You’ve decided it’s time to give your website a makeover. You want it to look more modern and accessible for potential customers to navigate.
That’s awesome!
But before you start any website redesign, you must ensure you do it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a website that performs even worse than before.
With careful planning, a website redesign can help you achieve higher search engine rankings, attract more ideal customers, and strengthen customer loyalty.
Here are tips on how to properly redesign your website:
1. Analyze Your Current Website
You need to assess your current website’s health. Do your pages load as they should? Do they load quickly? According to Google, one out of two people expect a page to load in less than two seconds.
You also need to understand where your site visitors are coming from (what platforms, what search terms are they using to get to it, etc..). You also need to identify how they interact with the site. For this, here are some metrics to check out:
- Bounce rate: This is the percentage of sessions that weren’t engaged sessions
- Page views: This is the number of mobile app screens or pages visitors see.
- Click-through rate: This is the number of clicks on a link per impression.
When you know all this information, you can ultimately redesign a website centered around your customer’s needs and journey.
Tools like Google Analytics 4 can help you track your traffic sources, keywords, and the metrics above. Heat maps, meanwhile, can tell you the points of site interaction of visitors.
At this point, just take note of your findings. They’ll come in handy once you start creating your redesign plan.
2. Write Your Redesign Plan
Planning a website redesign is a great way to ensure your site’s new look meets all your business goals. For this, you need to research your industry and competition. Determine, too, how much time and money you want to invest in the redesign project.
Specify all these in a website redesign document.
Don’t forget to also outline the old website design issues you came up with based on your site audit (see our discussion in number 1). Specify the solution you’ll implement to address each issue.
For instance, if you found your site loads slowly, then state in your website redesign plan that you need to secure the fastest web hosting provider. If your bounce rate is high, state that an overhaul of your content to ensure relevance is necessary. You might also specify the need to add site features to your new design to boost page views.
It helps if you include your conceptual new layout in your redesign plan.
In your plan, you should also explicitly state the following:
- SEO strategy
- Steps to ensure the new website design is adaptive
- Deadlines for each redesign task
You’ll also want to specify who’s in charge of what in your plan. So, you can have something like this in your document:
The more specific your website redesign plan, the better.
3. Test and Refine
At this point, you just need to follow your website redesign plan. But you won’t implement the changes to your real website just yet. The best way to ensure your final website design will work is via user testing.
So, using your redesign plan, build a prototype with a website builder. Prototypes are mockups or a representation of your site’s appearance in its finished form. They allow you to see how real people interact with your new design without you officially launching the new design just yet.
That’s the beauty of this strategy. You can make adjustments to the website design at the same time people are interacting with the prototype. So, you’re basically changing bits and pieces as the reactions come.
You can also create at least two prototypes with different redesign elements and conduct A/B or multivariate tests. Run tests online using software like ClickFunnels. Split users into groups and show them the different redesigned versions of your same website.
Here’s a sample from nngroup.com. They made numerous visual versions, then improved the design with each repetition.
Whichever strategy you choose, you’ll have to ask users directly about their opinions. Employ user research methods as part of the redesign process for this purpose.
You could, for example, use this simple poll form.
This will help you come up with valuable insights to use to ensure the final redesigned site truly caters to your audience.
Incorporate the user feedback you get into your website design plan.
4. Redesign the Website
Now, it’s time to make changes to your real website based on your improved redesign plan. This shouldn’t be too hard.
Start with small changes and gradually increase their complexity until you reach your final goal. For instance, you might begin by addressing gaps in your online content, then move on to refining the layout and adding features tailored to your needs. An ecommerce website, for example, will have different requirements compared to a news website, such as a focus on seamless product displays and a streamlined checkout process.
Follow your improved website redesign plan as much as possible. If you get delayed in one part, adjust the other specified deadlines in your plan. You want to do this to ensure your team members (if any) know you still have deadlines to follow even if you already missed one.
5. Communicate New Design to Stakeholders
Now you need a marketing strategy to promote this new website design you’ll officially launch. You want to create excitement for it because you want as many people as possible to use it. You need those interactions for your post-redesign analysis. We’ll talk about this later.
Start with email marketing. You want to notify your current clients of updates and new features they may find helpful or intriguing. Also, use social media sites to spread the word.
You can write blog posts emphasizing specific improvements or changes made during the website redesign process as well. What are the new visual and functional elements of your new design?
6. Conduct Post-Redesign Analysis
Your job doesn’t end after you’ve officially launched your redesigned website. You still need to check if it performs the way you wanted it to. In other words, you need to conduct post-redesign analysis. Post-redesign analysis allows you to determine whether or not the launched redesign helps your business achieve its goals.
You will again have to look at user behavior metrics like bounce rate at this stage. Other key performance indicators (KPIs) can help you measure the success of specific parts of your site’s functionality. For example, if you’re evaluating a new CTA, you might use KPIs like conversion rate.
The best way to interpret all this data is to look at your website’s performance before and after the redesign. On Google Analytics 4, you can simply pick the dates for your site analysis.
If all your metrics improve after the launched redesign, then that means you can retain what you have. If some metrics worsened, tweak the specific design elements you changed during the redesign process that may have led to that. For instance, if less people convert on your homepage, then the problem might be your CTA.
In Closing
Redesigning your site is a great way to ensure your business stays relevant in today’s digital landscape.
However, if you do a website redesign wrong, you might end up in a worse place than before. You learned the steps you need to follow to ensure your website redesign yields the results you’re looking for.
Just follow this guide. You’ll have an appealing website that performs as it should in no time. Good luck!
Author bio: Nico is the founder of Launch Space. The company works with enterprise SaaS clients, helping them scale lead generation globally across EMEA, APAC, and other regions. When not strategizing growth, he enjoys building practical tools like the Domain Name Generator.
