Website Redesign: A Step-By-Step Guide to Revamp Your Site
So you’ve come here because you realized that you aren’t satisfied with your website anymore. Maybe your conversions have decreased, your brand concept has changed, or you simply want to make your digital ‘home’ trendy and fancy.
Whatever the case, if you want to achieve truly exceptional results, you should approach a website redesign seriously. Because without a clear website redesign strategy in place, you’re bound to make some unnecessary (and frustrating) mistakes.
That’s why we’re here to help! Without further ado, here’s everything you gotta know about how to redesign your website.
What Exactly Is A Website Redesign?
First off, let’s define what “redesign” means.
Is it necessary to redesign a website if you only want to make minor changes to its layout, or is there another option?
Before devoting time and resources to a project, designers always advise clients to specify how much they want the website to change.
In line with this, redesigning a website often involves making changes to the “inner” and “outer” elements of the site, such as the navigation, code, visuals, structure, and content.
If done correctly, a website redesign lowers bounce rates, increases conversions, and improves user experience.
How is this different from a website refresh?
Redesigning a website is comparable to gutting a home and starting over, leaving only the foundation and walls. But if all you want to do is repaint the walls in the bedroom, you’ll probably only need to buy some paint and brushes, right?
A website refresh focuses on small changes as opposed to a website redesign, which can involve significant changes to the functionality, architecture, content, and visuals. You can experiment with a new color scheme or typeface, for instance, to update the UI and alter how the site appears and feels.
Whatever the case, both of these concepts are both great and give your web visitors a better experience. But now for the important question:
When would you know if it’s time for a redesign?
We’ll talk about that in the next section below.
How Do I Know If My Website Needs A Redesign?
Before you decide to redesign your website, ask yourself:
1. Have my sales declined?
Online shopping has been growing in popularity nowadays.
According to Statista.com, sales increased from 4.2% in 2010 to 15.7% in 2020. Given that 14.7% of all retail sales were made online in 2022, it’s clear that many people have maintained their online shopping behavior. That’s why, it’s a huge red flag if you’ve noticed that sales are declining, even though a lot of people are internet shopping nowadays.
If your website doesn’t give new and returning customers a warm and welcoming online shopping experience, they’re likely to go to a different page to do their business elsewhere.
2. Does the style feel dated?
Old websites can feel stale, especially for companies that have been around for generations. You might be using an out-of-date color scheme or a font like “Comic Sans,” which is unpopular with contemporary graphic designers. Maybe your images are outdated, or maybe you’ve added new components to your company that were never included online.
Though, it doesn’t really matter why it feels dated. If you feel this way, chances are that your potential customers will as well.
3. Do I spend too much time answering inquiries and addressing concerns?
A large portion of your work should be automated by your website so that you can focus on other tasks like fully processing orders and sales. If you’re answering a bunch of questions and concerns, then it’s likely that the user experience on your website isn’t that great.
4. How well does my website work?
It’s time to redesign your website if it can’t handle certain tasks, like being mobile-responsive. A website that isn’t mobile-responsive will most likely be slow and may push your target audience away, making them choose your competitors instead.
A website that isn’t well-designed will also affect your SEO or search engine optimization. This means less traffic from your website, and also less leads and less conversions.
In other words, if your website isn’t working well, you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities and it’ll be very hard for you to reach your business goals.
Luckily, some of the best web hosts such as Bluehost offer SEO features like Mobile Optimization and Site Reviews, so you don’t have to miss out on organic (or free) traffic.
If you feel like at least one of these applies to you, then it’s time to move on to the next phase: coming up with a solid redesign plan.
6 Steps For A Successful Website Redesign
Redesigning a website isn’t that different from making a website (in fact, it should have fewer steps). For you to have a successful redesign, there are 6 steps you have to take:
1. Make an evaluation of your website.
The first step to figuring out your website’s current state and developing a redesign strategy is to perform a website audit. It basically helps you analyze and see if the performance of your website is optimized. You can also use one of the best website builders with built-in analytics to help you monitor your traffic.
With that said, there are two kinds of website audits, namely:
SEO Audit
Keyword optimization, internal and external links, mobile friendliness, URL, page speed, security and accessibility, domain age, and technical SEO are some of the factors that affect the broad concept of SEO.
It’s crucial to evaluate the pages of your website using these SEO factors to assess the adjustments you must make to redesign your website and make it SEO-friendly. You can improve the technical and content SEO of your website to increase organic traffic and revenue.
Performance Audit
Your website’s performance audit will enable you to identify any weak points or potential improvement areas. A successful user experience, for instance, is essential to increasing site traffic, search engine ranking, and customer engagement—all of which can be achieved by conducting a performance audit of your website.
To analyze the performance of your website’s individual pages, it helps to go through your sitemap and look at metrics like bounce rates, traffic, time spent, and conversions on each page.
You can use this analysis to identify pages that need improvement for streamlined performance, pages that are performing well, and pages that are underperforming.
2. Make specific website goals for the redesign
You can easily set goals and specific objectives for your website redesign process after a successful SEO and performance audit reveals the areas of improvement for your website.
Some specific goals could be:
- A rise in conversion rates
- Lower bounce rates
- Increasing organic traffic
- Increasing user satisfaction
- Increasing customer loyalty
These are typical goals for website redesigns, but depending on the problems with your site, you may want to prioritize other goals or set different ones.
3. Examine the current user journey for your customers.
When designing a website, creating a user journey is an important step. However, this journey might not go as you expect it to or you might experience difficulties or changes during implementation.
That’s why it’s important that you understand the precise path taken by your users, spot any gaps or openings, and figure out how to close them in order to incorporate them into your strategy for redesigning your website.
As a pro-tip, find out more about your user’s journey and steps by conducting user testing or by obtaining customer feedback or reviews.
4. Make the wireframes for the updated website.
Wireframes are a 2D visual layout that serves as your website’s blueprint and depicts the navigation and features of your newly designed website. Wireframing your website forces you and your team to consider the conversion paths, usability, links, placement of the navigation, and feature placement of your website.
It’s a great way to identify problems with the architecture of your site and how to fix them to provide a seamless navigation experience for users.
5. Plan a strategy for a website redesign.
It is simpler to develop a plan that supports the objectives and encourages action once redesign goals have been established.
Depending on your objectives for your website redesign, you might need to carry out the following activities:
- Updating your website’s sitemap by adding new pages or moving existing ones around.
- Fixing problems you find during your audit.
- Effectively constructing and communicating your brand’s messages and key offerings.
- Performing SEO keyword research and integration.
Making your website redesign strategy based on the goals you’ve established will make it simpler to put into practice and provide a more complete customer experience.
6. Create an after-launch plan.
You shouldn’t abandon your redesigned website once you’ve put the redesign strategy into practice and launched it. It’s also important to analyze the outcomes and data you get from redesigning your website because you can use this information for email marketing and SEO, among other digital marketing tactics.
In order to take advantage of the opportunity for growth, you can:
- Look into various launch concepts, such as specialized email campaigns, social media announcements, Zoom website tours, or live office launches.
- Announce the main message and new features of your website with a blog post or press release.
- Lastly, celebrate your team’s accomplishment and give recognition to those you worked with!
Taking every opportunity you can is one of the best things you can do for your website. It helps your website reach new heights and allows you and your team reach your business goals faster!
How Often Should I Redesign My Website?
You should, on average, redesign your website every two to three years. Simply put, if your website is more than three years old — a lifetime in the digital world — chances are it’s out of date.
After all, something might have been appealing and aesthetically pleasing three years ago, but probably isn’t now.
This isn’t a set rule, though. Some sites might not require a complete redesign in that time, and others might require more frequent updates as business objectives or customer demands change. Age is just a number, after all, right? However, it’s usually a good idea to consider refreshing your website about as frequently as the majority of us get a new smartphone.
Keep Redesigning To Keep Your Website Up to Date
There’s nothing wrong with deciding that it’s finally time to retire your website’s current appearance.
If you don’t move to adapt to the web as it changes and evolves, you will inevitably fall behind.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to redesign your website. All you need is a few extra steps and a little bit of planning to make sure that everything goes smoothly.
