Website Redesign Tips: Breathe New Life into Your Website
A successful business needs an online presence that accurately reflects its brand, connects with customers, and converts visitors into sales. However, even the best website designs can become dated and fail to accomplish these goals over time. Knowing when and how to redesign your website is crucial for keeping your online presence effective.
In this blog post, we provide key tips for revamping your website to breathe new life into your online marketing. Read on to learn when you likely need a redesign, how to plan for an effective overhaul, and specific updates to implement. With these website redesign tips, you’ll give your online presence the boost it needs to drive growth for your business.
Know When It’s Time for a Redesign
Your website represents a significant investment, so you don’t want to redesign too frequently or without good reason. Check for these signs that indicate it’s time to breathe new life into your site:
Your brand has evolved
If your company’s branding, messaging, products, or services have changed significantly since you last designed your website, it definitely needs an update to match. Don’t make customers feel like they’ve stepped back in time when visiting your site.
Traffic and conversions are declining
Google Analytics can show you clear data on whether fewer visitors are coming to your site and/or converting into customers. This likely indicates your website isn’t engaging users or persuading them to buy. A redesign could help reverse these trends.
The site feels dated
Sites with lots of text, small images, basic templates, and older aesthetics typically turn off modern users. If your website seems stale rather than fresh and vibrant, improving the visual design should be a priority.
As a business owner, you want to make sure that your culture is open enough so that your employees can tell you when they don’t like the company’s website. You’d be amazed at how often we hear people tell us, “Don’t go to our website! It belongs in a museum!” Ask your staff if they’re embarrased by your site. If so, it’s time for a redesign.
It’s not mobile-friendly
With Google prioritizing mobile-friendly sites and over 60% of traffic now coming from mobile devices, having a responsive design is essential. If your site doesn’t adapt well to smaller screens or mobile navigation is difficult, it needs an overhaul.
Keeping an eye on these indicators will help you identify the right time to give your website a makeover.
Plan Your Redesign Strategy
Redesigning a website without a solid plan often leads to unsatisfactory results. Follow these steps to strategize for success before building out visual mockups or writing code:
Set clear goals
What specific goals do you want the new website design to achieve? Common goals include increasing visitors, boosting conversions, improving user experience, reflecting an evolved brand, etc. Identify 2-3 main objectives that will direct design choices.
Analyze your audience
Profile your target demographics and customer personas based on web traffic and sales data. Understanding user behaviors, motivations, and preferences will allow you to craft a website experience that truly resonates with them.
Review analytics
Dive into the stats from your current website to identify strengths to double down on and weaknesses to improve. For example, note which pages get the most/least traffic, where visitors enter/exit, and top conversion paths. Let the numbers guide your redesign.
Benchmark competitors
Conduct competitive analysis to see how your website stacks against others in your industry. Note effective designs, features, content, etc. you may want to emulate while ensuring your redesigned site still stands out.
Set a budget
Determine how much you can realistically invest in this project based on its priority level and expected ROI. Carefully scoping the budget upfront will ensure the redesign stays on track and achieves your established goals.
Approaching your website redesign strategically is the key to creating real impact rather than just a superficial refresh.
Implement Impactful Redesign Updates
With the groundwork laid, it’s time to breathe new life into your actual website design. Avoid change just for change’s sake—every adjustment should connect back to your established goals. Focus on these high-impact areas for your redesign:
Enhance visual design
Because first impressions matter greatly online, overhauling your website’s visual design can vastly improve user engagement. Consider changes like…
· Fresh color palette and fonts aligned with your brand
· Beautiful hero images/graphics that quickly communicate what you do
· More white space for better readability and clearer calls-to-action
· Video integration to increase information conveyance
Streamline site architecture
Many older websites have grown fairly disorganized over time. Reassess how your current site is structured and improve the information hierarchy using…
· Simplified main navigation focused on primary visitor tasks
· Carefully organized page layouts that make scanning easy
· Intuitive internal site search so visitors can find things fast
· Category pages and filters to handle growing products/services
· Breadcrumbs and clear page titles for easy backward navigation
Optimize pages for conversions
Redesign key pages with a conversion-focused strategy based on where visitors dropped off in your past analytics. Useful updates include…
· Prominent calls-to-action for desired actions on hero sections and throughout
· Specific value proposition messaging and peer testimonials on product pages
· Reduced steps for checkout and form completion through smart defaults
· Mirrored main navigation options in footer for quick access
Enhance mobile responsiveness
Check that your redesigned website looks fantastic and functions seamlessly on all devices. Mobile best practices include…
· Responsive design with column stacking on narrow screens
· Target tap sizes and spacing between site elements
· Minimal horizontal scrolling with smart menu patterns
· Possible dedicated mobile navigation menu
· Graphics/text legible on smaller displays
Future-proof your site
While meeting current customer needs, also ensure your redesign sets your website up for sustainable success down the road.
· Choose a scalable tech infrastructure
· Support emerging Augmented/Virtual Reality functionality
· Adopt an agile design mindset focused on continuous enhancement
· Create components that enable easy sitewide updates
· Integrate schema markup for better voice search visibility
Implementing even just a few of these impactful updates can quickly take your website to the next level.
Track Results and Continue Optimizing
Just because you’ve completed a website redesign doesn’t mean optimization efforts end. Continually track performance using Google Analytics and make data-driven refinements. Expand upon well-performing sections and reduce elements showing poor results.
Also reassess metrics quarterly to determine if another complete revamp is warranted after a couple years. The websites experiencing the most online growth use small, ongoing enhancements together with periodic major redesigns to keep their online presence aligned with business goals.
Biggest Mistakes We See With Website Redesigns
As digital marketing experts who have worked on many website redesign projects, we’ve seen clients make a number of common mistakes that limit the success of their refreshes. Here are some of the biggest pitfalls to avoid with your redesign:
Overlooking Core Website Objectives
Too often, businesses approach a redesign focusing solely on cosmetic updates rather than aligning changes to key goals. Always tie design choices and new functionality back to core objectives like increasing conversions, enhancing user experience, communicating updated branding, etc. Don’t make changes just for the sake of change.
Failing to Analyze Site Traffic and User Behavior
Redesign decisions should stem from insights around your current website performance and visitors. Thoroughly analyze user data on factors like most trafficked pages, entry/exit points, popular site search terms, mobile usage patterns and more. Let this analysis guide both visual updates and structural changes. Just grabbing a trendy template rarely improves core KPIs.
Neglecting Responsiveness and Mobile Experience
Today over 60% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so delivering excellent mobile UX is mandatory. We can’t believe we still have to write this in 2024, but we still see many site refreshes focusing only on desktop presentation. That’s shortsighted—test and optimize the redesign for all screen sizes and input methods to help your website visitors have a positive experience. Prioritize fast page loads, legible typography and streamlined navigation to engage mobile users.
Doing this work not only helps your site be more user friendly, but it lowers your bounce rate which can help your SEO.
Inadequate Post-Launch Tracking
You should monitor website metrics both before and after a redesign, with an emphasis on key goals. Set up proper tracking to measure results immediately after launch and continue optimizing over the following months. Which changes drove the desired improvements? Which new features fell flat? Use the data to build on what worked well.
Not Setting Up Redirects
If you think of your website as an airplane climbing its way into the sky to get to page one of the search results, the last thing you want is any drag on your plane corrupting your aerodynmics. Nerdy analogy aside, if your site has a bunch of 404 errors, that will affect your search engine optimization.
Far too often, we see web designers decide to delete old pages on their site when updating the design or creating a new site. When you delete pages, Google has a memory of that page if it’s been indexed and when someone wants to go there again, they will get a dreaded 404 “Page Not Found” error. This can seriously hurt your SEO.
To deal with that, you simply have to set up redirects to tell Google essentially, “Hey, if someoone goes to this page, send them to this other page instead”. It’s a simple fix and one that’s important.
We hope these common pitfalls provide lessons for your own website redesign process. When done right, an upgraded online presence can yield outstanding growth and better longevity for your business. Please reach out if you need any help getting it right!
Breathe New Life into YOUR Website
A outdated, ineffective website can significantly limit your business growth and undermine your brand. But with the right redesign strategy focused on visual appeal, user experience, and conversion rate optimization, you can craft an online presence that fuels increased visibility and sales.
If it’s time to breathe new life into your company’s website, the expert web designers at Make It Loud stand ready to make it happen. Let our design team help you through a successful website redesign.
Cliff Tillery, MBA is the Chief Operating Officer and SEO Director at Make It Loud which is a digital marketing firm located outside of Atlanta Georgia. More than 14 years ago, he started search engine optimization at this award-winning agency and has taught digital marketing skills to business owners at the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, the Gwinnett Entrepreneur Center, and other groups.
