Your website is one of your business' most important marketing assets. It can attract new customers and help express your unique brand identity. Staying on top of your website’s design is critical to your business being competitive. But what if your site isn’t up to par? Millions of websites go years without updates, and suffer from poor search results, lost sales, and even security vulnerabilities and hacks as a result. A website redesign can ensure that your site is having its intended effect and staying up to date, make your site more user-friendly and visually appealing, and improve your marketing as a result. Undertaking a website redesign is a big project and there are several important considerations you'll want to take into account before beginning the process. Before making any large changes to your website design, you need to determine which aspects of the site could benefit from an update. Here are the important elements of your website you’ll want to evaluate: Dive into your analytics platform and review how well your website visitors are converting into leads and sales. If you’re not hitting your target metrics, there may be parts of your website that need to be redesigned. When visitors land on your homepage, what do they see? Your website should make it clear what industry you are in and what your business does. All important information should be easily found on the site. If this is not the case, you likely have not clearly defined your buyer personas and are unsure which target audience you are trying to appeal to. This will ultimately lead to a lower conversion rate as each component of your website should be tied to a desired outcome. Is your audience able to easily navigate the site to find what they are looking for? Take a look at your website's speed, responsiveness, security, and navigation menu to see if you are providing visitors a great user experience. SEO determines where your website appears in search results for relevant search terms. The higher your web pages rank, the larger audience your business will reach. You can use Google Search Console to see where your website is ranking for important keywords. If your website is not yielding the SEO results you desire, begin to analyze the on-page and technical factors that could be holding you back. Some important questions you'll need to ask include: Is your audience able to find the information they are looking for on your website? If the desired information is not present, you need to create a content strategy to produce relevant material. Find out what content is performing well so that you can use it as a template for future content. This plays into SEO and brand reputation as a whole, so don’t let the quality and consistency of your content fall by the wayside. Once you have a clear idea which aspects of your website could use redesigning, you'll want to evaluate your budget and desired turnaround time. This is an important consideration as the amount that you are willing to pay for your website redesign will play a big role in the quality of service you receive. Here are some of the important questions to ask yourself when determining the time and resources to invest in your redesign: You may only want a simple redesign of some of the frontend elements of your website. Or perhaps you are looking for something more extensive like an entirely new platform or technology, new content, or a new digital marketing and SEO strategy. All these factors will impact your total budget for the project. Ask yourself how much of your current content you plan to keep so you can begin to have a better understanding of how much new content you need. You'll want to define the content needs of your website as early as possible. This will not only impact your project timeline and budget, but it will also help you find the right agency to partner with. Not all agencies are well-equipped to handle content creation so if you need a lot of content made you'll have to factor this into your selection process. Like other areas of marketing, taking a look at your competitors when considering a website redesign is a helpful practice. It will provide you insight into what others in your industry are doing and how your business can differentiate itself. Analyze the websites of your closest competitors and industry leaders and ask yourself the following questions: Use this competitive analysis to help make your website better than the competition's. If you're going to invest the time and resources into a website redesign, you want to maximize your results. The content management system (CMS) you use will determine what you are able to achieve with your website redesign. Not all platforms offer the same level of functionality or customization. The platform you use needs to balance options and capabilities with the goals of your redesign project. Ask yourself which benefits and features are most important to delivering the perfect experience to your visitors and which you can do without. We highly recommend WordPress as an all-around CMS and we start all our website redesign projects with a blank WordPress theme. If you need assistance implementing a website redesign, a professional web design agency like Carrboro Creative can help. Our strategic designers focus on understanding your company and target audience to design digital experiences that convert. Your business doesn’t fit into a template and neither does your web design. We design fully custom WordPress websites for your organization. Contact us today and let’s make you a custom site that converts.
Let’s take a look at the important factors to consider before beginning a website redesign.1. Analyze What Is Working and What Is Not
Conversion
Usability
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Content
2. Evaluate Your Budget and Timeline
What are you looking to get out of the project?
How much new content will you need to create?
3. Research the Competition
4. Evaluate Your CMS
Conclusion
