How To Plan A Website Redesign Project: 7 Strategies For Success

How To Plan A Website Redesign Project

Poor sales? Lack of cutting-edge technologies? Dated design?

A website redesign can be an answer to any of the questions mentioned above. It does not matter whether you are a big or small business organization, or, engaged in the B2C or B2B niches; great website design is essential to power your online performance and growth.

In the post-pandemic era, the expectations of customers have changed. It is true that millions of new customers are turning to online platforms for everything from buying groceries to watching tv shows. A poor website can dampen experiences and make them shift to competitors.

Many businesses fail to understand that their website can have a drastic impact on their bottom line. If the website has great design, performance, and functionality, it can attract more traffic climb higher on the SERPs, and boost the credibility of the brand.

It can also improve the sales funnel and lead to more conversions and revenues for the business. This means that a lot is at stake when you are looking at a website redesign project. In this resource article, we are going to help businesses plan their website redesign strategies.

Essential Elements of an Effective and Result-Oriented Website

Before we proceed to the list of website redesign strategies, it would be worthwhile to shed some light on the key or essential elements of an effective website. This will help set up the foundation of what you are hoping to achieve from the redesign.

The first thing that you need to consider is whether you will be hiring an expert agency to help you with the website redesign, or would prefer your in-house team to execute the same. According to experts, it is always better to go for specialized and experienced agencies that offer Website Redesign Services.

Let us get right to it.

1. Clear and concise messaging about your business-

A single two-second glance from consumers should be able to tell them what your business is all about. This is why brand messaging is an integral component of your website. What are you selling? What is your USP? What kind of prices can the customer expect? etc. are all parts of your brand messaging. You need to ensure that you are pushing the brand as a great fit.

2. A clear and non-confusing structure to guide consumers-

The site’s navigation plays an important role in how well the users engage with it. This means that if you have a simple and straightforward website structure, it can help your website with better engagement rates and more conversions. You need to make the user experience as simple as possible and remove any impediments towards sales, queries, or subscriptions.

3. Conveying the values and beliefs of the business-

Every business has a core identity and is governed by a set of beliefs, principles, and values. Is your existing website being able to convey the same to the users effectively is a question you need to ask? The personality of your business website is what is going to make the users engage with it. Users are interested in what the ‘About Us’ section on your website says.

4. Building online trust, credibility, and honesty for the business-

Everything that you put out on your business website needs to be a testament to trust-building. Imagine how you would explain your business to someone in a face-to-face conversation. Now think about ways of bringing the same experience to users when they visit your website. This will help you with immediate as well as long-term online success for your brand.

5. Optimizing sales funnels and website conversions online-

Every organization has a website to do more business. This means that at every step of the way, you want your potential customers to interact with the website that will take them one step closer to a sale. This means focussing on forms, contact pages, email ids, newsletters, and more. Optimizing the sales funnel should be an essential element that you need to focus on.

Websites should not be created simply because someone fell in love with a specific theme or prefers a language. They need to align with the KPIs of the business and should be governed by the rules and laws of ROIs.

7 Successful Strategies for Website Redesign Projects

In the last section, we looked at listing down five essential elements of successful websites. In this section, we are going to outline seven strategies that can help you make your website redesign project a successful one.

Strategy 1: Evaluate your current website and its performance

If you want to better something, you need to first figure out what are the improvement areas you can work on and where you are going wrong. This means turning to your old website and identifying everything from its strengths to its weaknesses and opportunities. Look at traffic numbers, visitors, bounce rates, engagement times, ranking keywords, links, total pages, and more. Once you have this, you have the blueprint of what you want to improve on.

Strategy 2: Set up realistic goals and expectations from the website redesign-

The word that should be paid attention to is ‘realistic’. This means that all the components that have been mentioned above should be bettered. In other words, post the website redesign, you should be looking at increased SEO metrics like DA, DR, and so on. It also means that more visitors should be expected with higher engagement rates and lesser bounce rates. Pay attention to the functionality like you would to the design. Understand that goals need to be achievable.

Strategy 3: Assess your messaging, branding, and unique value proposition-

A website is a brand’s identity on online platforms. For 90% of your customers, this is the first interaction that they are going to have with your brand. This means that at first glance itself, everyone that interacts or comes across your website should have an idea of who you are, what you are trying to sell, and what differentiates you from your competitors. You need to convey to the visitors that as a brand, you are the best and most optimum fit for their needs.

Strategy 4: Identify your target audience and set up the buyer’s persona-

Businesses need to acknowledge one hard truth. The website is not about them at all. It is about putting on the best suit, talking in the most attractive language, and becoming desirable to the consumers. You cannot do that if you do not have an idea of who you are talking to, what are their preferences, and so on. This will help you shape up the communication in such a manner that it becomes suited to the language of the consumers you are targeting for the business.

Strategy 5: Make the Redesign power your SEO efforts and strategies-

First things first. If people do not find your website, how do you expect them to engage with it? This is why you need to make the redesign prioritize your SEO efforts. Make sure to consult your SEO agency or executives about how you can best improve your SEO strategies. This will help you garner more traffic, lead to faster indexing, climb higher on the SERPs and promote better sales conversions. SEO helps shed a ton of light on the best UI and UX experiences.

Strategy 6: Never fail to look at what your competitors are doing on their website-

Rather than opting for a website redesign simply because your competitor’s new website looks better, make sure to carry out a thorough analysis of the same. You can use multiple tools at your disposal to see areas that they have worked on and optimized. Remember that you need to do better than them at all costs. Make a list of the strengths of your competitor’s website, weaknesses, and areas of improvement. Factor everything when going for your redesign.

Strategy 7: Reviews and assess your content and see where you need to improve-

A successful website redesign project needs to take a long and hard look at content. As a business, your aim should always be to improve your existing content. This is again an area where you can benefit from the inputs of your SEO agency. Pay particular attention to SEO Keywords, LSIs, and other best practices. Work to create your blog as an authoritative resource that helps in building credibility, driving traffic, and boosting sales for your business.

The Final Takeaway

Any website redesign project can go two ways. It can either be a resounding success for the brand and help it gain traffic, search rankings, better metrics, and higher sales. Or, it can become a vortex that sucks the company’s financial resources, goes on indefinitely by missing several deadlines, and puts everyone in negative mental headspace.

By following the above-mentioned seven strategies and looking at them in combination with your website’s essential elements, you will be in a better position. If you have any other questions on a website redesign or want us to help you with regard to design agencies that specialize in redesign projects, please let us know in the comments below.