As anyone who runs a website will tell you, stagnation is a death trap. Unless you are consistently updating your website with new content and pages, you will soon fall behind. Sometimes, your website might be in need of a complete overhaul and redesign. Getting started with your website redesign process is simple, but unless you know where to start, it can seem overwhelming.
In this article, we are going to take a look at where to get started when you are redesigning your website. Not only when it comes to who will be hosting your website, but what areas to improve and how to position yourself effectively to make the most use out of having a website for your business. Let us begin.
Website redesign checklist
The first part of the process is taking a look at your website redesign checklist. You need to analyze important metrics to find out what your current design is doing for you. Then, figure out what your current website lacks. Finally, you will need to figure out how your website fits into your overall business.
By doing this quick review, you will have a firm foundation on which the rest of the website redesign process will be built. To do this well, consider the following areas:
- Branding: How do you define your brand? Who are your target customers? How would those customers describe your brand? What can you be doing better?
- Sales: Are you consistently reaching your sales targets? If not, how can this website redesign process improve them so that you can meet your goals?
- Marketing: What channels are you currently utilizing? What results are you getting? Are there new areas to explore?
- Profits: Which products and channels are delivering the highest profits? Can those profitable channels be improved with a website redesign?
- Competition: How healthy is your business compared to your competitions? What are you doing better? What are they doing better?
Think about how your current design plays a role in each of these areas. Then ask yourself, how can you improve your performance in these areas throughout the website redesign process? If you can’t answer all of these questions right off the bat, that is fine. But you need to understand enough to know which direction you are heading.
Evaluate your current website
As you are reviewing your current website, you are going to want to keep a few things in mind. First, the website itself. Then, your website redesign process and how it worked for you last time. Finally, you will want to look at how your website is performing. Let’s take an in-depth look at each of these areas.
Problems with your current website
As you review your current website, you are going to want to look out for some key indicators that you are due for a redesign. Problems such as slow loading speeds, content not displaying correctly, and not being mobile friendly are just a few of the reasons your website may not be performing well.
Not having a well performing website is no longer excusable. If your website doesn’t load correctly or take users to the right page, you may be losing out on new clients without even knowing it. Take some time and make sure you aren’t having these problems with your website before moving forward. If you are, it might be time for a full website revamp.
- Visitors leaving your site quickly: monitor your bounce rate, behavior flow, and user sessions to see if your website isn’t grabbing users well enough. This alone is reason enough to take a look at your website redesign process and start fixing things.
- People can’t find what they are looking for: everything on your website should be within three clicks of the home page. People who can’t find what they are looking for might be the reason your bounce rate is so high.
- Your social media shares don’t look good: a very easy problem to solve, many businesses don’t ensure that their social shares look polished and thought out. In so doing, they are potentially turning off clients by avoiding a simply solution.
Review previous website redesign process
Your current website may have been design months ago, or it may have been years ago. Either way, you need to review what happened last time you redesigned your website and what you can improve upon this time. Think to yourself, which parts of the process worked last time? Which parts were frustrating?
If you need to, look through old emails and figure out how your current website was made. By focusing on the areas that worked and avoiding the areas that didn’t, you will be able to save yourself a lot of time and headache.
Check your current website’s performance
How is your current website performing? If you are considering jumping into the website redesign process, the answer is probably not too good. However, looking at specific details of your website’s performance will give you ideas on where to improve moving forward. Find benchmarks for the following metrics so that you know what your goals are with a redesigned site.
- Average number of monthly users: How many people are coming to your site every month?
- Top visitor locations: Where are these people located?
- Top visitor devices: What device are they visiting your website from?
- Bounce rate: Do they quickly move on from your site to another?
- Top referral traffic sources: How are people finding your site?
- Number of new leads per month: How many people are turning into leads from your site?
- Number of new sales per month: How many of those leads actually turn into sales?
- Website conversion rates: How many people are converting out of the people who visit your site?
Gather and analyze each of these metrics that apply to your business. Not only will this help you compare your old site with your new one, but it gives you a good idea of how your website is doing overall.
Set design goals
Since you have now looked over what you need to improve on your site with the website redesign process, it’s time for you to set your design goals. These will be your guidelines throughout the process and are necessary for you to understand moving forward.
Think about your business and where you want to be in 6 months. Think further out, maybe 2 years, 3 years. Analyze which parts of your business you want to grow and write down exactly how you hope to do that. Then, go through each of these goals and figure out how the website redesign process can aide or help you reach these goals.
Once this step is done, you are much closer to having the website you truly want and maybe even need.
Plan the website redesign process
The final step in getting started with the website redesign process is to actually plan it. Visualize how you want the redesign to go, how you want things to look, and picture the day to day operations of your team throughout.
Other things to consider at this point include:
- Who is designing this website? Will it be you or someone else? Are you employing a team to do the work for you?
- What vendor will you use? We recommend using WordPress for your website redesign, but feel out all of the options to find what works best for you.
- Which results are you pursuing? What are you hoping to accomplish with this website redesign process? What thresholds are you hoping to hit?
Now that you have gone through each of these steps, you are ready to begin the website redesign process in earnest. Try your best to follow as many of these guidelines as you can and it should be a relatively painless process!
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