Some Reasons to Redesign Your Website

There are many reasons brands redesign their websites. If a website looks outdated, companies will need to redesign to prevent website visitors from leaving. It’s simple: If your website looks old, website visitors assume the content is old, too. No one likes old content.

Some companies decide to undertake a website refresh because their site is not bringing in the desired conversions. Jeremy Abel, the chief strategist at rDialogue, described these websites as cars with no wheels. They “will take you nowhere,” he said.

Here are a few other reasons to redesign a website:

  • To remove design inconsistencies and offer a good user experience. Design inconsistencies such as image files of different sizes or clashing colors worsen the user experience.

  • To undertake a brand refresh or a rebrand. You might want small changes to the company logo or an overhaul of everything associated with the company.

  • To drive more traffic to the website. The more website visitors you have, the more leads you’ll generate.

  • To add functionality. You might want to add live chat to your website for an improved user experience, for instance.

In other words, companies are motivated to undertake a website redesign for a mixture of financial and aesthetic reasons. The company website is usually the first thing leads see. If it doesn’t look the part, the company will be losing out on potential sales.

You should be able to find several indispensable facts about motivation in the following paragraphs. If there’s at least one fact you didn’t know before, imagine the difference it might make. It’s so difficult to go on when everything seems to fail, isn’t it? Are there times in your life when you really want to call it “quits” because you just can’t see any good results from all the hard work you’ve done?

5 Steps Website Redesign Checklist

Now that you know the reasons for undertaking a website refresh, let’s look at the steps you need to follow. This website redesign checklist will help ensure your website redesign gives you the results you want. It doesn’t matter if you’re after increased conversions or a website that provides a better user experience. Following these seven steps will get you there:

1) Identify Problems With the Current Website

This is the first step on this website redesign checklist for a reason: if you don’t identify your website’s problems, you won’t know the problems your website redesign should address. Remember, a website redesign costs money. The prudent thing to do, then, is to get all those problems fixed in the website redesign so you can get more bang for your buck.When identifying your website’s problems, don’t just focus on the aesthetics. Check out how the website performs, too . This might be a web design-related problem. For example, if the website is loading too slowly, you might want to look at the images during the website redesign. The file sizes might be too big. Anything above 1 megabyte is likely to slow your site down. Consider changing the images’ format also. Instead of using the GIF or PNG format, use the JPEG format. JPEG images are much smaller in size.

2) Check Website Metrics

To get an accurate picture of how your website is performing, don’t just rely on what you see on the site itself. You have to look at what the data is telling you, too. Raw data will tell you how your website visitors are behaving. You’ll also know where exactly you’re losing them. There are many tools you can use to check your web metrics.

For instance, Pagespeed Insights can tell you what your page speed is. All you need to do is type the URL to get a performance score or the weighted average of all metric scores. The best part is the tool even tells you what you can do to get your speed up!Apart from the page speed, you should look at the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the number of people who go to a page on your website but leave without going anywhere else. A bounce rate of over 70% is bad. That means your content may not be sufficiently appealing to your website visitors. A high bounce rate may also be due to slow page loading time. Looking at the amount of time people spend on your website helps, too. If your website visitors are spending less time on a particular page, your checkout page, for example, that might mean it’s too complicated or it’s loading slowly.

3) Make A List Of Elements That Need Revamp

Once you’ve identified your website’s problems, make a list of what exactly is or may be causing them. For example, if your page speed is slow, you might have to add “image size” to your list. If your website visitors spend less time on your blog, you might have to include “content quality.” If there are low conversions, you might have to include “call-to-action” on your list. And so on. Identifying the elements that need to be changed to improve website performance shouldn’t be based on guesswork. This is where the web metrics come in. The results of A/B testing can tell you a lot as well. With A/B testing, for example, you can know which CTA gives you the most conversions. You can also determine which checkout form is the best. A small change can make a big impact.Determining the elements that need to be changed to improve the way a website looks can, on the other hand, be subjective. You may want to change the website font just because you think it doesn’t look as appealing. Or you may opt to go for the color blue as well just because it is your favorite color.

That doesn’t mean, though, that you can no longer base your decisions on data. For example, you may decide to change your website background to blue because psychologists found it has a soothing effect. Or you might choose to ditch the orange font because, according to a study reported by Neil Patel, both men and women report disliking the color.

4) Redesign Your Content & SEO Element

A website redesign is still an opportunity to improve the content, even if you think there are no problems. By redesigning content, I don’t just mean updating old data in articles. I also mean improving the content structure to ensure better navigation and user experience. With an improved user experience, you can expect fewer people to leave your page. You may enjoy better SEO results, too.When Google indexes a website, it creates a map by following your site links. If your website has a poor structure, some content may not appear in search engine results.

5) Prioritize Mobile Experience

You should make sure your newly-redesigned website is mobile-friendly. Just look at the statistics. According to Techjury, there are 3.5 billion smartphone users globally in 2020. That’s not all. In the second quarter of 2020, Statista said mobile generated 51.53% of global website traffic! In other words, you have to consider the possibility that visitors will access your website via their cell phones. That means you should optimize it for the mobile screen, too. That means your font and button sizes should be large enough, your images should load quickly, and there should be no text-blocking ads or pop-ups. You have to make information easier to find, too. Responsive web design – a design that automatically reconfigures to fit the user’s screen – is a necessity in 2020. Keep the website design simple and don’t include too many elements. Your website visitors will most likely leave if they see a cluttered page on their small screen.