No business can stay afloat in the modern market without a website. Most active consumers are already online, buying products and services via web channels. Thus a website is your strategic source of revenue and brand visibility, which are important considerations before redesigning your website.
Still, as time passes, you might notice that your website enjoys fewer visits. It may also give lower revenue and work with glitches. If any of these pointers are present, you need to prepare your web product to redesign.
Here is a guide on how to get ready for redesigning your website, what factors to consider before doing it, and how to maximize the value of your update efforts.
Why Think about Redesign?
Some business owners dread expenditures on website redesign because they believe it’s unnecessary for business success. However, practice shows that timely redesign brings many benefits and gains for any company. You’re sure to enjoy:
- Better brand image
- Higher customer trust
- Better control over branded content
- Consistent business growth across all channels
- Higher conversion rates
- Lower churn rate
- Adherence to the latest tech innovations
All these perks come with insignificant redesign efforts, so they are surely worth your time. Besides, redesign always helps remove the flaws, glitches, and imperfections, reducing the quality of user experience and costing you customers. If you need help with the redesign, you can always contact San Francisco web design experts.
Pointers of Your Website’s Need for Redesign
You need to start thinking about redesign once you notice some flaws in its work or are no longer satisfied with its productivity. The red flags of your site’s underperformance are:
- Your sales and leads are declining steadily
- The website’s design looks outdated and doesn’t correspond to the latest design trends
- The website’s design doesn’t match your brand identity
- The churn rate has been rising recently
- You are not ranked well on Google
- The website content is scarce and irrelevant
- Your performance metrics are much lower than those of your competitors
- Your users file complaints about poor service or technical glitches
Even if you’ve noticed a couple of these issues on your website, it’s high time to redesign it. The presence of more than two problems points at the urgent need to take action, or you risk losing customer trust and reputation.
How to Make Redesign Successful
So, how to proceed with website redesign to make it a success? What exactly should you redesign to avoid excessive expenditures while still achieving the performance targets? Here are a couple of insightful tips from redesign pros.
1. Align Redesign with Marketing
The redesign is always linked with website functionality. Once you notice that your website doesn’t perform the intended goals, it’s time to rethink those goals and design approaches. For instance, you want to convert visitors into buyers or subscribers. What design elements can help you complete those goals? There are many ways to ensure conversion:
- Prompt the visitor to sign up for a newsletter
- Ask for contacts via a contact form
- Stimulate a purchase
- Getting a prospect’s email address in exchange for a piece of free, downloadable content
Depending on your marketing goals, you can add one or several tabs like this to your website design. Link each to a specific conversion action and check how each performs its functions. The website’s metrics will show which solution is effective and which doesn’t work, informing further redesign efforts.
2. Make Data-Based Decisions after an Audit
The start of any website redesign is its careful audit. The simplest tool for auditing a website is Google Analytics. If you can’t do it independently, we recommend hiring an expert agency to give you a 360-degree view of your resource’s performance. The things to focus on include:
- Website pages that enjoy the lowest and the highest number of visits
- Primary keyword ranking in Google
- Performance of CTAs on the website
- The efficiency of your website’s architecture in terms of navigation ease
- Website speed
Based on these findings, you will know for sure what you need to redesign, remove, or condense on the website. The audit also reveals what works well and shouldn’t be adjusted. This way, you can reduce the time and cost of redesign to achieve maximum outcomes.
3. Reconsider Your Target Users
All successful designs are human-centered. The user-focused design approach ensures that your website will be appealing and enjoyable for users, guaranteeing its good UX. Still, you can’t make a website universally appealing, as people of different backgrounds find different things appealing.
So, your design should be narrowly focused on a specific population category. You can discover your target user preferences by conducting UX research and completing user personas. Include the following parameters in your user profiles:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographical location
- Educational level
- Socio-economic status
- User problems and pain points
- Preferred online channels
- Products and services they use
These findings will inform redesign and ensure that you develop the right solution for the right audience.
4. Analyze Competitors
It’s always helpful to see what others have done in your industry. Do you know successful market performers? Visit their websites and analyze what they’ve done right. Apply these findings in your redesign to improve functionality and gain more customers. But
5. Don’t Forget about SEO
SEO and content go hand in hand. Your website will become more visible and attended if you write informative, valuable content and spice it up with the right keywords. Let your prospects find you; SEO optimization always works to the benefit of sustainable business growth. Besides, it’s more affordable and long-lasting than paid traffic and advertisements.
6. Link Your Website to Google Analytics
The final stroke of the successful redesign is a linkage to Google Analytics. This set of handy metrics will help you track the website’s performance in real-time and make adjustments on the go. Analytical reports will inform you whether you’re moving in the right direction to achieve your marketing goals.
Redesign Is a Path to Better Performance
Don’t neglect the need for redesigning your website, as it fuels your business success. The tech progress is so quick that keeping pace with the latest trends may be challenging. Still, if you invest in website updates regularly and give your clients the best, they will reward you with loyalty and trust.