Website Redesign Guide And Tips For Better Results

Bad website design can and will hurt your business conversions and sales.

No matter how small or big your company is. You cannot afford to have a poor website for your business these days. First impressions matter more in the digital space, people don’t have time to waste on things that don’t attract them online.

Your website is there to bring in more business for you.

Otherwise, how will you improve your website design if you don’t know what’s wrong or what isn’t working?

Let’s look at the process for creating a website redesign that actually works for your business and maximizing ROI.

How Do You Know if Your Website Needs A Redsign?

This is the time you start using your website analytics. Go in-depth with the data and not focus only on the obvious data like traffic, and devices.

You can not afford to use your own subjective opinion. Ask yourself some of these honest questions?

• Have your bsuiness goals change since we launced our website?
• Does the design look outdated?
• Does the website represent the company brand?
• Are my sales/conversions descresing?
• What are people/customers/clients say about my design.
• Can our target audience navigateand find things thier looking for easily?

Based on your findings you should have a clear understanding of whether you should have a website redesign and what you need to improve on your current design.

This process can go in two ways:

1. A full website redesign, this can be a completely new website based on your data analysis and brand goals.
2. Redesigning parts of your websites, making changes that improve your current results. It’s also important to consider branding when making changes. Sometimes a complete redesign just makes perfect sense and financial benefit in the long run.

How Often Should You Redesign Your Website?

The approach that most business owners make with their website is having to redesign their website after a few years. According to Business 2 Community, the lifespan for a website in this approach is 1.5 to 2.5 years. That’s because technology, features, updates, trends are constantly being introduced and some make things a lot easier.

However, every business is different and has different challenges and goals driven changes to factor in this process:

• How much budget do you have put in design and development. Ask yourself how much work is needed for the redesign and the urgency.
• Has your brand and goals changed. Most businesses change along the way and some discover new markets perform better than the one they started in. Therefore, doing a website redesign makes more sense in this situation.
• The performance of your website. Results are more imortant in todays business websites. Are you getting a reasonable traffic to your site, is that traffic converting, what are people doing on the site when they get there.

The website is not the first place people come to for questions, research, make purchases, view services etc. Taking all that into consideration it’s best to take website redesign serious.

Website redesign starts before the actual design and development kick-off. Be prepared to invest a bit more time in this stage of the process.

The Old Risky Website Design Process

Unfortunately, most business owners and creative agencies still focus solely on the look and not the data the previous website was achieving to make a design decision.

Never forget to discuss the risk of these changes with the team you select for the redesign. What will happen when you change the page that drives in more traffic, are you going to drop in traffic or double. What impact will the layout do?

In most cases that risk discussion never happen and businesses end up spending more on a redesign with a new look but do nothing to contribute to the brand changes and goals.

Designers and marketers usually go into a redesign without a process in place to test the pages that are being changed. Monitoring changes against conversion metrics will save you from overspending on a design that may only bring about the same results your previous design was produced for your business.

Conversion rate optimization is a huge part of redesigning websites in this day and age. There are processes that include A/B and Split testing as part of the website redesign strategy, like these companies Electronic Arts, WineExpress, are getting significant sales lift while reducing risk.

How To Redesign A Website

1. Analyze the old website.
2. Benchmark the current website performance metrics.
3. Redesign for the audience.
4. Create a list of what is already working.
5. Find the right person for the redesign.

Let’s break down the steps to take when redesigning a website.

Analyze the old website.

Start by looking at your current website before you even talk to anyone about redesigning. Really look at why it isn’t working anymore. Does your design still able to compete with your local and national rivals.

At this point, you should already have identified the specific problems on your site. Ecommerce websites may require a little more work to identify problems and things may get technical. But you can still be able to see if your cart page is not functional or whether you losing customers on the checkout page.

Using Google Analytics can be extremely useful. Here you can study things like:

• Traffic pattens
• Bounce rate
• Device performance
• User interaction

If you need to understand how visitors navigate on your site, heatmaps or scroll maps can help you understand where you must focus and mostly improve your conversion rate optimization.

Benchmark the current website performance.

Documenting your current performance metrics will help you understand the improvements you need to work on most and better create a design that’s both user friendly and high performing.

Highlight your performance matrics

• Website traffic
• Top pages driving traffic
• Number of visits, visitors
• Bounce rate
• Time on site
• Total form submissions and new leads

Also include SEO matrics like:

• Top ranking keywords
• Organic traffic
• Page speed
• Backlinks
• Click through rate
• Conversions

The list can be long or short depending on the type of website you have and the size of your business. Create metrics that are best suited for your business, take time to understand what benefits your business goals.

Redesign For Your Audience.

A website redesign should not only be about changing the overall look of your website. It should improve the way it functions and the buyer’s journey.

Target audiences change over time. As your website and business grow, new products and services will be added to the site. Another thing, expanding into new markets. Updating your brand messaging to the people who are most likely willing to buy from you.

Create a list of what is already working.

You don’t have to change everything on your website redesign. In fact, it’s a small number of websites end up being completely redesigned to a brand new website.

Some aspects of your website will be working perfectly fine. a few touch-ups are all that is required. For example, your website’s colour palette, font choices, photographs don’t have to change if they are working well and in line with the changes.

Using tools like Google Analytics can help you decide what to keep or remove. If you use a website design agency for the redesign, they will do all the work for you and send you the report for you to make the final decision.

Find the right person for the redesign.

This is one of the most crucial aspects of your website redesign process. Finding the right person goes beyond how long you have been working with this designer you know, or how many people know this agency across your street.

A huge number of business owners with badly designed websites, keep going back to the same people, with the same budget.

The final step of the website design process also includes using the right software.

There are many CMS platforms to choose from. The right person can recommend you different options. However, every CMS come with its cost. Some are more expensive than others.

Remember, the saying “you get what you pay for” is so true when it comes to features and better Content Management Systems.

If you hiring a third party like a Digital Agency make sure you spell out all expectations in the contract and know exactly what you are getting.

Conclusion

Redesigning a website comes with a cost. It doesn’t matter how much you paid for your website before.

When thinking of a redesign always assess why you want to redesign your website. Having a redesign is not the same as building a new website for the first time. You should not need to be convinced to have a redesign because at that point it will also be obvious to you too that a change is required.

Start with the website data. What do you see that can be enhanced and benefit from. Apply what you know to the new design.

Don’t forget what your competitors doing. This can help you design a more effective website.

Redesigning a website can boost conversions and sales when done right. Improving the user experience through your website is certainly a big win.

Do you think you need a website redesign?