A website is a digital address of your business. It is where people reach out to know about you and your brand; if you think about it like this, a website becomes a very important aspect of running a successful business.
The process of redesigning a website takes time and effort. Redesigning your website is a continuous process that will continue to influence your online appearance for many years. To ensure that your website redesign is successful and lasts for a long time, it is essential to have a well-planned approach. Although many b2b ecommerce website development services might want to start immediately, strategic planning and goal setting are crucial.
Website Redesign Checklist
- Step 1: Audit your current site
- Step 2: Set clear, quantifiable goals
- Step 3: Gather inspiration and analyze the competition
- Step 4: Define your strategy
- Step 5: Solidify the brand style guide
- Step 6: Setting a timeline
- Step 7: Craft a website copy
- Step 8: Test
Eight important steps for a successful website redesign
- Audit your current website
The first step to website redesign is understanding what works for your website and what isn’t. Audit your website to understand its strengths and weaknesses. The main reason for a website redevelopment is to improve the user experience.
- Audit the current website’s performance:
Build a sitemap of the current website. Please review the website and analytics to understand what visitors find valuable and what they don’t. Make a report on the following metrics:
- Website sessions/unique visitors
- Bounce rate
- Average time on site
- Sessions per session
- SEO ranking for specific keywords
- Conversion rates
- Sessions per device
- Site speed/page loading time
This will help you understand the pages you have to deal with and will be useful when creating the sitemap for your new website.
- Complete SEO audit of the website
A thorough assessment of your attempts to rank in search results and the readiness of your website to function is a search engine optimization (SEO) audit. This audit’s objective is to find any problems that might harm your organic search performance. Keep a running record of any issues you want to address when developing a plan for your redesign.
- Audit the content on the website
Try counting the number of sentences on your website that begin with “you” instead of “we.” According to Marcus Sheridan in “They Ask, You Respond,” the ideal ratio is five to one, which means that you want to refer to your buyer five times more frequently than yourself. If you’re not meeting that ratio, it’s usually an obvious sign that your content needs to be revised to emphasize the buyer’s requirements and issues.
- Set clear, quantifiable goals
Once the audit on your website is complete, it’s time to set goals for your redesign. If conversion rates are dropping, focus on improving the metrics for the landing pages with the highest bounce rates and lowest goal completions. If the overall branding appears obsolete, make time spent on the site your KPI and stick to it.
Set clear, quantifiable goals. The number of goals should be not more than three to four, and create a strategy to achieve them. Often, marketers do not have a proper study to back their decision for a redesign. This leads to a waste of resources. Communicating the objectives and goals to your team to achieve measurable success is very important.
- Gather inspiration and analyze the competition
There is no shame in checking out your competitors and understanding what works for them. Take inspiration from their website and analyze why they have designed it that way. This does not mean blindly following what they are doing – every organization is unique, with different values and target audiences.
You can draw inspiration from anywhere. You don’t have to be a creative genius to design a website. Take the help of inspiring websites outside your industry to discover new ideas, like from the top web developers in the United States. Many designer communities like Dribbble, Behance, and Webflow have the latest website design trends and can be of great use to help start the creative process.
Don’t just scrape the websites for designs; look at their content too. A good visual website would still not serve your purpose if you do not have equally great content.
Create a library for yourself with your favorite sources of inspiration, no matter where you get your ideas. The more examples you can give the designer, the more closely the final product will resemble your preferences.
- Define your strategy
After doing the research, setting goals, and drawing inspiration, it is time to map out the journey for the visitors. For this step, you would require to build a sitemap. A sitemap is a list of the web pages on your website. Create a sitemap to reorganize the web pages to improve the user experience and website architecture and boost the SEO rankings. On paper, draw the hierarchy of your website based on the user’s journey and relevant topics and keywords.
The purpose of your website is to deliver a message. For this, you should have a clear understanding of what your message is. Once you are clear on that, you can strategize to rearrange the web pages, which would help to give the message effectively.
Keyword research is vital in optimizing your new site for search and learning about what your visitors are looking for. When you write the content for your website, you can use the same keywords that your target customers use to search. This raises your search engine ranking and makes your website more appealing to visitors.
- Solidify brand style guide
Your brand is what people think when they first hear or look at your company. It would be a good time to create or redefine your brand styling. Your brand styling guide would be helpful to align your thoughts and what the brand wants to represent.
It’s a set of rules that everyone in your company can follow to understand and replicate your brand. Because of this, it’s crucial to ensure these documents are updated before you begin gathering ideas and beginning the design process.
- Setting a timeline
Before you start the redesigning process, set a realistic timeline. This includes assigning tasks to reach the deadline. Building a framework will guarantee that all milestones are met, and the website is launched on time, even though quality shouldn’t be sacrificed for a time frame.
If you’re not using an internal designer, now is also the moment to set aside money for effectively managing this project.
- Craft website copy
It might be tempting to jump in and start designing and bringing all those weeks of planning to life. Instead, take it slow and try to get feedback at each step. You should frequently question yourself this; how will a potential customer react to your messaging if they visit your website, and will this messaging result in a conversion? Every title, subtitle, and call-to-action should speak to the buyer’s objectives, problems, and common language.
While crafting your website copy, it is important to draft a content architecture. Thinking that you can write the content afterward and fit it into your designs is one of the biggest mistakes you can make while redesigning a website. Your website’s page layout should always be determined by its content. Design should support your message rather than detract from or overwhelm it.
- Test
The fun part is over, and it is time to implement your ideas. Why not conduct a few A/B tests once you have established some of your website’s components to see whether your website redesign is successful? You don’t need to be a tech-savvy marketer to achieve this because many easy tools are available that allow you to perform quick tests on your website in real-time.
Start by running simple tests on your webpage, such as altering the CTA button’s color, to determine which version generates the most conversions. Another way to gather these insights is to conduct a poll on your website or send it to a limited group of customers you know will provide useful feedback.
Eight signs you need a website redesign
Every website redesign requires heavy investment, not only in terms of money but time and resources too. Here are the eight signs to look out for when considering redesigning your website:
- Your website design has not been updated or changed in the past 1.5 to 2 years.
- There has been a change in your business strategy.
- The website doesn’t receive enough visitors.
- Or, you might be getting traffic, but it is not getting converted to loyal users.
- You do not feel excited when you see your website.
- The website is not working properly.
- The website is not mobile-friendly.
- Some essential features of modern websites are missing.
Conclusion
Remember that the first step in every website redesign project is determining why you want to change it. Make sure strong reasons support your decision.
The success of your redesign will ultimately depend on how much time you invest in planning and preparation.
It’s impossible to be “perfect.” However, if you pay attention to customer input and adjust your website accordingly, your new design will perform far better than the previous one!
