The journey of improving a website performance never ends. Online business owners along with digital marketing professionals apply a wide range of best practices, guidelines, techniques and tactics for the sake of standing out of the crowd and converting more. However, it is important to know that the website itself plays a crucial role in the performance of online businesses of any type too.
In today’s digital world, a website acts as the showcase of a business and must be designed professionally. The web design standards and trends change quite fast, so a well-designed website might be looking dated after a few years. On top of that, there are some other reasons which make your website redesign necessary, regardless of how well your website was designed and how much your web design Australia price was at the time it was developed.
How to realize that a website redesign is needed?
To determine the necessity of website redesign, you must ask yourself the below questions. By doing so, it will be easier to figure out whether it’s time to consult with a reputable web design company, to put a redesign strategy together or if the website still works well.
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Has the website’s goal, brand or any branding component changed?
A business website must be designed in a way to perfectly reflect a business brand and goals. In case of any change in a company’s business structure and goals or a change in any other brand element, a website redesign is inevitable.
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How are the web pages performing?
The performance of all web pages must be investigated from time to time to make sure they are performing well. You must put your foot in users’ shoes and navigate through the website and check the performance of the website in terms of loading speed and interaction. If you realize that the performance is not as good as before, depending on the reason, website redesign might be needed.
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Does any element become outdated?
Considering the fast movement of technology, particularly in the digital world, it is quite common for all components of a website to become dated and not operate efficiently. It is required for you to conduct a test regularly to make sure all aspects of a website are operating well and if not, redesign to cope with the changes in technology is most probably needed.
Steps to put a website redesign strategy together
The process of building a redesign strategy is pretty much the same for almost all kinds of websites. Whether you have already done an ecommerce website design in Australia for yourself or a simple website design for your local bakery and are planning for redesigning your business website, you must take the steps below one by one to develop your redesign strategy.
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Document your website’s current performance metrics
Performance measurement is all about metrics and figures. Hence, as the first step, you must document your website’s current performance figures for benchmarking purposes in the future and after the redesign is completed. It also gives you the capability to focus on the weakness of your website, when putting your redesign strategy together.
Regular metrics such as traffic volume, CTR, session duration, bounce rate, keywords that make the most traffic, conversion rate, etc. must be identified, measured and documented.
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Set the goals of the website redesign
Be strict with the goals of your redesign project. You must clearly determine the reasons behind your redesign decision and set the goals accordingly. For instance, if you are not receiving quality traffic or your website is not performing as perfectly as before, the goals must be inline with the reasons. As such, in this case, the goals of the redesign project will be to increase quality traffic or improving website technical performance.
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Establish your branding and messaging
It is crucial for your website to reflect your business’s core message, once users enter into your website. Users must be able to easily understand what your brand is offering, how they can benefit from your brand and why they should be staying on your website and continue navigating. Your brand image and messaging must be clear and constant before starting your redesign project, in order to make it consistent across your new website design. As an example, for web design for construction companies, the homepage must be designed to reflect the construction atmosphere in a proper way as well as the construction services they provide and where to start to be in contact with the company.
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Define your SEO strategy
One of the most important reasons that people think about redesigning their website is poor performance in terms of traffic and conversion. Even if this is not the case, a professional SEO plan is an integral part of your redesign strategy. You must analyse your targeted audiences’ persona, including what they are after, what sort of information they need when approaching your website, how they intend to interact and what they need in order to take action and convert. Then, put a SEO plan together based on the information about your targeted audiences and redesign your website accordingly.
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Document and protect your most visited webpages
It is crucial for a website redesign strategy to document web pages with most traffic, conversion and high quality content. For such valuable web pages, if they are supposed to move, a proper 301 redirect must be created, in order to ensure the traffic and the value are retained. Failing to do so will result in losing a lot of SEO credit you have generated over time.
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Analyse your competitors websites
At last, navigating through your competitors website to create a competitive analysis would add a great value to your redesign strategy. By doing so, you will realize the features, content, keywords and any other factors that are working well on generating traffic and you have missed to include it in your website. You can include those elements in your redesign strategy, to make it as comprehensive as possible.
Kick Start your redesign project
Now you are ready to create your redesign strategy final document, design your new website, optimize for SEO and make it up and running. However, you must keep in mind that even if the new design works well for you, you must be watchful for new design trends, users’ preferences and market trends. Make sure to accept the fact that the market elements change very fast and you must be coping with the changes.
You may contact us with confidence, for a comprehensive analysis of your website and a redesign strategy and execution if needed.