Guide to Building a Successful Website Redesign Strategy

Guide to Building a Successful Website Redesign Strategy

Posted on Mar, 16, 2023 I Elise

If you haven’t thought of revamping your website – now is the time, more than ever, to invest in your website or app. Google states that a website is the most common yet essential touchpoint customers choose to reach out to any business. But is your website offering visitors the best online experience and helping in increasing conversions?

A website is most effective when it is first launched, but after a certain period, it loses its effectiveness. This quick shift happens because of the rapidly evolving internet, culture, messaging, and digital strategy, which requires reevaluation of the website on a constant basis.

Being the most vital component of a brand’s digital strategy, marketers must consider the timelines of their website. Refurbishing it occasionally will make your visitors stay longer and invest more in what your company offers.

Whether you are outsourcing website redesign services with top web design companies or refurbishing it in-house – the detailed guide in this article will help you follow the step-by-step process to plan your website redesign strategies.

When a website redesign is required?

Redesigning or maintaining a website is critical to the success of your digital strategy. Here is why you should consider it a priority –

• SEO is essential because it determines how your customers will find you. SEO optimization starts at the beginning of the website development process, which requires consistency to drive traffic to the website. With changing SEO algorithms, you need to align your website with the most current SEO efforts so that you may reach out to the right people at the right time.

• The lifecycle of website design is shorter now than ever before. With rapidly changing industry trends, if your website is not updated, it may start looking outdated – thus impacting your brand image and demonstrating a lack of value for the customers’ digital experiences.

• It is imperative to align your changing business goals and mission with your website design to communicate the right message to your target audience and engage with the customers.

• Content is the foundation of every marketing plan, and keeping it updated will directly relate to the success of your digital strategy. Therefore, constantly evaluate, add, remove, or rework the content for a long-lasting digital presence.

Step-by-step Website Redesign Process

1. Assess your current website

Website redesign is a remodeling project which requires a better understanding of the current ecosystem to identify the most valuable pages. A clear map and scope of wireframes can come in handy to know which pages need a change, which ones to be torn down, and which ones need rebuilding from scratch.

There are tons of aspects that you can look at. Start with the analytics to understand what your visitors are looking for and if your website is fulfilling their requirements. Does the content concisely describe your product or service on the homepage? What are the conversion and bounce rates for your site? Is the site hard to navigate? Are there any SEO bottlenecks? These are a few areas you should explore as part of your initial assessment.

2. Review your goals

Now that you have completed your website analysis it’s time to evaluate and set new goals. What isn’t working on your website right now and what do you want to achieve with this redesign? You can set several goals, however, make sure they are measurable, practical, and time-bound.

A few of the goals can be enhancing user experience to reduce bounce rate, improving traffic by refining SEO, upgrading graphics for great first impressions, boosting leads and improving conversion rates, or updating the site with quality content. You can also redesign the site to match the launch of a marketing campaign that would reflect a new and fresh look.

3. Understand your visitors

You know your website, and you know your goals, but do you know your audience? What are the visitors looking for when they visit your website? There are a ton of websites on the internet, why should visitors stay on your site? Understand your target audience and design will follow.

Develop multiple target buyer profiles and shortlist the ones that can bring you more business or sales. Make sure the customer journey has all the vital touchpoints. Now, design, around this buyer persona. Your website should resonate with this target audience. Understand where your users are coming from, and what are they researching. Look at the keywords that are bringing the traffic. Create an updated list of keywords with each having its long-tail versions. Now create quality content with these keywords that will echo the target audience’s needs.

4. Design and Test

Once you have done all the analysis and research, it’s time to put everything to use. Create a sitemap and build a wireframe. Wireframes are usually information architecture, you build a wireframe to see how the content will be placed and organized on each page.

The content should complement the flow or the journey of the target audience. It should aim at achieving company goals. Use content from the current website, or from a competitor’s website instead of Lorem ipsum text to better understand what is important to the user.

Validate your plan with usability testing. You can assign user tasks and asses how the site is performing to complete the task. Record the insights from the test and work on the design. If possible you can also perform quantitative testing with a large user base to overcome selection biases.

5. Redesign Launch

With all the testing done you are set to launch the new website. When users open this new design website, they would need to relearn everything on your website. Your goal should be to make this journey as painless as possible.

Prepare a checklist so nothing slips out. Make sure you have taken care of all the accessibility, usability, and SEO aspects. Also, there are many website checklists available online that will guide you right from the general principles to the SEO checklist.

Consider a soft launch where you release it to a limited number of users. Encourage their feedback as this user feedback will fill in the gaps that were not captured in your previous testing. If you see many challenges you can go back to the previous version.

Introduce the new design incrementally and make sure to guide users after every update. Keep gathering and working on the feedback to avoid major disruptions. Also, keep an eye on all the data to understand and proactively work on any trouble areas. Last but not the least, keep the old content and design brief easily accessible in case you need it.

6 Best redesign strategies for building a successful site in 2023

1. Mobile-friendly experience

With an increase in the use of mobile devices, your website should provide a mobile-friendly experience. Google’s mobile-first index looks for a mobile version of the website first.

Use a responsive design that adjusts to fit the screen size of the device allowing users to easily navigate and read your website. Other strategies are to optimize images and use a mobile-friendly design and features like a clean, simple layout, click-to-call buttons, and geolocations.

2. Page speed optimization

Page speed is a vital aspect as a slow-loading website can lead to frustration and impacts search engine rankings. Below are some of the strategies for optimizing the page speed of a website.

• Optimize images: Optimize large images without sacrificing quality, using tools like Photoshop or a plugin like Kraken.io to compress them. Make sure to size images properly before using them on your website.

• Minimize the use of plugins: Regularly review all the plugins and only use the necessary plugins. Enable browser caching: The user’s browser stores certain files in its cache when it visits your site. Add expiration dates to certain file types to enable browser caching.

A few other strategies to improve page speed is the use of a content delivery network (CDN) and optimizing CSS and JavaScript.

3. Interactive experience – GIFs, Animations, 3D world

A trend that will be gradually pickup in 2023 is the use of GIFs and animations. Gone are the days of using stock photos to create a story and convey a message.

GIFs and animations are used in the content and even on the home page for calls to action. Users tend to stick around and go through a few loops of animation. Adding 3D, GIFs, or animations gives a unique touch to your website that leads to a better and more memorable user experience.

4. Voice Optimization

Users are increasingly using voice search, so it makes sense to optimize your website for voice searches. Use natural language and long-tail keywords as it will positively impact website ranking for voice search queries.

Improve the visibility for voice search by using structured data, descriptive alt text for images, clear headings, and subheadings. Make sure both your desktop and mobile websites are voice optimized.

5. Include videos

Video platforms are a rage these days and integrating them into your website is a smart move. Videos are attractive, interactive, and quick.

Not all users will have the time to read through the content on the page but watching a small video can help quickly them grasp all the information. Integrating videos create more engaging points on your website.

6. Eye-catchy banner

Users have a very low attention span and within these few seconds, you need to capture’s user’s attention. There is a very short window to convince your visitor to keep scrolling and eye-catching banners do just the right job.

As the first thing people come across on your website is the banner, make sure it is striking and impactful. Your banner should display your product or service information in the most noticeable way.

Conclusion

Website revamping is a time-consuming process that needs patience, optimization, and improvement. Though expensive, it sure does pay off. With the above guide, tips, and design trends, it’s time to get to work.

Efficiency and proper planning are crucial, and you can’t achieve them without the help of a creative agency. And if you are running a business in Los Angeles – there are many web design companies to help you streamline your project. Get in touch with Los Angeles web design companies to successfully evaluate your website, save time and money, and target the right local audience.