A website redesign conversation is something important for your business to lead a successful graph with emerging technologies. It might possible that you are not getting enough leads because of outdated websites you are running on or might be it generates leads but not fast & relevant as expected.
No matter how big & small your company is, if you want to redesign your website then cutting corners typically results in a less than perfect end-product will harm your marketing & sales efforts a lot more than you think. You can make your redesign project successful with proper planning, research, & a little foresight over strategies.
Does your website need a redesign?
Before starting your website redesign process, you must know if your website needs a redesign in the first place. Because wasting your time and money on the process that doesn’t require any new design is not worth it at all.
Here we will discuss the things where your website probably doesn’t need a redesign if the following points will match in your case:
- Your website is redesigned within the last 2-3 years.
- Your website is eff3ectively driving leads and increase in traffic every week.
- There are more conversion rates after your previous redesign.
- Your website performs much better than before & all the functions work seamlessly.
SO in case your website fits in the above criteria then you probably don’t need to worry about a website redesign.
Now let’s move on how to know when it’s time to start your website redesign process!
On the other hand, if your website fits the criteria below, it’s time to consider creating a website redesign process.
- You haven’t redesigned your website in the last 4-5 years.
- You have changed your logo and branding.
- Your website functions are out of date and doesn’t work properly.
- You are facing issues with accurate leads, sales, & traffic.
- You don’t have a mobile responsive website.
Let’s talk about each in detail:
It’s been more than 5 years since the last redesign:
That said, if it’s been more than five years since you put together a website redesign strategy, it’s time to freshen up your site.
Of-course a lot can change in five years, including what users expect from a website and you have made your website stand as strong as it is before in front of present-day competitors.
There are chances that your brand style and product offerings will shift slightly, so you must keep your website updated
Your logo and branding changed:
Now, logo & branding is most important because that makes your business recognizable. It plays a huge role in uniquely presenting your company so that loyal customers get engaged with these elements easily for what they are looking for.
Always put your website redesign strategy together in case you have shifted your logo, branding and changes the color scheme of your brand and even shifted the style completely
For a perfect eye-catching site, your logo and branding should always match your website so that your visitors don’t get confused while visiting your website.
The functionality is out of date:
You have to keep your functions updated so that your navigation bar will get accurate with buttons and links. Because the user will be interested in your website when your website functions work well.
Such as if your navigation bar doesn’t take users to relevant pages and links then they will not get engage to your website.
While redesigning the website brush up your navigation bar design & work on your important pages.
You’re dissatisfied with the performance:
Of-course low marketing results do not depend only on website designs but it surely affects the metrics.
As we all know that Google serves the best possible sites to the user that fits their quires. For that Google not only look for relevant content, but also determine what website will be able to provide the best user experience.
A great user experience plays an important role in your search engine ranking and that is important for you to achieve high improved site traffic.
Your site isn’t mobile responsive:
Users should be able to access your website on any device such as mobile, desktop, tablet. If your website is not responsive where they are not able to click buttons and photos are appearing skewed/too large then you need to make your website responsive.
In today’s tech-trending world, everyone uses mobile for searching something nearby or in a mood to order something online that shows how important it is for your website to be mobile responsive.
If your website is not mobile responsive then it’s time to start a website redesign process.
Not only is it important to users that your site is mobile responsive, but in July 2019, Google stated that they started using mobile-first indexing.
This change means that Google uses the mobile version of a website for both indexing and ranking — making it even more important for you to have a mobile responsive website.
Now as we have discussed enough about whether your website should redesign or not?
It’s time to talk about the amazing website redesign process in 5 steps:
1. Take a deep dive into your current website
The initial step of any website redesign process is to audit your content site. You need to know what currently your website holds so that you make the improvement it requires.
Before deciding for website redesign it will be better to scrub your site from top to bottom and finding anything from design inconsistencies to broken links and many other points as stated below:
- Non-responsive images.
- Design inconsistency.
- Broken buttons & links.
- Places where you need to update your logo
You must be checking Google Analytics to see how specific site pages perform.
By looking at the traffic metrics on Google Analytics for your site pages, you can decide together what’s working and what’s not.
For example, if your blog gets hardly any traffic, but your main article pages perform well, you’ll want to ask more questions to figure out why.
Here are some queries you should ask:
- What does the user click on while visiting article pages?
- What page do they look at next?
- How long do they stay on the page?
- Does your blog have little traffic because of the design?
After the above process you can decide, what makes certain pages successful and what you need to work on for other pages to make them successful as well?
2. Determine the goals you want to accomplish with your website
Many times the design of your website helps you complete your goals. While user visit your website, they often make a first impression based on your company & functionalities so that’s makes your design a more important aspect of your website.
Always keep your focus clean and requirements clear for your website redesign such as if the main goal of your website is to sell products, then you should design your website to lead users to your e-commerce pages.
If you want to keep users simply on your site pages, then you should design your site with engagement in mind with the following features; images, interactive elements, & videos so on.
Once you have decided your goal, it will help you create a stable & strong plan for your website design so that it can simply determine your website functions, elements, etc.
3. Take inspiration from your competitors
You should never copy your competitor’s designs of-course there is no harm on getting inspired by them because you share the same customer base.
Check out here what works for other companies in terms of functionality and content.
Ask yourself these queries:
- How they arranged their navigation?
- What kind of images they have featured?
- What kind of blog they have?
- What kind of topics do they include in the navigation bar?
- What function do attract you towards their website?
The above points will help you to understand what requirements your website needs to be done and what elements you’d like to include.
4. Create a map of your website hierarchy
Creating a map before you start redesigning your website is very important. It will be easy for you to prepare the site pages hierarchy to determine how you’ll classify each of your pages.
It might be possible that you need to create different designs for sub-pages & pages within your sub-pages. For example, if you sell shoes for men, women, and children, you might design a few “general” pages about each category. This design will likely be different from the design you use to show off each product.
With the help of website hierarchy or a map of your site pages. You can easily determine how many different designs your pages required.
- Homepage design
- About us page design
- Product page design
- Category page design
- Sub-category page design
- Contact page design
5. Hire a website redesign company
When you’re running your own business, it’s difficult to think about anything other than doing just that.
While running your own business, it’s not that easy to manage everything on your own that’s why it will be better if you hire a website redesign company that can take care of the process for you and make sure everything is on the table as per your requirement.
If you hire a website redesign company, they will take care of every small detail of your site right from looking at competitor sites to creating your website hierarchy everything.
Conclusion
Always remember that the main goal of your website redesign is an increase in revenue and improving the user experience for better conversion rates.
If done correctly, redesigning a website can boost your conversion & sales rates. Start with data. What do you know about current trends in web traffic, conversion rates, and other metrics? Then apply it to the new design.
Always keep your eye on researching like what your competitors are doing and how you can improve your website more effectively by taking inspiration from their site. You can also use wireframes & mockups, to get an idea about how your website will look like and then steps towards it as per the above process.