Poor conversion rates? Outdated design and copy? Negative user experience (UX)?
No matter what type or size of business you own, your website needs to be the best it can be. But when it comes to making improvements to your site, you need a strong strategy — otherwise, your site updates can create more harm than good. That search engine optimization (SEO) that you’ve been working so hard at improving? The wrong website redesign and your website traffic can start dropping — the exact opposite of what you want to achieve.
What Is a Website Redesign?
When you’re not getting the results you want from doing business online, the first place to look for answers is your website. Usually, poor performance is due to your site’s copywriting, design, structure, or navigation. A website redesign identifies and addresses these issues to convert more visitors.
A redesign is also helpful when your brand or company goals change and when there are different trends and technology advances in the website industry.
Website Redesign vs. Website Refresh
An average website lasts 1.5 to 2.5 years before you need a redesign. You may have minor changes to make in between redesigns — such as adding a new colour palette or updating some content or images. These types of minor changes are what make up a website refresh.
Although a website refresh is not as extensive as a website redesign, both processes can significantly affect your customers’ user experience (UX).
What You Need to Know Before and During a Website Redesign
Before completing a website redesign, you need to know exactly where you went wrong with your old site. Otherwise, your new site may be no better than your last! There are six critical questions to ask yourself before starting a website redesign.
- What Are Your Website’s Most Valuable Pages?
Use website analytics to determine which of your current pages are the most valuable. You’ll want to keep your search engine-optimized pages, so gather information on which pages receive the most traffic and inbound links and convert the most leads. This will help you determine what content should stay and what content should change.
- Who Is Visiting Your Website, and Why?
Our website is supposed to attract your target market — so dig deep to figure out exactly who that is. Are they single parents? Pet lovers? Household budgeters? How old are they, where do they live, and how much income do they have? Use this type of information to generate a buyer persona (or ideal customer).
Buyer personas humanize the marketing journey and assist you with targeting your website to select individuals. It helps you clearly understand your ideal customer’s needs and motivations to provide them with the information they want — and avoid offering content they won’t read.
- What Propels or Prevents your Customers from Converting?
Besides providing helpful information on your most valuable pages, marketing analytics can also showcase your least helpful pages. Which pages receive little to no traffic? Do particular call to actions (CTAs) rarely get clicked? Use heat maps and scroll maps to analyze your website’s visitor behaviour visually.
Combine these insights with internal sources like feedback from sales teams, chat logs, and customer reviews to figure out what’s preventing customers from converting into a lead or sale. By completing this step, you can learn about issues that you didn’t know existed. Maybe you’ll discover pages producing errors or better understand user likes and dislikes about the current design.
- What Impacts Will a Redesign Create for your Team?
To keep everyone in the loop of upcoming changes, invite the entire team to be a part of the website redesign process. After all, your website impacts all aspects of your business!
Staff who are dealing with the website daily — like sales reps and customer support advisors – can often provide insight into the customer experience. Website designers, content writers, and search engine optimization experts will have feedback about the technical aspects.
- How Can You Measure the Changes That Are Working?
To know whether your redesign is successful, you need to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Choose a combination of relevant revenue-related metrics (such as length of close cycle, number of conversions, and visitor traffic numbers) and qualitative metrics (such as the number of support questions you receive or scores in customer satisfaction surveys).
Benchmark the metrics before redesigning the site, then allow some time to pass before measuring the same set. By comparing the two groups of results, you’ll be able to see if your website redesign is benefiting your business.
- How Can You Test the Changes?
Before making any monumental changes on your site, why not see if they are wise to make?
A/B testing is a method that compares two variants of the same web page using different website visitors to determine which one performs better. To use this method, you need adequate traffic and an A/B testing tool setup. If you don’t have either of those, you can always request feedback the traditional way: show people your website and solicit their feedback.
Launched in 2021, Google’s Core Web Vitals provides helpful information on your site’s speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. The metrics change based on what users expect from a good web page experience.
Once you redesign a website without losing out on SEO, it’s time to monetize the new site.