The Ultimate Guide to Building a Website Redesign Strategy

So, you’re looking to begin a redesign of your website. You may have completed the process of revamping your brand, or your website was recently revamped. Whatever the motive, a revamp can be an enormous success, or it might not. It could also be a tedious and long project, so every redesign should begin with a clear plan or problem to be solved.

The more precise you are in creating your vision at the start, the more effective the redesign process will be and the easier the whole process will be.

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Suppose your agency is redesigning your website in-house or suggesting a redesign to your company’s users. In that case, This guide will provide the redesign of your site and make sure it comes out to be an enormous hit and not a failure.

Website Redesign

A redesign for your website involves altering and changing your site’s contents, structure and navigation to boost performance and bring in more site visitors.

Many companies revamp their websites to attract more visitors when their business expands. Some opt for a website revamp to be part of an overall initiative to rebrand. No matter why your business is considering a web design plan, the task is a huge undertaking and crucial to do right, given the crucial importance of your website’s role in your brand’s image and marketing.

A new study has revealed that 50% of customers believe a website’s design is essential to a business’s overall branding. Many believe your website’s design is equally important to the goods you sell.

How Often Should You Redesign Your Website?

As per the Business 2 Community, The average life span for websites ranges from 1.5 or 2.5 years. Because trends in design change and technological advancements and refinements, this is the typical length of time a new design will feel “fresh” and competitive. But this is just a reference point; you should determine what would work best for your business.

The following elements can help you decide the frequency at which you must update your website:

• How often do your brand or your goals change? When itching to create a new website, ask yourself, “Does this website still represent who we are as a company?”
• What amount of budget do you allocate to development and design? Ask yourself, “Can a website design wait, or do I have reasons to utilize the budget on our site now?
• How long will your site is functional and quick? Step into your customers’ shoes and check whether you can easily navigate the site and locate all the information you want without dealing with errors or lengthy pages loading. Nearly 50% of the sites have between four to six page views per visit, so your site’s navigation and speed are crucial.
• Your website’s performance. Ask yourself, “Is this site converting a reasonable number of traffic? Do visitors stay on the page for a reasonable time, or do they bounce?”
• Industry has seen changes. For example, when Google announced that it was changing to a mobile-first indexing system which required websites to be mobile-friendly; otherwise, they’d lose organic traffic to Google.

Your site is where customers and visitors go to inquire about issues, read content, ask questions or buy products or services. Therefore, it is best to be ready when you decide to go through with the redesign of your website.

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You may be spending more time preparing your plan for redesigning your website rather than working on the actual redesign. If you’re considering what to include in your website redesign strategy, begin by following the steps below.

How to Redesign a Website

• Check your current performance metrics.
• Determine your website redesign goals.
• Create your brand’s identity and message.
• You must define your customer persona(s).
• Guard your pages optimized for search engines.
• Examine the competitors.
• Make a list of your top-performing assets.
• Choose the appropriate software.

Let’s review eight important web design tips to be aware of when planning and finishing your redesign.

Check your current performance metrics.

Before you start making plans for redesigning your website, note the current performance metrics of your website. These will help you understand where the website is and what metrics you could improve by reworking your website.

Examine your current website’s month-to-month performance in these areas. The significance and importance of each will depend on your goals for redesigning your website. However, looking at each measurement before you start your design is beneficial.

• Visitors, number of visits and visitors who are unique
• Rate of bounce
• Time on site
• The top-performing keywords in terms of rank, traffic and lead generation
• Inbound linking domains: Number of
• New leads in total and form submissions
• Total sales made (in dollars)
• The total number of pages indexed
• The total number of pages that are receiving visitors

Suppose you don’t have access to this data. In that case, I suggest tools such as Google Analytics and HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics to provide better monitoring and an understanding of the performance of your website.

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Also, note the methods you employed to gauge all of the benchmarks previously. It is recommended to employ the same tools for recording your post-redesign measurements. Otherwise, the comparison will be apples with oranges.

What is your website redesign goals?

What is your “why” behind your website redesign? If you’re considering a redesign, there must always be a valid reason behind the decision.

If you’re responding by saying, “Well, it’s been a while since we’ve done one,” or “My competitor just did a redesign,” those arguments aren’t enough for themselves.

Remember that it’s not only about how your website appears but how it functions. It is important to clarify why you’re undertaking a revamp and link the goals to quantifiable outcomes. Also, share your goals with your design team, designers or even your agency.

Think about the following data-driven purposes for your website’s data-driven goals:

• To increase the number of visitors and visits (both are essential since one visitor may visit more than one time)
• To lower the bounce rate
• To improve the amount of time consumed on the site
• To improve domain authority
• To increase the number of leads and forms submitted
• To increase the sales
• To increase the SEO ranking of current keywords for the most important keywords

A lot of these goals depend upon one another. For instance, to boost conversions, it is also possible to increase traffic while reducing the bounce rate on your website.

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Also, review the data you have pulled out in the earlier step. What are the metrics that you could improve by implementing a new website? You could use your previous site’s metrics to motivate new goals.

Create your brand’s identity and message.

When preparing your new website’s design and content, ensure you know your branding, message and unique value offering. By doing this, you can guarantee consistency throughout your website.

Any person who visits your website first must immediately know what you are offering to benefit them and why they should remain on your site to avoid a trip to rivals.

Use any well known website homepage as an example. It’s clear from the start the services they provide, what can offer and how a visitor can start. 

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Consider whether you want to alter your branding or messages or if they remain the same. What will you need to be altered if you plan to alter it? Make these changes a priority when you design your website.

As you create your messaging, use clear, concise language. Avoid using industry terms that can cause confusion for your target audience and make your voice appear more like a business robot rather than a person.

Also, when developing your corporate branding, take note of the visual elements of your website that should be updated and what could remain the same. Did you create a brand design, stylistic guide or colour pallet? Be sure to apply these to your new site to be similar to other elements associated with your business.

You must define your customer persona(s)

Your site is not only about you. It’s not even about you.

Visitors who visit your website probably ask, “What’s there for me? What can this do to help me?”

Communicate with your visitors to them in their language by crafting your site’s layout as well as content around the personas of the buyer.

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For example, suppose the marketing manager of a hotel wants to gain new customers. In that case, you might target five distinct buyer types: an independent business traveller or a corporate travel director and event planner, an extended family on vacation and a couple organizing your wedding’s reception.

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Be sure to clearly define your buyer personas so that you can tailor your redesign strategy to accommodate the people who matter to you the most.

Use builder of buyer personas to help you build thorough buyer personas.

Does your audience change in the course of the redesign of your website? Does your brand and content match up with the new group of people? Answer these questions while you think about your new website design.

Guard your pages optimized for search engines

Finding your website’s online presence is crucial to improve your site’s performance. If nobody can locate and access your website, How can you improve leads, conversions or sales? 

Here are some helpful suggestions for designing your new site using SEO in mind:

Record your top search-related pages

Utilize Your analysis of your marketing to search which website pages are getting the most visitors and have the highest number of inbound links, turn the highest leads, and eventually provide the most relevant subjects in your field. If you plan to leave any of these important pages, ensure you have the right redirects to 301.

Create a 301 redirect strategy

When it comes to the 301 redirects, they are very important for retaining the link value and traffic for a specific page.

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Create a spreadsheet to note and organize your redirects to 301 (old URLs instead of newly created URLs). You can then hand over this spreadsheet to a technical person for implementation.

Do your keyword research

For each page of your newly-designed web page, pick one keyword/topic the page will concentrate on. Once you’ve identified the keyword(s), you can apply the best practices for SEO on your page to improve the performance of your website pages. Additionally, you should consider including new pages and content on your site that focus on the specific keywords and subjects that aren’t being addressed on your existing site.

Examine the competitors

While we don’t suggest being obsessed with your competition, it is a good idea to help you understand how you’re performing. Start by running your website using HubSpot’s no-cost Website Grader tool to produce an evaluation of how your site performs.

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Using this tool to assess your competitor’s sites is also possible, ensuring you’re conscious of your competitor’s strengths or weaknesses.

Then, look at the competitors’ websites and note the things you like and do not. It is an exercise to assist you in determining the areas you could improve on your site. When you have completed the competitor analysis, make an action plan highlighting areas of improvement and ways to differentiate yourself from your competition.

Make a list of your top-performing assets.

While a revamp is an excellent way to boost your site’s efficiency, it could harm your business in many ways. Your website will likely have several content assets with high-quality performance that have already been built, and reducing their value through a redesign could seriously impact your marketing performance.

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For instance, these assets could comprise:

• The most-shared or watched content
• Highly-trafficked pages
• Keywords that are most effective or rank well and related pages
• The number of links that are inbound to specific pages

For instance, if you decide to remove the page on your website, which has been accumulating many links from the inbound, and you lose many SEO credits, that could make it more difficult to find in search engine result webpages (SERPs).

Be aware that many web developers need to consider this option because they’re not SEO professionals or marketers. Do not pause to remind them of this and assist you by analyzing your website and giving them the necessary checklist to maintain or update the most important pages on your website.

Choose the appropriate software

The last (but the most important) stage of redesigning your website is deciding on the best software to build and host your site. This type of software is commonly called an content management system (CMS) and is utilized to design, develop and publish your website for the world’s eyes.

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CMS software is useful because of several reasons. Whether you’re a new digital marketer or a seasoned web developer, CMS can assist you in creating a stunning and functional website. The choice of the best CMS is based on your specific company’s needs, including the CMSs you’re familiar with and the features you require for your new website.

There is a myriad of CMSs to select from. Among them is CMS Hub, the only one combining CMS with CRM. You can also review the top CMS systems to learn more about the possibilities.

Wrapping Up

Whew! You’re now ready to design, plan, build, optimize, launch, and analyze your brand-new website. Use these seven steps to revamp your site that is more appealing to customers, wows more users, and turns more customers.