The time for a website overhaul always comes. However, before you redesign, here are some tips to help you avoid missing some key aspects.
There are several reasons why webmasters and business owners remodel their websites. It may not be generating enough leads or conversions, or the design may be out of date. The time for a thorough overhaul always comes. Redesigning your website is a big job. Therefore, before you redesign, you need foresight along with a lot of research.
The procedure must be exhaustive, covering all aspects of a website. Here’s a checklist to help you avoid missing key aspects throughout your website overhaul. It covers everything from setting goals to content design and development.
1. Before you redesign, analyze your current website.
The first and most obvious step is a complete website review.
Redesigning is about creating big improvements. That requires knowing your website’s flaws. Therefore, analyze your most popular pages. After that, ask yourself what’s lacking and what can you do better.
Reviewing your present website helps you determine what to change and how.
2. Before you redesign, study the competition.
Like the first stage, the second requires an evaluation. However, this is not another look at your website, but that of your competitors. Observing what other companies in your field are doing can help you identify best practices.
Therefore, scout the competition. Find out what they are doing right. The idea isn’t to copy them but to improve yourself. While thinking outside the box is innovative, there are patterns of success to follow.
Therefore, examine your competitors’ designs. In addition, check out their content’s tone. What are their inclusive web design methods? In addition, how does their design feel? Furthermore, what photos do they use?
Analyzing in this way allows you to learn from your competition. If you can see what works for them, it can inform your redesign. In addition, it can provide you with an advantage in producing a better user experience.
3. Now it’s time to set some goals.
After looking carefully at websites, both yours and the competitor, it’s time to formulate some goals.
A website redesign without goals is meaningless. They are actually the cause for a makeover. However, they are also a way to track your progress.
What do you hope to achieve with your redesign? How will you increase website conversions? Asking these questions and setting new goals is a way to gauge where you are in the process.
Therefore, your redesign will have purpose and direction. Additionally, keep in mind that you won’t achieve all of these goals right away.
4. Before you redesign, let your service provider know about your SEO challenges.
Be honest with your SEO service provider. This phase involves discussing your SEO problems with your coders. Your web developers must copy current links into the new site if your existing website has a high search engine score.
Therefore, it’s vital to reprogram all existing links on your website to ensure they work on the new one. Leaving one link unprogrammed will redirect users to the old website. This will ruin their experience.
Aside from ensuring all your links are in sync, this is an opportunity to improve your SEO. Therefore, find out whether there are more keywords you can use to increase your search engine rating.
5. Reestablish your brand before you redesign.
The next stage is to re-align with your brand. This is where you review your brand with your staff.
First, recall your brand identity. Attach it to the project’s core to guarantee that all design and content are compatible. Everything you create after redesigning your website must be all yours.
This is also a chance to get away from old branding and start over. Brainstorm until you find a genuine, relatable brand.
Remember that your company’s brand is your style. Everything you do stems from it. Therefore, you must always be in tune with it.
6. Identify the user path.
Before you redesign your website, get to know your users. Find out what their typical pathways are.
Unless you can see things from their perspective, your website is unlikely to meet their needs. This, in turn, can make the redesign a pointless waste of money.
Therefore, put yourself in your users’ shoes. What do they usually look for? Additionally, how will they find it on your site? Check your existing site’s stats to find out. Furthermore, know which pages get the most visits so you can prioritize them in the makeover.
Understanding your users’ requirements and concerns is crucial to delivering a better experience for them.
7. Before you redesign, set a reasonable timetable.
Redesigning your website is no minor task. It requires a lot of planning, so plan on it taking a while.
Trying to squeeze everything into a limited time results in you missing important nuances. In addition, making mistakes due to a rush simply prolongs the process. Therefore, make sure your timeline is realistic.
It’s normal to want to finish rebuilding your website as soon as possible. However, you must ask yourself what is most important. Spending time on content or pages that bring no value to your website is a waste of time. Therefore, you will want to make the site more concise by removing non-essentials.
Also, ask yourself when you need the task done. Is there a major event you can leverage your digital presence for? Questions like these help you evaluate when to double down on a project.
