Redesigning your website is a great ordeal. It makes even the most skilled marketers cringe. If you do it the right way, it can improve the experience of the people accessing your website. This will turn your website into a very valuable sales tool. Many marketers regard an official website as a company’s best sales representative.

If you cut corners and skip crucial steps while redesigning your website, it can spell doom for your organization. It will cost your company a lot of money, effort, and time. It will do more harm than good for marketing your products and services.

Whether you are redesigning your website or doing social media marketing, you will need reliable internet access to do such activities. Use MetroNet Internet to get the reliability needed to smoothly run your business operations.

Don’t get swayed by the prospect of an unsuccessful website redesign. With some foresight, research, and proper planning, you can be very successful with your next website redesign and avoid getting stressed by this situation.

But First, How Do You Know if It Is Time for a Website Redesign?

Before you begin to employ expensive company resources into redesigning your website, you must be sure if it is something your business needs.

While there may be many good reasons for undergoing this activity, there are also very poor reasons for doing so. Reasons such as “I simply don’t like the way our website looks anymore” or “Our competitors have redesigned their websites” are not good reasons for a website redesign.

If your website in its current state continues to attract a good volume of online traffic, there is no need to make changes to it. If you can implement your marketing strategies successfully through your existing website, then maybe now is not the right time for a website redesign. Why change something that is working well for you?

Don’t allow your subjective opinions to be the judge. Analyze your website. Ask these questions first before you go ahead with a website redesign:

• Is my website optimized for portable devices?
• Is there a change in the organizational goals since the last launch of our website?
• Does my website has outdated branding?
• Is my website functioning properly?
• Is it easy to publish content and set updates on my website?
• Is it easy for our users to easily navigate through the website?
• What are the business metrics on our website? Are we able to convert leads from our website?

Depending on how you answer the above questions, you will get a decent idea of whether you need to go for a website redesign or not. So if the answers point toward a website redesign, here are the steps you need to take.

Establish Your Dedicated Team of Stakeholders

Before you begin to redesign your website, you have to select a team that will oversee this task. You may call it your website task force. Having a team that is dedicated to this task alone will help maintain focus on this crucial activity. A dedicated team will ensure there won’t be a slowdown in the website redesign process.

You should have diverse and cross-functional group members undertaking this task. The team should not be more than five people. All team members will ideally be from multiple departments.

This will allow you to get feedback from people with multiple points of view. Your website task force should comprise the following:

• Developer
• Designer
• Strategist
• Content writer
• Final decision reviewer from C-Suite

You will also need to appoint someone from within this group who will lead the website redesign project. The leader will have the final word on all approvals. The leader will make all decisions within this group and will be entrusted with ensuring the project progresses at a decent pace.

After you have assembled your team, you will be ready to get started on the project.

Audit Your Current Site

The success of your website redesign will depend on the measures you take in planning and preparation. The more robust your planning and preparation, the better this project will progress. The best thing you can do is to do a comprehensive audit of your existing website.

Such an audit will tell you about all the assets you have at your disposal. It will give you insights into what aspects of your website are currently working well and which ones need to be altered.

Assess Your Website’s Current Page Performance

It is highly recommended to construct a sitemap of your existing website. You should then perform analytics on each web page to evaluate any noteworthy user trends.

Analyze critical metrics. These metrics will include conversions, traffic, time on page, and bounce rates. This will give you an understanding of which pages your users found useful, potential pages that may be missing, and which pages you can do away with.

This activity will give you a fair idea of which pages you have to work with. This will be helpful later on when it will be time to put together the sitemap of your new website.

Complete an SEO Audit of Your Website

An SEO audit will allow you to do a thorough evaluation of your efforts to get a high ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). This will let you know if your website has performed well.

This exercise aims to search for issues that are adversely affecting the organic search performance of your website. These issues could be technical or they may be related to the quality of your content. Technical issues may include the speed at which a web page loads while content-related issues may include problems like missing keywords.

You can use tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and Semrush to look into SEO-related issues.

Review Your Website’s Current Copy

Most businesses make the grave mistake of thinking their website should be about them. They use their website as a medium to tell their readers how great and unique they are. Most buyers are not interested in knowing about the company behind a website. They are only interested in knowing how a company or business can solve their problems.

You need to ask yourself how effectively your company website answers this question. If you do not have a satisfactory answer to this question, it means your content has issues. Make sure that your website’s content focuses on the needs and problems of your target audience.

Understand the User Journey

A user journey shows a roadmap of the multiple stages they go through when they navigate your website to make a purchase. You need to understand the different actions taken by users and the emotions they may feel at each stage of the purchase process.

You need to know what your users are looking for and the questions that they seek answers to. You must know how your users will look for answers to their questions on your website during the purchase process. If you can do this, you will be well on your way to success.

You need to plug in all the holes that may be present on your website when a user accesses it to make a purchase.

Use Customer Interviews

There are some ways you can ensure there are no shortcomings in the user experience of your website. One way is to ask the users themselves. You can go about asking the following questions:

• Why did you decide to purchase product X?
• Was there any trouble using the website?
• How did you reach page X on our website?

The goal should be to make the website experience as smooth as possible for all users. This will lead to better sales conversion. There can be no better way to make improvements than to seek customer feedback.

Use User Testing

User testing is another way to gauge the website user journey experience. There are some services like UserTesting and Userlytics, which can be used to perform user testing.

User testing will allow you to see how the experience your customers will potentially face using your website. You can then use the knowledge gained to remove the shortcomings in your website. Where are customers abandoning your website during the journey? Which pages are they consistently interacting with? Are they facing any issues accessing your website? These are some of the questions that will be answered through user testing.

You can also use heat mapping tools like Lucky Orange and Hotjar to figure out where you can optimize your website. These tools color-code different sections of the website to give a visual view of how customers interact with the website.

If you focus on the user journey, you will be able to redesign your website in a way that will help generate increased traffic.

Set Goals

Setting goals is key to performing well. The same will apply to your website redesign. You should have specific goals for this process.

It takes a lot of money and effort to perform a website redesign. So it is important to ensure this process remains successful. Your efforts will prove successful if you set realistic goals for your website redesign. After completing the website audit, you will have a fair idea about which areas on your website require improvement. This is a good starting point for setting your goals.

For example, you may have seen your website get a steady flow of traffic. However, it is not leading to sales conversion. Using this information, you can set a goal of increasing your conversion rate by 1% in the next six months.

Having access to data is certainly an important aspect of the website redesign process. However, it does not always provide the complete picture. You will also benefit from getting ideas from your team members. You can do this by asking them to fill out surveys to get more feedback.

You may ask your team the following questions:

• What prompted you to redesign your website?
• What are you trying to achieve through your website?
• What do you think are the important things your users will do on your website?

These questions will help you pinpoint exactly where you need to focus your website redesign process.

Try communicating your goals to all team members. This will ensure everyone will be on the same page and will lead to a smooth website redesign process.

Summing Up

Website redesign is an important business activity. You can use the checklist mentioned here as a guide when doing a website redesign. At times, there will be time constraints that will limit the extent of effort you may devout to this exercise. However, the more thoroughly you follow this guide, the better it will be for your website.

You will, without a doubt, need to use multiple online tools to help you redesign your website. Get access to high-speed internet from MetroNet. Contact MetroNet customer service to learn more about their internet plans.