A mapping fixes it: a clear, agreed link between every page on the site and the one frame it should match.
Start from the sitemap, not the Figma file
The sitemap is the list of what actually exists on the site. Start there, page by page, and find the frame for each one. Starting from Figma tends to miss pages that were never designed, like a 404, a legal page or a template that was built from components.
For CMS collections, map the template, not every item. One frame for the blog post template covers every post that uses it.
A naming system that survives revisions
One Figma page for approved designs
Call it something unambiguous, like “Approved”. Everything else, explorations and old versions included, lives elsewhere.
Name frames after their URLs
“Home”, “Pricing”, “Blog post template”. The name should tell anyone which page it belongs to.
Replace, don't duplicate
When a revision is approved, update the frame in place or move the old one to an archive page. Never leave two frames with the same name.
Note the breakpoint
If you design desktop and mobile, add it to the name: “Pricing / Desktop”, “Pricing / Mobile”.
Decide what happens to unmapped pages
Some pages won't have a frame, and that's fine. A privacy policy built from a standard template doesn't need a design comparison. Make it a conscious choice rather than an oversight, so nobody wonders later whether a page was skipped by accident.
Keep the mapping current
The mapping drifts the same way designs do. A page is added late, a frame is renamed, a template is redesigned. Check the mapping whenever pages are added, and again before the final review.
Mapping Checklist
5 checksWhat to do when there's no frame
Some pages exist on the site that were never designed. Search results, a 404, a thank-you page, a template the developer built from existing components. Leaving them unmapped is fine, but it's worth deciding how they'll be reviewed instead.
Usually the answer is to review them against the design system rather than a specific frame: do the type, colours and spacing match the rest of the site? It's a quicker check, and it catches the pages that look slightly out of place because nobody designed them.
Who owns the mapping
On a small team, the mapping usually belongs to whoever runs the design review. On a bigger one, it's worth naming an owner explicitly. Mappings fall out of date quietly, and the first anyone hears about it is a review that compares a page to last month's frame.
The owner doesn't need to do much. Check the mapping when pages are added, when a frame is renamed or replaced, and before the final review. Ten minutes at each of those points keeps every comparison honest.
When you set up a project, Frank reads your site's pages from its sitemap and you match each one to a frame from your Figma file. The mapping is kept for every scan, so each page opens side by side with its design. Get started with Frank →
Map It Once, Review It Every Time
A clean mapping turns design review from a chore into a quick page-by-page pass.
