A Complete Guide to Create a Website Redesign Strategy
Does your website seem outdated? Or maybe you just don’t like its design anymore? Did you just add a new product? Or your website isn’t providing enough value to your visitors? Whatever the reason is, the solution is to redesign your website.
Redesigning can be a great success or a big failure, depending on how well you do it. But one thing is sure that this is a long and tedious task. To make sure you do it right, it is essential to have a clear vision. This will make sure that the entire process runs smoothly. The clearer idea you have since the very beginning, the more successful your redesigning will be. Whether you are hiring an agency to redesign your site or doing it in-house, this is the complete guide to help you create a website redesign strategy and make sure it turns out to be successful.
What is Website Redesigning?
Website Redesigning involves changing and updating the existing content, format, structure, and navigation of your website to enhance its performance and convert more of your potential customers. Most of the organizations choose to redesign their website to drive more traffic as their business starts expanding. A few companies also opt for website redesigning as a part of a more prominent rebranding measure.
Despite the reason your business is interested in redesigning its website, the project itself is a huge task. Moreover, it must be done right because of the enormous impact it has on your brand’s marketing and image.
Businesses should often redesign their website every 2 to 3 years. However, you must decide what works best for your business. Trends change regularly, so you need to ensure your website stays up-to-date and does not miss any content that can boost your traffic. Tracking your website’s performance will also help in determining if it needs redesigning, in case it has slowed down. Or if your business goals have changed. There are many factors which can guide you in this regard.
How to Redesign Your Website?
To make this process easier to understand and follow, we have divided it into eight simple steps below. Let us have a look at it!
- Measure your current performance metrics
Before you start planning your redesign, benchmark your current performance metrics. This will help you to figure out where your website stands currently and what areas you can improve through redesigning.
Analyze your website’s current monthly performance in the following domains. However, the importance and relevance of each of them depend entirely upon your redesigning goals.
- Total number of visits, unique visitors, and visitors
- Time on-site
- Bounce rates
- High-performing keywords in terms of rank, traffic, and lead generation
- Total number of inbound linking domains
- Total number of form submissions and new leads
- Total sales generated
- Total pages indexed
- Total pages that receive traffic
Make sure you use a single tool to evaluate all of these points.
- Establish your website redesign goals
For every task that you do, knowing the “why” behind it plays a crucial role. You must know why exactly do you want to redesign it? Is it because one of your competitors just did or maybe because it has been a while since you redesigned it? If this is the case, then your reasons are not strong enough.
The point is not how your website looks; instead, it’s about how well your website works. You need to have clarity on why you are redesigning your site and then link these reasons to your redesigning goals. Then further communicate these goals to your team or designer or agency. Based on your collected data from the first step, you can consider these objectives for your website:
- Increasing the total number of visitors and visits
- Reducing the bounce rate
- Increasing the time-on-site
- Improving the domain authority
- Increasing the total number of form submissions and leads
- Increasing the total sales generated
- Enhancing the current SEO rankings for relevant keywords
A lot of these goals depend on one other. For instance, to increase the total sales generated, you will have to increase the number of visits and visitors while decreasing the bounce rate. Take a brief look at the data gathered from the first step and see if you need to add any new goals for your website.
- Determine your branding and messaging
Before you start crafting your new design and content for your website, you need to determine your desired branding and messaging. Not only this will form the base of your site, but it will also maintain consistency throughout your website.
As soon as your visitors land on your website, they should be able to find out what your company is offering them, how it can be helpful to them, and why they should stay on your website.
Therefore, first, decide whether you need to change your branding and messaging or not. If yes, then make sure it goes in line with the other content on your website. If you are planning to introduce a new logo, consider the visual aspects of your entire site.
- Define your audience’s persona
Your website is hardly about you at all. Whenever visitors arrive on your site, the first thing they think about is what has this company got for me? Can this help me?
Therefore, you need to make sure that you interact with your visitors well through this website. Make sure the design and content resonate with your audience’s character. Plus, in case your audience is changing with the design, you need to ensure that your website design and content aligns with them.
- Protect your search engine optimized pages
Improving your website’s metrics is only possible if you get discovered online. If people don’t even know that you exist, how can you expect traffic, lead generations, or sales? Therefore, you must keep SEO in mind when redesigning your website.
- Prepare a list of your most search-valued pages – Using your marketing analytics, find out the pages which receive the most traffic, inbound links, and cover the most important topics. In case you plan to move these pages while redesigning your site, make sure you make the proper 301 redirects.
- Building the 301 redirect strategy – 301 redirects play a critical role in retaining the traffic and link value connected with the given page. Make a proper spreadsheet to record and organize your 301 redirects. Also, let a technical person handle its implementation.
- Research keywords – For every page that you have added in your newly designed website pick one keyword that each of them will focus on. Implement the best SEO practices to optimize your site.
- Analyze your competition
Competition is something that keeps us in action. It is not something you should obsess or worry about. Although analyzing your competition will give you a much better idea of how your website should be structured to ensure it stays in the competition. Using proper tools, you can figure out the unique keywords your competitors are using to rank higher, how they have designed their website, and how they are interacting with their potential customers.
Apart from all the plus points, you are going to get from this analysis; you will also be able to figure out some weaknesses in their site. Note them down and make sure you do not repeat the same.
- Take inventory of your top-performing content
No doubt, redesigning can bring many benefits to your website and improve its performance. But there are ways how it can hurt your website rankings. More likely than not, there will be pages on your site with some top-performing assets that you have made over the years. Now losing them because of redesigning will be a significant loss. These assets comprise your most viewed or shared content, high-traffic pages, and best performing keywords and associated pages.
Remember that most web designers are not going to bother about this step because they are not any SEO experts or marketers. Therefore, do not hesitate to hand over the list of your top-performing content pages that they need to include in your newly designed site.
- Select the right software
Last but not least is choosing the right software to create and host your website. This software we are talking about is the Content Management System, which lets you build, design, and publish your site. Using CMS, you can create an appealing and functional website easily. Choosing the right software depends majorly on the requirements of your business and the softwares you are already familiar with. There are tons of CMS available in the market to select from. Just make sure it offers all the features you require for your website to operate swiftly.
Well, now, you are ready to plan, create, design, develop, optimize, publish, and analyze your newly designed website. Follow these steps one by one to create a high-performing website that can attract, retain, and convert as many customers as possible.
We hope this information is useful to you. Let us know your thoughts on it in the comments below.