Web design trends keep evolving, it shows clear patterns of how people engage with web pages, these trends are driven by a couple of factors including advancement in web technologies and more.
You might have spent a lot of money to design your website from inception, but the fact is, the design may not always be relevant, at some point in the future, there will be need to revamp the website based on user experience, current trends and patterns relating to how people engage with Website in recent times.
There are new web design trends and you can’t close your eyes to the fact that you need to redesign your website every once in a while, to make it as relevant as it can be. The goal is not to follow trends, but majorly to make sure your website visitors are getting the much-expected value.
Redesigning a website doesn’t have to be a pocket-emptying endeavour. To keep your website valuable, it has to be in good shape both of aesthetics and contentfulness.
Quick research into the important aspects of the website that’s needing attention can help you to map out a strategy of what to implement per time, once you have a plan of what to do, redesigning your website is half done, you just need to take out time to implement the much-needed changes carefully.
Our goal in this nifty guide is to give a step-by-step insight to help you redesign your websites following some effective strategies and proven practices.
Table of Contents
Why Redesign a website?
Just before we proceed to look at some best practices to redesign your website, let’s take a sneak peek into some practical reasons why business owners and individuals chose to redesign their websites when they do:
Businesses wouldn’t stop looking for ways to transform their existing websites into a powerful and very competitive marketing tool capable of generating leads and driving sales conversion for their business.
The optimum goal of redesigning a website for a small business owner would be to make sure that the website is in good standing and can capably engage site users long enough to make a buying decision on the website.
Factors such as bounce rate, click through rate, conversions and sales, average order value, customer lifetime value, how clear the website offers are to the target audience, are some result-driven reasons people seek to redesign their websites.
Facts about a great Website design:
A good Website is said to have less than 1 second to impress first timers, which means that the perceived credibility of the business is directly tied to how aesthetically-pleasing a website is.
Design takes effort, and users understand that Website that gives more attention to design details are more credible than one’s with shabby looking and outdated designs.
A web credibility research report by Stanford University maintained that over 75% of site visitors will base how credible a business is on the quality of the website’s design.
Irrespective of what your reasons are for designing your website are, it should be in place with the above goals of achieving better credibility, creating better user experience for site visitors and annexing better conversion results.
How to Redesign a website?
Let’s see some recommended approaches to redesign a website.
1. Set a Goal for the New Design
In the quest to redesign your website, you need to first set clear cut goals bothering on why you’re embarking on revamping the website, these goals will include the real intentions around the redesign.
When the purpose of redesign is clearly stated, charting a course to implement the design effectively will not be tacky.
A handy checklist of goals to achieve in the course of the redesign will keep you on check as you get set to onboard changes to achieve the redesign.
Also make sure the goals you set are measurable, for example, a design goal such as “I want to redesign my website to reduce the bounce rate” is not a measurable goal, better still, you can set a goal like
“I want to reduce my website bounce rate by 5% every month so site users can click through my site more and stop exiting the site to competitor’s website” now this a much trackable redesign goal!
2. Website appraisal & examination
The next point of action would be to evaluate the current state of the website. The evaluation should not be from a point of view of how critically bad you assume the site users think the website is, because the current design may not be that really bad, especially when you’re sure you put in the effort and resources to get it to its current state.
The centrality of evaluation should be on an optimistic point of view, which is to identify different sections of the website that could do better with a redesign or perhaps some new elements you can introduce to the website to make it more functional for users and boost your lead generation efforts.
It’s hard to tell what this really is without some web-specific data analysis. We’ve always advocated setting up metric and performance testing for your website from day one, and one of the reliable tools that can give you a handful of metrics you need to make some informed decision is Google analytics.
You’re on the good side, if at this time you’re thinking of redesigning your website and you have a Google analytics account connected to it, that’s a good place to start your analysis.
Google analytics will give you insights on your sessions, click through rates, ranks and possible de-rankings, keywords and conversions per time; say a period of 7 days or 28 days or 90 days.
If it happens that you’re just hearing about analytics and you don’t already have it installed on your website, we suggest you set it up immediately then leave the website for a while to gather some core metric data about your website, the data can be of help for the redesign exercise.
To redesign or to refresh?
Redesigning a website is the most common term, but most times people just refresh their website without really redesigning it.
There’s a large difference between web redesign and web refresh.
Redesign tends more to more on making structural changes while refreshing has to do with making minor to major aesthetics changes on the website.
When all you do is make visual adjustments that has zero to little impact on the performance and structure of the website then that’s more of refreshing, for example, changing the font or color of a website does not really have much effect on the performance of the website.
Refreshing can be part of redesign, redesigning a website entail making architectural changes or modifications that can have a lasting effect on the website, as earlier hinted, it’s not limited to visual updates alone, but can also consist minor to major page level changes that can impact user experience and the overall growth of the website.
Website Redesign SEO
To redesign is not necessarily a complete overhaul!
Especially for business Websites that thrive on SEO, redesign doesn’t mean you need to do a complete overhaul.
Redesigning every aspect of the website can sometimes throw it off balance on search, well! You can say, Website are not solely built for search engines but human users!
Yes! That also is true, but you need to achieve a balance, because SEO is the vehicle that brings the human users, once it tanks, the business might suffer a great deal of loss in sales and conversions.
So, it’s recommended that you make tiny sectional changes to some aspects of the website you’re convinced needs a redesign according to your KPI in the goals you set in the first place.
You’d get better feedback on what works and what’s not, comparing your old and new design, versus when you pull down the entire old design and pull up a new thing completely.
So, making structural changes should be carefully approached to prevent page content loss.
Other than Google analytics you can also compare how much leads and sales the website was attracting before versus what it’s currently getting.
Overall, see a way to find out what’s working for you currently on the website and other things you think need to be improved.
For example, you may come to realize that your enquiry or order form which has 25 form fields stop converting, that’s because users are frustrated with the number of forms fields they need to fill to interface with your business, compressing that 20 something form fields to 4 to 5 fields can boost your conversion by over 110%.
3. Take note of important pages
All Websites have important pages, by important we mean core pages that are of greater benefit to the users and as well as to the business. These important power pages include the product or service page, shop page, Content pages and other value pages created especially to promote the core offerings of the business.
While planning to redesign your website, you need to be mindful of these pages, most importantly when they’re already doing fine and give some good results.
There are some SEO-friendly websites with tens to hundreds of landing pages built for online promotions, if you don’t carefully think through the redesign, these pages may be lost in transit and your business back to square one.
These happens a lot to small business owners who failed the use the service of professional web designer, they ditched their hold handler because of price and whatnot reason and they got a developer, who will just wipe off the complete old website and build something new from ground up for them.
In a nutshell, you need to painstakingly identify your value pages also known as money pages.
If you are wondering how to recognize these money pages?
Well! That’s not difficult. If you’re conversant with your website, you should naturally know what your money pages are. In one of our guides, we have explained in detail what money pages are.
But if you don’t, here is how to find out your important value pages. Two of the best places to check are Google search console and Google analytics, these two metric tools will show you your most valuable pages based on number of visits, sales and revenue, engagement, click through rate, page ranking or position on SERPs and many more.
You’d ordinary think your homepage is your most important page, while that is true in most cases for small business website with less than 5 to 10 pages, it’s not the case for others who have invested in a considerable level of web positioning efforts, so don’t assume anything, you want to be sure!
Once you’ve found these pages, you need to make sure that any proposed adjustment to them is meticulously approached and done by someone who really understands how things work.
Also, irrespective of whatever page-level changes made, you need to keep your URL unchanged to avoid page visitors being miscarried on the website to 404 error page. If you must make URL changes, there’s a need to also effect a redirection so that users can properly navigate through the new links to their original destination pages.
4. Stick to the brand’s guide
It’s a tough call for any business to make too much obvious shift in identity in the course of redesigning its website. It’s why a brand guide was created to help you and your team keep on track of your brand elements including your visual language, messaging and overall brand style. You don’t want your site visitors to be feeling lost due to heavy changes to the brand colors, Website color schemes, logo, design assets and all.
5. Learn from competitors, but don’t copy them!
Your direct and indirect competitor’s website can be helpful for you in gathering more information on how to better optimize your website.
You need to study the elements they have adopted and others they’re yet to adopt.
Many of these competitors have been in business for quite a while and they have made several changes and adjustments to their website to get it to where it is currently.
Most times, they are getting results from few elements that came to be accidentally in place, whatever the case may be, you need to pay attention to what’s currently working for them, make a list of those and see how to incorporate them into your website.
You can use tools like Ahref and SEMrush to sniff out helpful data that can form the bases of your competitive analysis.
6. Create a Silo
Silo is a logical site architecture pyramid that exemplifies how you intend to group, arrange, connect and interlink your money pages, they are consciously clustered pages for SEO purposes.
SEO Silos or site-mapping is crucial to make sure that your website is properly organized and that the site navigation system is user-friendly.
To do this, you can simply sketch out different web pages on your website and how you intend to interconnect them, the diagram is in form of a tree structure as seen above.
Make pages with depth and quality contents and service offerings top priority.
7. Backup current website
It’s a hard call to make any form of changes to your website without a prior backup, I know your web hosting provider may offer you a backup, but you need something more intentional. Backing up your website before making any minor or major change will help to ensure that you secure your current data, media contents and all.
If anything goes wrong, (both on the side of your web hosting company and when making changes to the website) you can have a backup version to fall back on.
You can also mirror the current website to a new server to compare and contrast with the new design that you intend to unveil this will help to ensure that all the important elements have been added to the new design, especially in cases you need to do a complete overhaul.
Website’s backup is also good for keeping a historical record of the website for future reference’s sake.
8. Fresh/Updated contents
Website redesign is not just about structural pages, you also need to find underperforming web pages and repurpose them with fresh contents. Both your high-performing and underperforming pages can be reworked to perform even better.
You can use your Google search console and analytics to know how your web pages are faring and how much revamping is required. You can tell from their current position on SERP, inbound links, volume of traffic, and more.
You can focus on making your microcopies more powerfully crafted to make it more conversational.
Website Redesign Service in Nigeria
We are your reliable partner capable of revitalizing your business’ online presence. Let’s help you unlock the power of aesthetics and structural enhancements to elevate your website’s positioning on search engine. We understand visibility and competitiveness is key to ranking better for your primary keywords and we are sure to carefully map out the best strategy tailored for your business growth.
We will also create simple but converting funnels to help you interface with your prospects from time to time until they are converted to repeated customers. Take the leap today towards achieving the digital success that your brand craves.
Contact us today for a lasting redesign effort that will leave your competitors in dust! Call/WhatsApp 08114900422 or use the contact form on our page to get started.
