A website redesign might be a powerful strategy to bring new life to a business. Still, there are also lots of cases when poorly prepared redesign resulted in financial losses, angry users, and other problems.
Especially if no consultation takes place with a reputable SEO Agency to protect rankings or a Web Design Agency that understands high conversion strategies. (remember Basecamp redesign?)
According to a leading Australian SEO agency Top Rankings, website rankings for less competitive keywords will increase in a few weeks, it will take months for moderately competitive keywords, and highly competitive keywords take up to one year or more to improve.
Five stars rated Web Design Agency Digital Rescue outlines several reasons why responsive web design is crucial. Let's talk about what you should think about before considering a corporate website redesign.
Step #1. Set up smart goals
When it comes to business, no actions should be taken before setting goals in advance. You need to align the redesign with your business goals. For example, you may want to:
- Increase the number of visitors or conversion.
- Change the look to reflect your new business style and modern UX trends.
- Extend the website's functionality, i.e., add tools that allow customers to order a callback, or add new sections with testimonial sliders, etc.
Once you set your goals and understand how they can be incorporated into your website, you then be able to divide the whole process into easily manageable steps.
Step #2. Collect as much data as possible
You can't make something better if you have no understanding of how the current version of the website does not aid SEO or conversions. How do users get to your websites, what pages are they landing on, where do they spend most of their and where do they bounce out? Who are the visitors, male female age group, where do they reside, what devices do they use?
All these questions should have data-backed answers. So, the redesign starts by studying your old website, user flows, and combining a comprehensive report. User testing team composed a perfect piece on developing a data-driven website redesign strategy.
Step #3. Think about SEO
There is no sense in redesigning a website if, when it gets a new look, it will rank lower than before. SEO is a crucial thing you can't underestimate.
There are many ways to optimize your site for SEO during a website redesign:
- Double-check your page titles, sub headers, meta descriptions, permalinks to all the content.
- Check loading times and try to minimize them.
- Run plagiarism checks to ensure your content is unique enough.
This said, you also need to set up the right expectations.
Step #4. Polishing the content
Here you need to understand what role the content will play on your website. You may have landing pages, a blog, a forum with user-generated content, or a curated knowledge base. It is not necessary to have everything or at least prominently appearing on the site, and you need to understand what content you will need to achieve your business goals.
Then you can spend some time obtaining uniquely written content and build the content marketing process if needed. Producing content for landing pages and blog — are two different tasks, as in the first case, the content will be the same for an extended time, and the blog, you need to have a stream of new content.
And you will need to understand where you will get it from and who will write it and how frequently. This involves preparing a content strategy. Read more on a content-based redesign approach in this paper.
Step 5. Make sure it is responsive
Famous web design agency DigitalRescue outlines several reasons responsive web design is crucial:
- Improved browsing experience. Accessing non mobile-friendly websites from mobile is a huge pain. Potential customers will be angry, and the odds of pushing them further through the sales funnel will reduce significantly.
- Lower bounce rates. If the website fails to provide answers to questions, visitors may leave quickly resulting in a higher bounce rate. The potential sales lead is lost forever. This is why it is crucial to show relevant content right away, and scale the web page accordingly, no matter what device is used to access it.
- Better search rankings. Audits show that responsive UX is one of the leading factors that search engines use to construct their rankings.
Final Thoughts
Website redesign done right can be a brilliant business move. However, there are still a lot of pitfalls and mistakes to avoid. It is a complex process that requires an investment of time dedicated towards planning, data collection, execution, analysis and ongoing refinement.