Website Redesign Strategy – A Brief Guide for 2022 and Beyond

Did you know that website users form an opinion within less than a second about whether they like a website or not.

Now, this is a pretty strong reason to consider redesigning your website. 

While a website redesign can take a long time to accomplish, generate results, and convert prospects – it remains an essential process to access your target audience and get the attention of prospective buyers. 

 

1. What is a Website Redesign?

The process of website redesign revolves around website enhancement, improving user experience, decreasing website friction, and engaging more with your target audience.

A general website redesign strategy can induce changes to the most visible parts of the website’s UI (user interface), such as the color schemes and the functional aspects of the UI, such as accessibility and usability.

 

2. Potential Benefits of Redesigning a Website?  

As mentioned before – redesigning your business website can boost your business value and improve your online presence. Like any custom project, a website redesign can have its own set of focus areas, crucial details, and potential challenges.

Here are some essential benefits of redesigning a website:

• Increase Business Value
• Boost Marketing Efforts
• Improve Online Presence
• Increase SEO Rankings

 

3. Potential Reasons for Redesigning Your Website

If you are wondering about why good website design is important – here are the potential reasons a business might want to redesign their website: 

 

• Amendment of Outdated Content

One common reason to redesign your website is the amendment of outdated content or UI. Also, if the website is too slow and not efficiently responsive – the website can benefit from some redesigning. 

According to a research on audience engagement, at least 81% of website users form a negative perception about a business if its website is outdated. 

 

• SEO Optimization

If you feel you need a better user journey and improve your website’s SEO rankings, then redesigning your website might be the best thing to do. With the help of a highly-qualified content marketing team, an optimization-focused website can work wonders in reaching sales goals. 

 

• Rebranding 

Often business owners feel that their website needs a makeover after some changes to their company culture, products/ services, market strategy, and brand logo. 

 

4. Best Website Redesign Techniques

Now that we have established the potential reasons to implement a website redesign strategy –the next step is understanding how to do it the right way:

 

• Revise Old Website

You don’t necessarily have to redesign the entire website. Simply set all miscalculations aside by hiring a professional developer team and ask them to point out the pages, elements, and copy that might be creating a website problem.

You might as well encourage your users to give you constructive feedback so that no nook of your website remains unchecked. 

 

• Brainstorm Ideas

By this stage, you will have a list of website problems and a better understanding of the potential areas of your website where things need to get improved in terms of user experience.

Now enter the ideation stage and brainstorm potential solutions to each problem in the list while also keeping in mind the website’s holistic user experience. 

Source: medium.com

 

• Create Actionable Drafts

After the ideation process, you will want to come up with actionable drafts. And with sufficient actionable drafts – you can now create early prototypes.

At this stage of the website redesign strategy, you will create a base to work on for the upcoming months. Ideally, you should resolve any problem at this state as going back will cost you more – once the development initiates. 

 

• Get Reviews from Stakeholders

While getting reviews from stakeholders, you can ask them the following questions:

1. Does the current website modification resolve the problems at hand?
2. How do the current website modifications improve the overall user experience? 
3. Do the website modifications require a reduction or amplification – if yes, then how will it impact the user experience? 

 

• Develop Website & Review 

At this stage of your website redesigning plan, it is time to go all-in with all the website design choices, solutions, and implementations.

It doesn’t matter whether you have an in-house development team or whether you have hired a professional website development agency – make sure that you and other stakeholders keep overseeing the progress.

You never know when some last-minute changes might have to be made to the website. 

Source: eyes-down.net 

      

• Testing Stage – Get User’s Opinion

Once you have completed your potential website and you are ready to launch it – 

Do not launch it YET.

Even when the new website design looks perfect and all potential stakeholders have reviewed it from all aspects – there is still one thing missing:

Testing it – and getting the user’s opinion. 

You get the point – before doing anything else, your completed website redesign needs to go through a series of testing. At the end of the day – an untested redesigned website is just as good as the old version.

So, getting the user’s opinion is absolutely crucial.

 

• Launch Website

After testing your redesigned website – and – in all probability – slightly altering the end product, it is finally launching day.

Hold your horses – your stress isn’t released yet – it is time to check how your website works when live. 

After launching your website, make the following assessments:

1. How long does it take for the website to load?
2. Are there any sections that aren’t working properly?
3. Have you/ the developer team overlooked any last-minute change?
4. Based on the user’s feedback – do you need to make more changes?

 

5. How to Ensure the Success of Your Website Redesign Process

Once you have ensured that the website redesign process has been successful, all you need to do is to keep optimizing your website and ensuring that the website has the highest success rate.

Here is how to ensure the success of your website redesign process:

 

Source: unbounce.com

 

• Make a Great First Impression

As mentioned before, 81% of website visitors form a bad opinion about your business if the website isn’t impressive.

So, the best way of making a great first impression is by designing outstanding landing pages, integrated with clear value propositions and great call-to-actions. 

 

• Focus on Usability 

Ideally, you should focus on usability during the website redesigning the process by focusing on how visitors will be engaging with your website. 

You might want to conduct research and see which website design practices people expect when visiting a website. For instance, they might expect the menu tab to be positioned at the top of the webpage. 

Also another common expectation is for the website footer to display contact information. 

      

• Focus on Readability

Readability plays a massive role in ensuring the success of your website redesign strategy. If your readers cannot get anything valuable from the copy on your site – it is not good for your business and the ranking of your website.

Some best website redesign practices include using bold serif fonts throughout your website. Also, while structuring your website’s copy, ensure it is SEO-optimized.

 

• Optimize for Mobile Devices

Did you know that roughly half of all internet web traffic is generated by mobile devices? So, it is highly likely that every other visitor on your website would be browsing from their smartphone.

That said, you will want to ensure that your redesigned website is optimized for mobile devices. Else – your website visitors will bounce, and you will never attain mobile conversions. 

So, make sure your modified website has a mobile-friendly website design.

      

• Minimize the Loading Time

If your website is slow, more than half of your potential website visitors won’t buy from you. The value of one second might not be much in real-life and real-time, but when it comes to your website, you will want to aim at a minimum loading to get on the good side of your fast-paced target audience.

Pro-tip: avoid complicated user navigation on the website’s inner pages. 

 

• Integrate SEO Mechanics

While redesigning your website, you should aim to get in the good books of Google’s algorithm by getting your website SEO-optimized. 

So, improving your website’s SEO should be an essential part of your website redesigning strategy. As a matter of fact, most elements of your website can affect Meta tags, content, and other SEO mechanics. 

Make sure that your website redesigning efforts integrate with the best SEO tactics. 

 

Conclusion 

Website designs have evolved over the years. While redesigning your website, make sure to hire a professional development team and test it before the final launch. Your website should work on both mobile and desktop.