Understanding The Background Of Web Redesign

What is web redesign?

According to the dictionary, redesigning is the process of revamping, updating, or amending something that already exists by making sure that the standards are followed correctly and that there is a cumulative progress.

Facebook Redesign by John Mevis

Redesigning a website encompasses more than just changing the navigation, widgets, colours, and formats. Businesses that generally begin the process of redesigning their website, have a set of goals in mind, which include: -creating a better UI (User Interface) -improving online visibility -improving user interaction -increasing conversion rate. Your website attracts criticism and this accusation isn't just directed at the website. It also includes how users perceive your brand, which determines and builds your brand image in the market.

How often should your website be redesigned?

A website's average lifespan is 1.5 to 2.5 years. Since design trends shift and technology advances, this is the average amount of time it takes for a redesign to feel "fresh" and competitive. However, that time frame is only a guideline; you must determine what works best for your organisation.

The frequency at which you should redesign your website is determined by the following factors:

• How frequently do your brands or goals change? If you want a new website, ask yourself, does this website still represent who you are as a company?

• How much money do you set aside for design and development? Can your website redesign wait, or should you use the budget on your site right now?

• How long will your website be fully operational and quick? Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and see if you can easily navigate through the site and find everything you're looking for without confronting errors or long page load times.

• Your website's performance. Consider the following factors:

- Is your website converting enough traffic?
- Do visitors stay on the page for a longer duration, or do they leave quickly?
- Industry changes

For example, when officially Google announced that it would be shifting to mobile-first indexing, it mandated that sites be mobile-friendly first, or they'd lose organic traffic from Google.

When visitors or customers want to ask questions, read content, or buy products or services, they go to your website. As a result, when committing to a website redesign, it's best to be extra prepared.

• Mobile-friendly Design

According to statistics, mobile browsing has overtaken desktop browsing in 2016, and the trend has only continued to grow exponentially since then. Every minute around the world, website visitors are checking out various websites on mobile phones and tablets first, to ensure that they are all capable of doing the job.

This means that there is an unavoidable pressure on your website to be responsive on mobile phones, which means that it must be able to adjust to the screen sizes and devices of the users. Visitors are increasingly expecting this from their web experience, and if you don't deliver it, they will go elsewhere.

Why should you redesign your website?

• An unoptimized website is completely worthless.

Your website might have been built with a framework, or your URLs may be flexible. A website redesign can help you improve the structure of your page to make it more SEO friendly. A website redesign as a whole will help you improve your coding and make your website as a more SEO friendly by utilising custom page URLs, tags, Page Titles, header Alt Tags, and inbound marketing by utilising more advanced Content Management Systems, etc., that gives you added flexibility and makes optimising your website easier. Backlinking is one of the most popular and trustworthy methods of improving your website and growing your business. A backlink checker is a good idea to help you check your hard-earned backlinks as well.

• Your website was created using outdated technologies.

Perhaps your website is still built-in flash, which is hard to comprehend for search engines like Google and impossible to access on tablets and smartphones, or perhaps your website uses extensions that haven't been updated in years. Conducting website checks and updating your website with the most recent technologies and plugins will help it run faster and more efficiently, providing your users with a better UX.

• Keeping an eye on the competition

Assessing your competitors can help you understand what the rest of your industry is doing and how your company can improve overall. Keeping track of your market and competition is a critical business practice because if you don't know what's going on and what the standards are, how will you contend and achieve targets? Performing a website check on your competitors is a great way to find out what's trending and what might be trending. It also aids in the development of new strategies and ideas.

Try to figure out why your competitors are successful, and why you are not. What do they have on their website that you don't have on yours? Pose as a consumer and examine the website from that vantage point before making the comparison. Make a list of areas where you're lagging and set goals to address them as part of the website redesign.

• Rating your Content Management System

The CMS (content management system) you choose to work with limits how much you can do with your site creation and redesigning. Content management systems are essential tools for creating, managing, and analysing good content that can be optimised for search engines so that your website receives the most traffic. The platform for your site must find a balance between alternative solutions and features, as well as the goals you're seeking to achieve.

Now that we have spoken about why you need a website redesign, let’s now discuss…

How should you redesign your website?

• Comparing your present overall performance metrics with the ones of others.

Before you begin making plans for your website redesign, do a website check and make a list of your present overall performance measures. This will provide you with a great concept of wherein your current website exists and which metrics you may enhance with a redesign.

Assess your present website's monthly overall performance in the following areas. The importance and significance of each will vary depending on your website redesign goals, however it is a good idea to gather every metric before diving into your redesign.

• Keep information on the number of website visits, site visitors, and unique site visitors.
• The website's bounce rate
• The time spent on your website
• Keywords that rank high in search engines, generate leads, and generate traffic.
• The overall number of domains with inbound hyperlinks
• Volume of new leads and form submissions
• Total revenue earned
• Total number of indexed pages
• Total quantity of visited pages

If you do not have access to such data, use tools like Google Analytics to enhance real - time tracking and readability into your website's overall performance. Keep a track of the tools you used to quantify all these benchmarks earlier. Ideally, you ought to use the same tools to collect post-redesign metrics; otherwise, you may be comparing apples to oranges.

• Construct your branding and messaging.

Before developing your new web site design and content material, be flawlessly clean approximately your favoured advertising and messaging goals, and specific promoting points. This will make sure that your website is steady throughout.

Every new visitor in your website ought to possibly recognize what you are providing, how it is going to be worthwhile for them, and why they ought to live in your web page in preference to one in all your competitors. Think properly if you really want to alternate your branding and/or messaging or you need to preserve it in the same manner. Why do you need to alternate them? If you'll alternate it, what factors do you need to alternate? Keep those adjustments in mind as you ponder remodelling your internet site.

• Create your client persona (s).

Your website isn't always about you at all. It’s about your website visitors.When site visitors arrive at your internet site, they think approximately what is in it for them? How is that going to assist them? So, craft your web site design and content material around your client personas to talk to your site visitors in their language.

For example, in case you're a hotel marketer supervisor looking to bring in new clients, you may target five different buyer personas: corporate travel manager, a solo enterprise traveller, an event planner, a family on vacation, and a couple considering making plans for their wedding reception.

Make it a point to absolutely figuring out your client personas so you can body your website redesign plans across the website visitors who're maximum vital to you. Is your internet site's audience converting because of the redesign? Is your branding and content material great suitable for this audience? These questions need to be answered as you propose your website redesigns.

• Examine the competition.

Usually, we do not advocate getting worked up over your competitors, understanding where you stand up may be beneficial. First, use a diagnostic tool to create a report on how properly your website is appearing.

Next, observe your competitors' web sites with the equal diagnostic device and maintain track of anything you want and do not like. This system will help you in figuring out what you need to enhance in your website. After you've finished your aggressive analysis, create a listing of action plans that highlight a few possibilities for improvement and the way you can differentiate yourself from your competitors.

• Make a listing of your top-appearing content material.

While web redesign is an outstanding manner to enhance the performance of your website, there are a plethora of approaches wherein it can backfire.

Your present website most likely includes many high-performing content material assets that you've already constructed, and losing their effectiveness due to a redesign could have a considerable effect in your marketing efforts. Such factors could be your,

• Most popularly shared or viewed content material
• Pages with quite a few traffic
• Keywords with the best overall performance or ranking, in addition to their associated pages
• The quantity of inbound hyperlinks to pages.

For example, in case you take away a web page out of your website with a huge number of inbound hyperlinks, you would possibly lose quite a few search engine marketing credits, making it pretty hard to be observed on search engine results pages (SERPs). Remember that many web designers forget this step because they may not be proficient marketers or search engine marketing experts. So, remind them of this, and help them by comparing their web page and giving them a listing of important pages to hold or update.

• Select the right software program.

The most crucial step in website redesign is choosing the right software program to create and host your internet site. It is referred to as a content management system (CMS), and it is used to create and make your website go online.

A CMS software program is beneficial for a whole lot of reasons. A CMS allows you to create a beautiful, practical website, whether or not you are a beginner digital marketer or a pro web developer. Opting for the appropriate CMS is depending on your company's needs, inclusive of which CMSs your website already has and which functions your website redesign necessitates.

• How to calculate the website redesign success?

Metrics associated with your bottom line are the highest accurate manner to look whether or not your modifications have been a hit in case you are an online enterprise. They get proper to the actual point - did your website redesign gain the company?

Revenue-associated metrics are associated with the purpose of your redesign: to create a domain that your primary clients will prefer and, as a result, buy from. They are as follows:

• The overall quantity of conversions
• Rate of conversion
• Revenue
• Order Value on Average (AOV)
• Customer Loyalty Value (CLV)

You also can use qualitative metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your redesign.

Conclusion

Finally, a website redesign is never truly complete.

Customer preferences, as well as browser technologies, design practices, and accessibility standards, are constantly evolving. Furthermore, things that worked at the time of the redesign might not work 12 months later. You'll need to keep track of what your customers really want because they're the ones for whom you're creating the website. Create a roadmap to help your team with the redesign process and also to keep a proper track of the progress made. This will ensure that not much time or money is lost in the process.

Use the same behaviour analytics and feedback tools that you used during the drivers/hooks research phase. Compare heat maps of new and old website pages, to see if new design elements are garnering a user's attention in a different manner, or add a permanent on-page poll to your site to see if a user's purpose for visiting your site changes over time.

FAQ

1. Is it true that redesigning your website has an impact on SEO?

A poorly designed website redesign can have a negative impact on your SEO, whereas a well-thought-out redesign can have little impact on your SEO. Here are some examples of how a redesign can harm your SEO:

• Changing your URL structures can result in broken links and the collapse of your site structure.
• Removing pages frequently results in the loss of valuable backlinks.
• Too many 301 redirects will slow down your website's page load time.
• A bad redesign will result in a bad user experience, which will increase your bounce rate.

It's best to focus on small changes, one at a time, for a successful redesign strategy. Smaller changes allow you to measure their effects (via A/B tests, for example) and quickly reverse any unfavourable changes.

2. Website redesigning cost

Smaller changes allow you to measure their effects (via A/B tests) and quickly reverse any unfavourable changes. The cost of redesigning your website can range from $1,000 to $10,000, based on how you address it and whether you do it yourself or hire a professional.

Consider the following factors:

• Data: To guide decisions and changes, a good website redesign depends on quantitative data from tools like Google Analytics and qualitative data like user personas and data from behaviour analytics and feedback tools).
• Talent: You can use internal talent—the team you already trust—to help you stay within budget for your website redesign. If you have an in-house copywriter, they can write the content for your new site.
• Hiring external talent provides you with access to expertise that you do not have on your team; however, they will not have a deep understanding of your business in the same way that your current team does.
• Site size: Redesigning smaller websites may be less expensive, based on the complexity of redesigning each page. Redesign research and a website check will assist you in determining how many pages you need to redesign and how.