If you’re thinking of revamping your website, you probably have many questions and want answers before making any final decisions. This post will provide information to assist you in feeling more at ease and knowledgeable. You’ll discover information ranging from the possible causes for a website redesign to practical tips for getting started and a glossary of key concepts.
Were you aware that a poorly designed website might hurt your business? Yes, it’s true because web development trends are changing at a rapid pace. And a website redesign is the best way to deal with this. It’s essential to take a systematic approach to your website redesign regardless of the size of your business or the sector in which it operates. Get a handle on what isn’t working, what is, and what you hope to accomplish. If you don’t do this, you’ll be wasting your website’s current visitors. What if your web design discourages potential customers from even checking it out instead of increasing traffic to your site?
Let’s look at some of the methods I find most helpful when formulating and executing a website redesign strategy to maximize return on investment. Let’s start with the why before diving into how to overhaul your website.
Why Do You Need to Redesign Your Website?
The scope of your website makeover will be determined by the goals you have set for your business. It may be as simple as altering the website’s color scheme and image library so that it reflects the new company identity. On the other hand, if you have lately changed the way you approach marketing, you might discover that it is essential to switch to a new content management system that gives you the flexibility and customization you require to remodel your website. To have a clearer picture of your redesign process, let’s go deeper into the most common redesign goals and the steps you’ll need to follow to achieve them.
- To succeed, you need to increase the number of people visiting your website.
- It would help if you had a higher lead conversion rate.
- You have decided to improve your website by including new features.
- To cater to mobile users, you’ll need to optimize your site.
How Do You Know It’s Time for a Website Redesign?
When marketing your company, your website serves as much more than a simple online brochure. It’s like having a shop window open all the time, relaying information about your company to your target demographics. Your website is “always on,” which means it always needs to be effective, whether the visitor is a new prospect, a consumer contemplating a first purchase, or another crucial stakeholder. That’s why it’s vital to evaluate your site frequently to ensure it effectively promotes your business.
There are both user-facing and server-side factors that affect a website’s usability. When contemplating the prospect of a redesign, it’s crucial to give equal weight to both. All the material (copy, design, etc.) that generates an engaging user journey and ultimately leads to sales is considered front-end work. The term “back end” refers to the website’s underlying structure. In addition to facilitating SEO and content management, it also facilitates content updates and management.
We inspect the front and back ends of your site for problems to assist you in deciding if a complete redesign is necessary. These are eight warning signs to look out for if you’re thinking about revamping your website.
- The website isn’t contributing to the company’s goals.
- You’re dealing with high bounce rates and low conversions.
- The loading times on your webpage are high.
- Unfortunately, mobile users will find your site unresponsive and difficult to navigate.
- You need to update your website’s design.
- The layout of your website makes it difficult to accomplish even basic tasks.
- Changing your content might be a hassle.
- In other words, you’re changing your image.
How to Redesign a Website
If you’re thinking about redesigning your site, it might be because it’s old and you want a change or to create a new experience to deal with falling conversions and traffic that doesn’t move. No matter the problem, you can fix it by redesigning your website, but if you do it wrong, it can also kill your business. Redesigning a website is done in a clear way, which is shown below.
1. Research & Analysis
Putting the user experience first is essential when redesigning a website. You can successfully remodel the site with minimal study and analysis. To get started, you need to evaluate your current situation. It is common for web design firms to begin with this step. Examine the sites of your competition to learn where you might improve your own. Find examples of good website design and use those as a guide to implementing such features in your site. Search for the issues like, “What layouts are best for your industry?” Do you want to go shopping? Which visuals are required for your purposes?
2. Website Audit
The effectiveness of a website redesign project is often directly proportional to the amount of time and effort put into its planning and preparation. An in-depth audit of your current website is a great place to start. An audit is a way to go if you want a comprehensive picture of your site’s assets and performance and a sense of where you might improve.
3. Strategy & Planning
Your company’s website should reflect your brand’s principles and aesthetic. To successfully rebuild a website, it is necessary to conduct an extensive study and analysis of your current site and competitors’ sites. It’s essential to create a strategy for the redesign that adheres to your brand’s established standards and aesthetic.
The following are some potential components of your plan and strategy:
- Make a spending plan
- Find out how big your project will be
- Work with experts
- Revamp and release
You need to take a close look at your site from all four directions.
4. Pin Down Your Brand’s Message
It’s essential to have a firm grasp of your brand identity, messaging, and USP before you begin work on a brand new website design and content. If you follow this rule, your website as a whole will be uniform. To keep new visitors on your site and not send them running to a rival, ensure they know exactly what you do, how they may profit from it, and why they should stick around. Consider whether you want to alter your brand’s messaging and identity. What exactly must be changed if you are to make such alterations? When updating your website, keep these alterations in mind.
5. Make Your Brand Stand Out
To put it simply: if you have a website, you are a brand. However, whether or not your brand is compelling enough to convince consumers to part with their cash is another story. The solution might be found in the representation of your brand. Redesigning your website is a simple approach to give your company a more memorable identity online. You want the very first thing a customer sees on your website to convey a clear picture of who you are and what you’re selling.
6. Create a Responsive Website
These days, individuals browse websites using not only laptops and desktop computers but also smartphones and any other device with a screen that can connect to the internet. Laptops and desktop computers are still the most common means of doing so. Therefore, seeing something like “this website is not compatible with your device” will not create very many leads for you. Websites need to be mobile-friendly; more specifically, they need to be made responsive so that they may reorganize themselves according to the screen size of the device used to browse them.
7. Competitor Analysis
In addition to conducting site audits, researching the websites and layouts of your competitors is essential. Observe what they’re doing that seems to be successful. Learn which graphics and layouts people in your industry respond to the most. Examine the websites of your top five competitors critically in light of standard industry standards to identify the elements in common that bring in new customers. It might be anything from their price menu to graphics, imageries, testimonials, videos, interactive chats, marketing campaigns, offers, etc. In addition, you can see the gaps in your rivals’ offerings. Mark what works and what doesn’t so you may improve your remodel.
8. High-Performing Content
While a website redesign can greatly benefit the site’s speed, it can also negatively impact the site in myriad other ways. If you lose the effectiveness of the many high-performing content assets you’ve already put up on your current website due to a redesign, it can have a devastating effect on your marketing results. You need to adapt some
- Some examples of such property include:
- Content that has received the most attention or shares
- Sites with a lot of visitors
- The highest-ranking keywords and their corresponding web pages
- the total amount of links pointing to specific pages
9. Create a Sitemap
You should know which sites will be indexed by Google before beginning a redesign. Don’t include a page in the site map if you don’t want it to be indexed. Some examples of these pages include “Thank you for the purchase” pages, pages where you can provide comments, and 404 error pages.
- You should develop a list of the pages you wish to optimize before deciding which ones to index.
- Utilize a page crawler, such as Screaming Frog, to automatically collect all of the URLs for all of the pages.
- The menu categories should be given more importance than the product pages or blog posts.
10. Go Live With Beta Testing
Get a beta group together before you show your new site to the world. People who are already committed to the brand and are excited to try out the new website could make up this group. In addition, you can strengthen relationships with your regular customers by having them participate in beta testing. Once you have received positive feedback from your beta-testing group, you may begin preparing for the alpha release. You should probably make a few more tweaks to the website and do user tests between the beta and alpha releases.
Wrapping UP
Due to the ever-evolving nature of design methods, customer tastes, browser capabilities, and accessibility guidelines, a website redesign is not a one-and-done procedure. When it comes to your website, you will always put the needs of your clients and the most recent standards first. The Houston website design agency is the place to go if you need assistance updating your site.
