Website redesign is giving your website a new look, feel and touch to improve performance. Remember when you started your business and didn’t have a website? How did it feel? What are some of the things that got you thinking, “If only I had a website, I would do better?”
You already have the website. Is that website performing according to your expectations? Have you increased the number of your customers?
You need a website redesign if you can identify with the following:
Branding is one of the fast-paced technological advancements that you don’t want to miss out on. Branding is your unique identity. A prominent portion of branding considers what your audience thinks of you. The picture that your audience builds in mind whenever they see your company’s logo, your products, and your staff.
Businesses that understand the power of branding stand out from the crowd through unique colors, logos, font style, and consistent design through all social media platforms and physical presence.
Take, for instance, the case of Safaricom. Safaricom’s unique logo and colors are unique and consistent across all platforms. If you mistakenly closed that tab, you can quickly tell that you are no longer navigating Safaricom’s website.
A consistent reflection of your physical presence on your website builds trust in your audience. Whether it is a new offering, a change in your logo, or a product or service that you no longer offer, all the changes you make must be reflected on your website before your customers, and the potential audience questions your identity.
In the world we are living, everyone can differentiate between an old-fashioned and an improved website. Comparison is inevitable. Consider an e-commerce website that saves a customer’s session after purchasing so that the system can remember the customer’s credentials the next time they want to make a purchase.
Also, consider another similar website prompting the customer to enter the same credentials they used in their previous sessions. No matter how illiterate that customer is, they can tell the difference between the two websites.
The experience is different! The next time that customer needs to make a purchase, they already know which store to visit. Your website is simply dull if it doesn’t reflect the following:
Simplicity: Easy to find what you are looking for at the click of a button
User-friendliness: The ability to navigate through a website with ease. Your website should adopt a competitive user interface and user experience design.
Accessibility: Descriptive links and fast loading of the pages make it easier to access information.
Your website should present a consistent design across all devices, whether a laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone. Technology has made it all easy to create responsive systems, improving customer experience.
Websites that are not SEO optimized are risking losing customers. Have you ever clicked a link hoping you will find the information you are looking for, only to be redirected to different content? How did it feel? How about the links you click only to be informed that the website is insecure?
Have you also experienced difficulties navigating a website because of ads? How much longer did you stay on that website?
Your website aims to provide the information your customers are looking for and attract new customers by reaching your target audience with reliable content. It would be best to think from a customer’s perspective whenever you publish content on your website. What kind of information are your customers looking for?
Does your website’s content attempt to answer their questions? How about the images on the website: are they descriptive of the content they are visualizing? Can your audience tell what your images are representing from a glance?
If your website was created using old-fashioned content management systems that do not support SEO optimization, you should consider redesigning it.
As your business grows, you may consider introducing new services or products. There is a need for your website to reflect the new offerings. As a result, you may consider redesigning your website to care for the new offerings.
A website redesign is an investment aimed at increasing returns. The following risks are associated with a website redesign:
1. High upfront costs
2. Cost management
3. SEO disorientation
4. Design variations
5. Losing customers
6. Lower ranking on search engines
However, there are dozens of reasons you should consider a website redesign. Better still, the risks associated with a website redesign have a mitigation strategy. This article addresses the issues associated with a website redesign and how to resolve them by discussing the steps to consider when doing a website redesign.
You are only five steps away from redesigning your website. Ready? Let’s dive in by looking at these steps:
1. Start by conducting SEO Research
2. Perform a website audit
3. Draft the website redesign prototype
4. Examine your local SEO
5. Rebuild the website
SEO research for your website redesign is critical in projecting performance. A website redesign affects SEO in two different ways. It can lead to increased traffic and sales. On the contrary, it can also lead to traffic and sales increases. SEO research will help you achieve the following:
You may be afraid that redesigning your website will affect your traffic and sales if you are already ranking high on search engines, mainly because you may have to move content permanently or temporarily to a different location. But do you know it can redesign your website without affecting the existing SEO?
Two types of redirects guide your audience whenever the content is moved so that they are not served with only errors without an explanation.
A 301 redirect informs your audience’s search engine that content has been moved permanently to a different location and directs the audience. In contrast, a 302 redirect informs the search engine that content has only been moved temporarily, then redirects to the temporary location.
Find here more information about 301 and 302 redirects for your website redesign.
A website redesign offers a chance for SEO optimization on Internal linking, page speed, navigation, and other website features. User interface and user experience design, code refactoring, and other features are better optimized during development.
Your website may have irrelevant links, broken links, outdated content, or simply content that you no longer want to be published on your website. The issues affect your website’s ranking on search engines. Statistics reveal that:
75% of users stick to the first page of search results
75% of all clicks go to the top three search results
33% of all clicks go to the first search result
Optimizing your website redesign for search engines lays a foundation for generating leads, reaching a new audience, customer retention, and other factors that promote sales.
You are updating your website to improve your customer experience, generate more traffic, attract a new audience, and increase sales. There is no better way to do that than investing in SEO. rede
To ensure that every aspect of your website has been tested and proved to be search engine optimized, you may consider redesigning it against a checklist. Here is a quick check through the list of aspects to consider:
1. Establish the sitemap and information architecture
2. Ensure on-page optimizations are compiled
3. Map every 301 redirect
4. Create site backups and update your site architecture
5. Submit XML sitemap
You can find a detailed guide to the website redesign SEO checklist here.
Although you may know what is informing your website’s redesign, conducting a professional audit unveils a lot more that is affecting it. A redesign audit will give insights into the performance of:
1. Call to action references
2. Website Traffic
3. Menus and navigation
4. SERP performance
5. Security of the website
6. Site architecture
7. Domain ownership and registration
When performing a website redesign SEO audit, the following considerations are critical:
Are your pages optimized for the right keyword?
Are the links on your website relevant?
How about your anchor texts? Do they contain descriptive keyword
Is there any potential for penalties, or is your website already penalized by google?
Blue Hills Digital has a detailed website audit checklist here.
Google penalizes duplicate content. Also, your content may be original but lack proper syntax (grammar, punctuations, spellings, and plagiarism), affecting ranking. A website redesign audit will help discover your content’s uniqueness and optimize it for search engines.
Google crawls your website to index pages. Easy navigation of your website helps Google determine which pages to index. Otherwise, google will end up indexing pages that were not supposed to be indexed at all, lowering your rank in search engines.
Inappropriate use of JavaScript and CSS elements can cripple the performance of your website. Google will appreciate and reward a structured architecture for your website as it will be easy to understand the content and choose the pages to index correctly.
The goal of every website is to help your audience find the content they are looking for within the shortest time, and a website audit will help you discover users’ behavior on your website.
Google crawls the content on your website to determine how trustworthy your content is from the user’s perspective. Security of your domain, your audience’s privacy, and related factors that are questionable to google can be identified during a website redesign audit.
Generally, an easy-to-use interface and website responsiveness are critical functionalities—the speed of your website and links. You want to create a valuable platform with minimum user effort, and a website audit will help discover the website’s functionality details.
You have done your research and audited your website. A new picture of your website is beginning to take root in your mind! But you don’t want to build a house without a blueprint. Starting with the user experience, you can create prototypes of the web pages.
1. Design prototypes of how your content and other media appear on the different pages. You can do prototyping using grayscale wireframes.
2. Try different visual styles to gauge the user experience and determine which style best represents your brand. You can use mood boards and style scapes.
3. Design high-fidelity mockups and user interface prototypes with the help of Adobe XD or Figma. Also, define interactions and descriptions of unique functionalities. For instance, what happens when you point your cursor to the logo? The developer is not supposed to guess such descriptions and calls to action.
4. Document the visual layout in a website style guide and hand it to the developer. Remember your style guide is subject to change since It will be updated every time changes a made on the website.
5. Export all the necessary assets for the developers to begin their work.
You have pages ranking high on Google Search Results and wouldn’t want to lose the rank. You will need to develop a list of link redirects to ease the developer’s work. Research the keywords users are looking for to optimize for new content to be added to your website.
Into developer’s hands! Your front-end and back-end development team will work on the website redesign without interfering with the initial website’s URL to allow for testing and amendments to the given prototype.
They will work on it from the development environment until the redesign is approved. Then, they can move it to the live environment.
Redesigning a website may be risky, but do you know what is riskier? The way to do it! Technology is evolving, and your business and your audience are evolving. All you need is to choose a team of professionals to hold your hand through your website redesign, and you will be glad you did.
If you are looking for professionals to redesign your website while retaining your rank on search engines, Sadja Websolutions is a perfect choice.
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