Let’s get one thing straight before beginning today’s discussion: a website is not an optional element but an essential business tool. And a poor web design can negatively impact conversions.
No matter whichever industry you belong to or what your company size is, owning an attractive and user-friendly website is of paramount importance. If your existing site doesn’t comply with these adjectives, it’s time to redesign your site.
Now, when you are planning to give a new look to your site, make it right from the beginning. Here are 12 essential things to bear in mind while redesigning a website. Check these out.
Website Redesign: A Complete Checklist
Know the Most Valuable Pages
Before you start out, conduct a thorough website analysis. If you have a large website with numerous web pages, you must be extra cautious. Which pages are the most valuable ones? Does any of the pages rank high or moderately on the search engine result page? Which pages can be entirely torn down and rebuilt from scratch? Do you want all the pages to feature a similar colour combination or a specific format?
Find answers to all the questions!
Pay Attention to Traffic & Conversions
One of the most crucial questions for a website redesigning is which pages drive the most traffic and which pages have the highest conversion rate? (Yes, they may not be the same pages!)
Each of the web pages may fall into one of the four categories mentioned below. You have to strategize your website redesigning plan accordingly.
High traffic but low conversion pages – While such pages drive a lot of traffic, they don’t have a high conversion rate. For instance, the contact page. Visitors may check out the page so as to know the location of your office / store or contact details. But not all of them may convert.
So, there’s a low chance of risking conversions while making a change on these pages. You can be a little experimental here, but don’t go overboard to lose the traffic you are already earning.
Low traffic but high conversion pages – Such pages are crucial because of the conversions they drive. Take a blog page for example. Not many visitors check out your blog section but most of the visitors subscribe to your blogs after checking out a few.
This means something is already working and enhancing the user experience. From a design aspect, these can be the way you feature the blogs, the prominent CTA buttons, and more. While approaching a redesigning, you should not make too many modifications to ruin what you have!
Low traffic and low conversion page – These are the most risk-free web pages on your site. Therefore, you can be as experimental as you want and include various elements.
High traffic and high conversion pages – These are the most valuable and precious web pages for your business and any wrong step can produce disastrous consequence! Make sure to be extra careful while approaching a redesign.
You can use Google Analytics or other analytics tools to find out the above-mentioned metrics.
Approach Redesigning from Your Audience’s Perspective & Industry
Your site should be directed by your user’s persona and the industry you belong to. For instance, if you belong to a B2B industry and sell products at a wholesale rate, the look and feel of your site will be much different from a site belonging to a B2C industry.
Creating customer personas based on psychographic and real demographic data gives clarity. For instance, a website whose ideal customer base is middle-aged people looking for cosmetic treatments will be very different from a site that offers online Adobe Photoshop training to the young generation.
Wonder why it is important? It will direct many of the elements on your site. For instance, the first category of people may be interested in locating your clinic, contact details, services you provide and so on. They are not visiting the site to directly convert. Constantly forcing them to subscribe to your newsletter with too many pop-ups won’t help as they may simply bounce.
On the other hand, the students will be more interested in finding information about the curriculum, fees and convert online. Placing a few CTA buttons here and there on the site is a good idea. From colour scheme to the features – everything is directed by the target user persona.
This is why engaging custom website design services is always a good idea instead of using a free template design. The experts will integrate essential elements into your site and it will reflect a professional vibe.
Check How Your Customers Interact with Your Site
We already mentioned that you should pay attention to the most valuable pages on your site. Here comes the next logical step. Observe which elements your users are interacting with the most and which elements are making them confused. Here are a few things to monitor:
- Which CTA buttons are driving the most customers?
- At which point most of the users are bouncing – is it a problem with the content? Is it about a long form you want them to fill before subscribing to your newsletter? How far are the users scrolling on your site?
- Are most of the users bouncing just before checking out on your eCommerce website? Does it have a loading issue or too many confusing steps?
An understanding of these details will help you to replace many features and include new ones. Session recordings and website heatmaps help you to visualize your audiences’ behaviour and interaction with each page and element.
Observe the Leaders in Your Industry
This is a much ignored but quite important step that may bring some revolutionary changes to your website. When you are putting an effort to redesign your site, why not put some more efforts into checking the moves of the industry leaders? It will give you an idea of what they are featuring on their website. While you shouldn’t blindly follow that, being open to a bunch of ideas is always a smart strategy.
Make Sure that the Site is Mobile Responsive
A survey by Statista underlines that mobile devices generate more than half of global website traffic. In such a scenario, owning a mobile responsive website is of paramount importance. A responsive website offers a seamless user experience on devices of different screen sizes – mobile, tablet, and laptop.
When you are redesigning your website, pay attention to making it mobile responsive. Here’s a complete checklist of a responsive website design. Take a look.
Given the rise of mobile users, you should integrate a click-to-call button on your website. It allows the visitors to tap on a phone number or button and directly call your business. All you need is to encode your business phone number in a clickable link.
Content Refreshment
Website redesigning is not complete if you don’t update the existing content. A fresh approach to content can take your website designing to the next level.
Make sure to update the site content with target keywords and also adopt on-page SEO best practices to make it more search engine friendly. It will help to boost your rank on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and drive organic traffic to your newly designed website. If you are not sure how to get started with search engine optimization, outsourcing professional SEO services is the best idea.
Also, if your website has a dedicated blog section, it’s time to bring a change there. Single out outdated and old blogs and update these with the latest information. Set up a publishing schedule to enhance user engagement. Also, pay attention to the pieces of content that are already performing well to get an idea for future content.
Improve Page Loading Speed
Other than refreshing the content, you need to pay attention to enhancing the page loading speed. Ideally, a website should load within 2 to 5 seconds. In fact, 40% of internet users have a propensity to bounce if the site takes more than 3 seconds to load (source: Kissmetrics). Therefore, pay attention to checking your site loading speed and enhancing it. Remember, page speed is a crucial ranking factor. So, you better not neglect it.
Adopt the Latest Web Design Trends
Suppose your website was built about 10 years back following the most advanced trends of that time. In the ever-changing digital realm, 10 years is a long time and those web design trends are outdated now.
Make sure to adhere to the latest web design trends while redesigning your site. Some of the recent trends include the usage of motion UI, 3D visuals, augmented reality experience, dark mode, cartoon illustration, experimental fonts, digital interpretation of physical products, and so on.
Overwhelmed with so many ideas? Collaborating with a leading website development company can be advantageous for you. The professionals will equip your website with trendy features and offer a unique user experience.
Use OG Tags
You cannot possibly complete website redesigning without taking social media into consideration. Do you want to control the way your content appears on social media? Let us tell you, it impacts your visitors and the right strategy can drive a significant amount of traffic from social media platforms. You do care about that, right?
This is where OG tags come into play. Using an Open Graph (OG) tag will give you better control over how your site material appears on social media. If you don’t use it, you allow the automated content generators of the social sites to determine the appearance of your site (any shared content, for that matter).
Using the OG tag allows you to control what everyone sees as people (or you) share your site content. You can customize your content title and description just the way you want to present it on social media. That way, you can create a catchy title & description and drive more traffic.
Highlight Your Success Stories
Your business has come a long way and received many accreditations. It’s time to feature those on your website. Remember, these evoke your trustworthiness and inspire confidence among your potential consumers. Here are a few things you can highlight on your site:
- Years of experience
- Achievements and awards
- Portfolio and case studies
- Client testimonial
Also, you can notify your loyal audience about your newly designed website and receive their feedback. It will help you to further improve your site.
Security should be a Crucial Concern
With the rise of cybercrime, people are becoming more concerned about their security. It’s the responsibility of the website owners to immediately fix any security loopholes and protect the users’ sensitive data.
Using HTTPS instead of HTTP is the first step to ensure your site security. HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) is a combination of HTTP and SSL/TLS protocol. It identifies a network server as encrypted and secure.
Remember, today’s consumers are well aware of security and they may even leave a site if it doesn’t have a green padlock in the URL – a symbol of HTTPS security. So, ensure to obtain an SSL certificate at the earliest if your site doesn’t have it yet.
Also, use an advanced firewall to protect your site from spam attacks. It adds an extra layer of protection between the site and the internet traffic. Filtering out malicious traffic is a perfect step to enhance your site security.
Ready for the Change?
With the changing customer preferences and the competitive landscape, redesigning your website at regular intervals is a logical step to take. We hope you have got a comprehensive idea of how to get started. Feel free to share your thoughts with us.