If you are looking for a way to make a change that would differentiate your product or service from the rest on the market, you should consider redesigning your website.
As a matter of fact, according to Salesforce research, 80% of consumers say that the experience a company provides is equally as important as the services or products they sell, and this includes the experience your visitors have with your website.
So, a redesign can solve so many problems if done right. But how do you know when it is the right time to redesign your website?
When Should You Consider Redesigning Your Website?
You got bored with the existing look of your website - If you are not happy with what your website looks like, you should choose different colors and maybe different graphics and animations to make it stand out.
- It doesn't work on mobile devices - This is a big issue. Your website needs to be accessible to your visitors on all devices, especially on mobile devices. Our mobile phones are the most popular means of communication nowadays.
- You are getting a small number of visitors - If your website is not gaining traction, there must be something you can do to increase the number of visits. Low traffic gives you a chance to analyze your SEO, discover the weaknesses on your website and then address them through a new web design. Optimizing your site is imperative if you want to increase leads, conversions and sales.
- You have a new business strategy - If you have taken a new business approach and maybe have new KPIs, it's important to be consistent. A website redesign is ideal for aligning your online presence with your new business strategy.
- You want to improve the usability of your site - One way to attract more visitors to your site is to make it easy for them to find what they are looking for. Your website will become more user-friendly by improving your website UX and UI, allowing visitors to navigate the content easily. You don't want your visitors to feel frustrated and unhappy once they reach your site. Bad user experience can drive them away.
- Changes in the industry - it is necessary that you keep up with the trends to get ahead of the curve and stay there for longer. For instance, if most of your competitors are doing a website redesign, consider doing the same. The same goes if your competitors are emphasizing mobile friendliness.
- Slow load times - our attention span dropped significantly, and we tend to pay attention to something for no more than 8 seconds. A well-performing site will load in approximately 3 seconds, which means that you have another 5 seconds to manage to engage your target audience. Slow websites need redesign. Another reason why you should improve your site speed is that Google penalizes websites that have low page speed scores. You can test your site speed with one of the many tools you can find online.
- Your website is content-heavy - in this fast-paced digital era, fewer and fewer people have enough time to read through the entire content. They are only looking for crucial information once they start reading a certain piece of content. Or they choose to watch a video that summarizes the key points quickly and concisely. This is why your website should not be overloaded with content. So, if your site has more text than images, it's time for a website redesign. Also, a text-heavy website may be blocking your visitors from finding your CTA buttons. The bottom line, too much text is overwhelming.
So, now that you are confident that you should start redesigning your website, you need to create a website redesign checklist to help you go through the process and achieve the best outcome. And, we are here to help you with that.
Check out the steps you need to take to do your website redesign successfully.
Your Website Redesign Checklist
1. Set Out a Goal for Your Web Redesign
The first thing you need to do before you start your website redesign journey is to clarify what you are trying to achieve with the new web design.
Set some time aside to think about the content you are going to use and how you will communicate the new business strategy.
The more specific you are about your goals, the easier your website redesign process will be. This way, you will achieve the results you, your visitors and web designers will be satisfied with.
Not having a clear vision will only take much of your time and effort, causing everyone to feel stressed and unsatisfied.
So, to make this process as smooth as possible, you should maybe outline your goals and write them down. You can even use some metrics so that you know whether you are on the right track.
2. Analyze Your Competitors
To make sure you keep up with the trends, you must analyze your competitors.
By gathering insights on the usability work of your competitors, your designers will be able to deliver a website design that converts.
Before you complete your website redesign, you must evaluate your website's performance to test different approaches and see how customers react to your content and design as opposed to those of your competitors.
It's important to keep in mind that people search several different websites before choosing a business partner. So, engage them and make them want to choose you.
3. Do an In-Depth Analytical Research
To remove all the errors and streamline the speed and performance of your site, you need to do an analysis and determine your strengths and weaknesses. The most efficient way to do this is to ask yourself a few questions. Here are some of them:
- Are there any elements that are causing my website to work slowly or not work at all?
- Does CMS provide me with all the necessary features to manage my website easily?
- Are there any limitations on my current website I want to remove?
- How do developers and SEO experts see the current look and performance of the site? What are the areas for improvement from their point of view?
- Are there any sections or pages missing?
- What are the elements or aspects of the site that clients like or complain about?
3. Define Your Branding and Messaging
You need to be crystal clear about your website's content and design.
Keep in mind that anyone who visits your website for the first time should clearly understand your vision and mission. Also, think about whether you want to keep the existing messaging or adapt it to your new strategy.
Another thing you need to pay special attention to when you develop branding is the visual aspects of your site. Think about what visuals need to be redesigned and what should stay the same. Also, always be consistent. This is the top priority while doing rebranding.
4. Determine Your Buyer Persona
Your website doesn't only represent you and your products or services. Actually, it is more about your customers' needs. When customers visit your site, they need to find the answer to the question: What's in it for me? How can this organization help me?
You must build your entire website and its content around your buyer persona. You need to know their pain points and how you can help them solve them and find solutions to the problems that bother them.
Sometimes, depending on your buyers' needs, you may have more buyer personas you need to target.
For instance, if you are running a hotel and want to attract more visitors to your site, you may need to target five different buyer personas, like an event planner, a corporate travel manager, a couple planning their wedding, a family going on a vacation or a business traveler.
You need to clearly define your buyer persona and align your content and design with it to make sure you are on the right track when building a website.
5. Do an In-Depth SEO Analysis
When redesigning your website, you do not necessarily have to redesign all of your website from scratch. There may be pages that are well-designed but need improvement.
By doing a deep SEO analysis, you will be able to determine how you can make your content better and achieve better results. Here are a few things you need to look for in this process:
- Web pages that do not have a clear and impactful CTA (Call to Action)
- Broken links and some other issues that may lead to a higher bounce rate
- Content that performs according to analytics but needs to be improved or updated to be able to attract even more visitors
- An existing piece of content that you can then use in another format to gain your visitors' attention
- Opportunities to upscale your website structure and make it more user-friendly for your visitors
6. Choose the Right Website Builder
While the steps mentioned above are crucial during your website redesign process, all of them make no sense if you have not hired the right person to perform them. To do so, you may need to choose between two options: hiring a website builder or a web design company.
The main difference between the two is that a website builder provides you with more convenience and affordability and a web designer gives you more control and flexibility.
No matter which option you choose, the most important thing is to achieve success. So, take some time and do your research before you hire someone to help you with your website redesign, as this will determine all other steps that follow.
When should you wait for the right time to do a web redesign?
Even if you decide that you may need a website redesign, it's still important that you maintain the old design to learn from it, gather valuable insights and use them when building a new site.
Before you set off on this journey, you need to clearly define how big this process will be and how much time it will take. Also, you may want to find out what things people like and don't like about the existing content so that you can then incorporate these into your new design.
So, even though you feel like it's the right time to make some changes, you may first want to maintain the old site as much as possible to discover the things you need to work on and then build a new site that outperforms your original version.
Take your time and use your learnings to achieve outstanding results.
Wrap Up
Before you decide to start this web redesign journey, you need to clearly determine why you want to do it in the first place.
To do so, you need to do in-depth research of your existing website, find all the strengths and weaknesses and then lay out the things that need to be improved.
Don't start redesigning your site just for the sake of it - make sure this will bring value that will continue to grow in the long run, and then make your first step.
