Website Redesign [Six Best Practices for 2021]

Whether it’s a new launch or redesign of an existing design plan, the website design’s success clearly depends on the factors in play, such as web team experience, the scope of work as decided by the redesign strategy, and budget. Websites are continually developed and modified depending upon the user demographics, personas, and the surrounding outlook.

With a clear vision or mission statement, the task at hand gets simpler. When you can define the process better, you can focus on the redesign. Clarity is essential to create a polished website in a timely manner.

A well-structured and formatted design goes a long way. Therefore, let’s start by defining exactly what a website modification involves.

What is a Website Redesign?

Website redesign is the workflow required to change various parameters like format, flow, nature, type of content, and responsive scheme for a website to increase profitability. A redesign enhances the look and optimizes the website to be compelling and convincing for all online visitors.

This not only increases the conversion rate but also keeps them engaged and increases customer retention.

Reasons for Website Redesign

There are three core reasons why organizations choose to implement a website redesign:

1. With the ever-changing content and the evolving mindsets of consumers, your website needs to match your target audience’s expectations. As audiences shift or your product portfolio changes, your website may need to adapt.
2. Taking advantage of new technology to match the pace of changing trends is essential so that you and your website can gain a competitive edge over your rivals.
3. The creation of a new organizational goal or a strategy that the current website cannot fulfill.

However, before getting started on the website redesign, make sure to allocate time and resources to understand and document the process you will follow, thereby streamlining your project.

Six Essential Best Practices for Website Redesign

Here are the six steps for a website redesign:

1) Record Your Key Performance Indicators

Get to know the current position and standing of your website. Examine the look and feel, branding, layout, sitemap and information architecture, CTAs, and copy. Get a good feel for everything.

It is much easier to know your destination when looking at a map if you first know where you are.”

All the parameters that determine your site’s credibility and authenticity help in understanding its performance. Once the insights are known, then the update to those existing parameters gets simpler.

Careful analysis and subsequent recording will help you in forming a better picture of your destination.

Depending on your objective, the key fields can vary, but the metrics you most likely will be looking at are:

• Number of Online Visitors: How much traffic is your site getting?
• Bounce and Click-Through Rates: Which pages are people reading thoroughly and clicking vs skimming or bouncing altogether? Examining design issues, layouts and themes, color schemes and accessibility, and copy are essential.
• Engagement Levels: How is the health of your blog? Are customers utilizing your live chat features? If your website allows comments or you have a forum, how is it doing?
• Responsive Rates: How responsive is your site? Is it loading quickly? Do pages look good on mobile? Now is an excellent time to examine a mobile-first approach.

These metrics are vital for redesigning the website. Use tools to increase your chances of growth and success during the redesign strategy.

2) Focus on Your Objective

It is essential to pay attention to your objectives in order to build brand value and trust. Narrowing down the purpose helps you re-focus on the parameters that your site needs to be built upon.

Your site can’t be everything to everyone. Too broad a scope will miss the mark with your audience. Knowing exactly what your audience wants and positioning your website redesign to focus around that and the goals you stated in your strategy will be critical.

For example, one of your goals is likely to improve the site/domain/page authority and its ranking to get more organic traffic, thereby increasing brand awareness and possible conversions. Don’t let minor objectives, such as a specific design or feature, hinder you from achieving your goal.

Business goals are crucial for the growth of a business and can be leveraged to stay ahead of your competition. Once these goals are clearly defined and understood, you can remain attentive to your website redesign and contribute to developing its outlook.

3) Emphasis on Rebranding

Your website design is heavily reliant on the brand and message delivered through it. A redesign usually helps brand value be conveyed to the target audience more clearly. This should be much easier at this point since your team has already laid the groundwork, which helps a great deal in knowing about the areas of improvement.

Targeted auditing reveals gaps in content or any other factor which can be worked upon later. Your team may not want to play around with the brand statement at this time. In such cases, determine whether you want to re-focus on it or not. Ensure it aligns with the new direction of your website.

If your team is unsure whether a specific website element should be redesigned or not, and you cannot come to a consensus, study the analytics. Human response and feedback can be confusing, but the reports and targeted metrics will tell an unbiased story.

Next, prioritize what needs to be changed and get the work done step-by-step so that there’s no time lost in the process.

4) Create High-Ranking Content

Content is the crux of your website. It plays a pivotal role in creating brand value, driving organic traffic, and converting leads into customers. You can learn a lot about your existing content by paying close attention to the content’s performance metrics.

With a website redesign, the marketing and promotion strategy also goes through a clear-cut overhaul. Hence, you need to be well aware of what needs to stay and what doesn’t. Further, the areas which need work should be looked at closely.

There are chances that high-performing content gets kicked off the grid, which is certainly not beneficial. Having a detailed overview and a comprehensive analysis of your content will help this from happening.

5) Know Your Competition

Healthy competition paves the way for progress and subsequent success. After gathering all of the information about your existing website, it is also useful to learn from your competitor’s website.

A thorough analysis of competitor websites, noting what works for them and what doesn’t, will help maintain your new website design quality in the long run. Tools and technology can come to your rescue in such situations.

After you complete your report, you can make a list of all points that need to be focused on and take it from there. With a redesign strategy in place, you can come up with tactics that make your presence matter.

6) Explore Your CMS and Web Services Options

Once your growth trajectory is set at a defined pace, you should invest time and resources into ensuring you have a quality Content Management System (CMS) and web services provider.

After all, research has shown that website visitors will leave if the site doesn’t load in less than three seconds, and the primary driver behind site performance and speed is the quality of your web host servers and services.

When choosing a CMS, take some time to decide whether the current platform is working or if additional features are required to achieve your objectives. There are both proprietary and open-source platforms available to choose from, both with advantages and disadvantages.

Get Started With Website Redesign Today

All of the points mentioned above can make your life simpler. To get the ultimate results from your strategy, it is essential to know all of the factors involved. By following the steps in the playbook, you can rest assured that the redesign will be successful.

Experiment with your options. Learning and growing from the process is the way to design a high-performing website. Tackling the problems and providing cost-effective solutions promotes efficiency and the overall design of the website.

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