Website Redesign Tips and Best Practices
Is your website incapable of generating sales leads? Your current website is unable to meet your online marketing objectives. No matter how much social media marketing you did, advertisements you launched, or blogs you shared, it is still ineffective.
There is a possibility that your website is outdated, and you need to upgrade its content. There arrives website redesigning as the relevant solution.
Why Is Website Redesigning Needed?
Website redesigning is essential now more than ever for the creation of a user-friendly and responsive website. While you are redesigning your website make sure to avoid these mistakes in 2021.
As the online market is increasing, it is also intensifying the competition. Nowadays, there is lots of content available online, and thus people do online research and compare your website with others before taking action on your site.
Therefore, an updated website with current trends and design is necessary for business as it captures the first impression from the visitors. This process also boosts your sales if you focus and implement it skillfully. You may want to reach out to a Creative Agency Birmingham, or a company local to you to help get you started with your website revamp.
What Does Website Redesigning Do Anyways?
Website redesigning is not just about making changes here and there. A properly executed website redesign refers to the complete renovation of the code, design, and content. See it as an entire remodeling of the website.
It is the process of modifying and updating the content, structure, arrangement, and navigation of your website to improve performance and convert more visitors into customers.
Redesigning does not always have to be a complicated process. Take your time, breakdown your website profoundly & do a proper analysis of what your visitors want to view and interact with, focus on that change.
Redesigning provides an interactive user experience to your visitors to get the most out of your website. Your website redesigning may not work with a one-time modification, which is why you need to keep making changes accordingly, based on what is in-demand and servicing your users.
It is necessary to redesign a website with a clear vision from the beginning, and your entire process will have a high chance of executing smoothly. In this blog, we have compiled a list of tips & practices, which help you in the website redesigning process.
1. Make a Strategy
The foremost action of website redesigning is to discover your goals. Find the answer to why you need to redesign your website? Once you are transparent on your aim, outline the requirements.
When you finish setting up the outline, prioritize them in your plan accordingly. Try to be more concrete with data and numbers related to these goals.
Record your conversion rate to verify if it is improving. If you make this planned outline, it will help you as a step-by-step guide for getting your job done and making your website ideal.
Goals to Consider
There can be several reasons that can influence you to consider website redesigning, such as:
- Retaining visitors to your page to reduce the bounce rate.
- Making your content more informative and accessible to your users.
- To make your content more visually attractive and relevant to your brand.
- Improving the navigation for your visitors.
- For implementing better on-site SEO.
Make sure that your goals are something similar to the above-mentioned points. If you want moderate changes for making your website work a little better and look pleasant, then a comprehensive website redesign is not necessary. You can update your website design and content, and that will be enough to give your website a refreshed look.
- Documenting Everything
Make a spreadsheet document of your website data such as bounce rate, average loading time, traffic sources, and conversion rate. Save all the metrics, arrange them into multiple pages and subpages to easily access them.
Such documents will better prioritize your tasks that need immediate attention and the ones that can be delayed accordingly. This step will ultimately help you in creating your action document spreadsheets.
2. Take the Backup
Backup the current version of your website so that you do not miss any of your previous work. Also, help you to transfer any of your backend work or prior content to the new website. Even if you think you do not need any of your past content, take a backup as it is a valuable source that can act as a reference.
The document that you need to backup includes:
- Page text
- Videos
- Image content
- Blog posts
- Knowledge base
- Downloadable reports like brochures, case studies, etc
- White papers
3. Market Analysis
Nowadays, having a website for your business, portfolio, or blogging is quite common. Therefore, you can find immense content online to which you can compare your website. You can learn about the preference of your target and how you can provide an ideal website experience.
Although it is not right to be too captivated by your competitors, take those websites for analysis and comparison purposes. Make a list of at least three to five websites that have the same objective as you. After that, focus on following these steps:
- Analyze Your Opponents
By analyzing your competitors, you can find the types of content your visitors demand. Do they have similar content or design? Do they experiment with their website features— like quizzes, gamification, chat, or animations? The tone of the website— is it humorous, serious, descriptive? What type of resources do they demand— blog, whitepapers, emailers, knowledge base, or case studies.
- Focus on Their Best Feature
Analyze the best functions of your competitors’ website that you prefer to include. Create a list of the features that you like, and your visitors will benefit from it. Through this process, you can achieve better results on your website.
- Make a List of Characteristics
It is essential to list all the features in a spreadsheet and prioritize them based on consistency, readability, user expectations, assistance, etc. Through this process, you will get the structure of the features you need to work on and their ordering.
4. Review Your Website
Now that you have got the goal of website redesigning and have analyzed your competitors, it is time for you to take a look at your website as well. By looking, we do not mean merely examining the features, content, design. We expect to look at a comprehensive insight into the website’s functioning and how your users perceive it.
- Remove All the Bugs on Your Website
Nothing can be more bothersome than visiting a page only to find some error on it. Bugs give hard time to your visitors, whether it is navigation errors, compatibility problems, or slow loading issues.
As we mentioned before, nowadays, there is a flood of online content, your visitors will not think twice before leaving your website. Ultimately affecting the performance of your site and increasing the bounce rate. Therefore, record all the errors and make sure to remove them while redesigning.
- Check for its cross browser compatibility
Ensuring your website is cross browser compatible should be a priority on your checklist. Why this is important is because you cannot control from which browser, OS or device your user is coming from. And the last thing you want is to give him/her a bad web experience.
For this you need to make sure your website is cross browser compatible. LambdaTest is a tool that we highly recommend to do this, they offer a combination of 2000+ browsers & OS to begin with. What’s best is that the platform is so simple that even a novice tester can do the testing and share web bugs.
- Find Your Weaknesses and Strengths
It is not necessary your whole website fails to provide the desired result. There must be some areas that need improvement, and you have to find and target those sections only. Inspect the conversion rate of your web pages and make the changes on low-rated pages.
Try to find the cause of the issue rather than changing the page content or design blindly. For example, sometimes, the page may not be compatible with a device or operating system, and in that case, you have to focus on compatibility.
In case of strengths, i.e., your frequently-visited pages, ensure their functioning is smooth as ever. Concentrate on the off-site and on-site SEO for those pages, and make sure your users find and run these pages effortlessly.
5. Content Rich Website
To make your visitors stay, you have to incorporate user-engagement content on your website. For a user-friendly website, you have to find a way to converse with your users. There are several ways to provide useful content that will make your users engage, such as blogs. Not only beneficial to provide the latest information but also essential related to SEO purposes.
A content-rich website is a standard that you should follow, and also it is a current trend that keeps your users engaged with your service. Several other types of content make your website successful, such as;
- Infographics
- Emailers/E-books
- Knowledge base articles
- Video content
- Case Studies
- Landing Pages
These types of processes are easy and inexpensive to implement compared to the benefit it provides. It will help you to reach your website to more people and increase traffic.
6. Measure the Performance
There are several ways in which you can measure your website performance, such as:
- Click-Through Rate
- Keyword Ranking
- Page speed and load time
- Organic Traffic
- Bounce Rate
Note: Make sure to implement all the SEO activities while redesigning, such as:
- Meta titles and meta descriptions
- Optimized page content
- Headings and content formatting
- SEO images and other multimedia elements
- URL optimization
- Internal links
- External links
The overall goal of website redesigning is lead generation. If the website starts to show improvement in the number of leads, it means that your website redesigning strategy worked. In that case, we suggest you avoid making redundant changes and stick to the same layout and content on the page, whether you like the current design or not.
Similarly, if you are getting fewer leads even after redesigning and implementing proper SEO techniques, consider changing it to the former website.
7. Keep the Process Going
Now, you have successfully implemented the website redesigning techniques and measured the performance afterward. It’s time to analyze the pages that are showing improvement and the ones that are not.
That way, you do not have to make the changes again & again, and you can focus on the issues that need effort. Keep on improving the effectiveness of pages and drive more conversion rates and leads through your website.
Note: Do not limit your web content. Keep on adding landing pages, blogs, and content over time. That way, you automatically optimize your website content.
In the End
Hopefully, you would now have a clear understanding about the website redesign and tips you can use to redesign a website. In simple terms, you have to scrutinize your website, plan, optimize the website, implement changes, and analyze again. This process should be done from time to time to optimize the website, gaining web traffic, and converting more customers.
