Website redesign does not always mean you need to change every aspect of your existing website. But there are times when a redesign is necessary or advantageous. The key is knowing the right time to do a website redesign.

In this digital age, your website is a critical marketing tool, which is why you should not enter into a site redesign haphazardly.

Aesthetics changes are wonderful. When done right, they can quickly capture the attention of your visitors. But they should not be the main reason for redesigning your website. Primarily, the focus should be on user experience, improving performance and reaching predetermined business goals.

Developing A Website Redesign Strategy

Setting clear business goals at the beginning will aid in a smoother overall process and a more successful website redesign. It is important to understand that an entire site redesign can be a huge undertaking and may be best handled by a professional web design agency to ensure it has the necessary functionalities and capabilities to generate leads and sales in addition to cross browser compatibility.

To help you develop a strategy, we have created these six steps for a successful website redesign.

Step 1. Define Your Website Redesign Goals

The first step is to clearly identify why you are doing the redesign, and connect those goals to measurable results. Clarifying your goals will help you to set a direction for your new website. There should always be good rationale for a redesign. Reasons like “We’ve had this design for a while, it’s time for a new look” and “Our competitors just updated their website” are not good business reasons to redesign a website.

Before plunging into the planning process, create a list that focuses on identified goals and objectives you hope to attain through a redesign. Goals could include increasing form submissions, increasing site traffic, increasing time on site, and more.

Step 2. Protect Your Assets

It is important to assess your current website’s assets to determine whether content should be discarded, kept, or updated. If your website has been around a while, you no doubt have acquired a notable number of assets that you may want to kept. Assets include things like conversion tools, keyword rankings, remarkable content, and inbound links. You definitely would not want to accidentally discard any of these during a site redesign. Therefore it is of great importance to protect these assets during this process.

Start by identifying and evaluating your current website pages to determine what is working and what isn’t. Conducting a site audit and benchmarking your current metrics and analytics data will be helpful in getting you through this process.

Step 3. Homepage Optimization

Take care in designing your homepage as this is commonly the first interaction between your brand and potential customers.

Remember, less is more. If you cram a lot of content on this page, visitors may feel overwhelmed and oftentimes confused about the action you want them to take. Also, optimize the content with targeted keywords which make it easier for search engines to find it.

Useful best practices for homepage design include:

• If your site is relatively large, it may require more than the traditional menu because of the complexity of the site structure. Oftentimes, an additional menu is required to supplement the main navigational menu. However complex or simple your site structure may be, providing intuitive navigation is crucial in helping your visitors reach more in-depth information quickly
• Help your visitors to connect with more from your brand by integrating blog posts, social media links, and other social content into your homepage layout
• To be able to collect more intelligent data about different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way, create buyer personas for your site visitors and then develop your site with a look and feel that targets this group

Step 4. Study The Competition

While we don’t advocate preoccupying yourself with your competitors, it can help you get a better understanding of the look and feel you are going for and what you can do better. It is a good idea to check out websites outside your industry as well. After you have completed your study, create an actionable list that highlights some areas for improvement and what you can do differently than your competitors.

Step 5. Content Strategy

Content is king. Both your site visitors and search engines appreciate fresh content. It is critical that your redesign plan include an ongoing content strategy.

Your website content should be focused on solving problems and educational needs of your target audience. There are many types of content you can produce such as a company blog, videos, images, ebooks, and more.

If your goal is lead generation, your marketing team and website design team should be in collaboration during the identification and implementation process. Lead generation tactics can include email marketing, Pay Per Click, social media marketing, SEO, radio and TV.

Step 6. Measuring Results

Measuring the effectiveness of a site design is undoubtedly one of the most important steps. Like any other investment calculation, the effectiveness of a website redesign is based on the cost and results. Here are some of the key website redesign success metrics that can be measured:
1) Visitors

• How many people are coming to your website as compared to that same period prior to the redesign?
• How did they get to the site?

2) Leads

• How many visitors converted to leads as compared to that same period prior to the redesign?
• What was their conversion item?

3) Sales

• What is the sales conversion rate as compared to that same period prior to the redesign?

To truly know how successful your redesign is, the metrics you track should be based on the goals you created in the first step of the redesign process. Analyzing and tweaking your site’s content is an ongoing process that you should perform diligently in order to help you reach your expected goals.

Wrapping It Up

A website redesign can be a huge successful or a total disaster. If you are redesigning your entire website, it can be a long and demanding undertaking, which is why every redesign needs to start with a clear purpose and business goals. About 75% of our business is doing some type of website redesign. Get in touch with our experienced web design team today at (858) 874-6528 or get a quote to learn more about how Envisager Studio can help you reach your site redesign goals.