Not every website is perfect, but even if it is, it still needs a regular makeover. The digital environment is everchanging, and you need to adapt your website to new requirements and fresh trends rapidly. Moreover, in order to beat the competition, you need to implement new technologies to your website design. All these steps might sound challenging but let us break them down for you and answer all the crucial questions you might have.
When do you need a website redesign?
If you’re not sure whether your website needs a redesign, several signs can show you that your website is ready for an upgrade.
Your website is underperforming
If your website doesn’t attract the number of visitors you’ve counted on, it is a definite sign that it needs a redesign ASAP. Moreover, you might have spotted that it has a high bounce rate. All this points to usability issues or poor visual design. Also, there might be issues with your website’s content.
Conversion rate is influenced by your website usability and can suffer from a poorly made website. With the website redesign, you will improve its structure and overall user journey and make it more trustworthy in the eyes of your potential customers.
You want to rebrand and target new markets
Sometimes it happens that your business needs rebranding. It’s completely normal, but you need to remember that your website needs to change with your brand as it reflects your brand’s personality.
Furthermore, your website needs to be updated even if you change only some parts of your branding, like the color scheme. Because if it’s not, it automatically becomes outdated.
Also, when it comes to rebranding, sometimes it means you want to target a different audience. This is another case when website redesign is a must. To appeal to the new target audience, you’ll need to conduct user research, create a new user persona, and bring completely new visuals to your site.
Once in a while (to keep the website updated)
Sometimes your website needs a redesign not because it’s badly made or has issues with functionality (which are other reasons for redesign) but because it has to be updated to keep up with new trends.
This is relevant especially in the terms of attracting new customers. The trends are changing constantly and if your website was trendy a few years ago, it might be completely outdated today. Therefore, the customers visiting your website might be pushed away by the outdated visuals.
Also, there are new technologies constantly emerging that can be implemented into your website. For example, large retailer Sephora added an AR feature to their website, so the customer can try on the makeup virtually and increase their confidence in their purchase.
What should you know before redesigning your website?
If you recognize your website from the ones described above or feel that it needs a makeover, then you need to determine certain things before sending it for a website redesign. Here are some points to consider before redesigning your website.
Decide whether you need a tech upgrade
As we stated before, your website can benefit greatly from having new technologies added to it. However, you need to think everything through before you’ll settle on this decision: what type of tech you want to implement, whether your website can leverage it and whether its speed won’t suffer. Because besides the benefits of introducing the new technologies, it can also create a conflict with other ones you are using for your website.
Moreover, make sure that the technologies you are adopting are relevant to your business. They need to contribute to your website’s goal – to provide users with the best possible service and user experience.
The additional or reduced traffic of your website
After the website redesign, your traffic might go rapidly up. Therefore, you need to be prepared for that and be sure that your website is ready as well. It will be disappointing for users who visit your freshly renewed site to face slow loading or other technical problems.
However, sometimes your website’s traffic can also drop after the redesign. It’s a normal situation but an unpleasant one. To avoid that, you can take the following steps before jumping straight to website redesign:
- Implement SEO strategy into the redesign process
- Make an inventory of every page on your website (and think about new site architecture)
- Make sure the proper redirects are in place
Security
Your website security is an important thing you need to consider before its redesign. Unfortunately, today there are many cyber-attacks targeted at websites. And because you can never predict whether your website will become a victim of those attacks, it’s better to be always prepared, especially during and after your website redesign.
There are several measures you can take to ensure the security of your redesigned website. Firstly, you need to check your website for any vulnerabilities. To make this process easier, you can hire a professional. You should look for outdated website plugins and components, links to malicious websites, viruses, etc.
Also, you should do a backup of your data to recover it in case of an attack and take the appropriate steps to protect private user data like credit card numbers and passwords.
Repurpose your content
Content is a crucial part of your website. After a website redesign, you’ll surely need to adapt it to new layouts and new requirements. Therefore, you need to think about it in advance. This is especially relevant if rebranding is a part of your redesign. Then you might want to refresh your content.
What are the first steps?
After we’ve defined the essential step before the website redesign, it’s time to proceed with the redesign itself. Here are the first steps to take during the redesign process.
User interviews
A user interview is a UX research method during which a user is asked specific questions: about their interaction with the website, behaviors or habits. User Interviews help to easily collect user data and help you to find out what users think about your website.
Conducting user interviews will help you to understand what you need to add to or fix in your website from a user perspective. It is better to ask customers who use your website for a while and are already familiar with its interface and structure. The more detailed information you obtain from user interviews the better.
Creating user persona
User personas are the archetypes of users who represent the needs of a wider target audience. Usually, a persona is described in a one or two-page document which includes behavior patterns, goals, attitudes, and background information. Also, it covers the environment in which a persona interacts with your website.
Creating a user persona helps you to understand your website users and influences your decisions about the overall user experience.
Content creation
To begin with, your website’s content should be oriented toward your target audience and based on user research. You can also take a content-oriented approach for a website redesign. In this case, the content will be the core of your website.
Moreover, your website structure should create a clear and logical way to the needed content. Besides great-looking AI, it should make sense in terms of navigation towards the essential information of your website.
For these reasons, you should build an information structure that will be understandable to users. This way you create an information architecture that will become a solid basis for your redesigned UI.
What’s next?
After you’ve created a foundation for your design by conducting in-depth research and got to know your customers it’s time to begin your website’s makeover.
Development of user-centered redesign
If you’ve hired a professional web design agency for your website redesign, this stage will be pretty easy for you. It all depends on how much you want to be involved in the process.
Basically, the redesign goes like this. After you’ve analyzed the existing website and determined what needs to be changed and set your business goal, the design team can begin the redesign. First, they will start with the creation of the new site map and redesign of the IA. After dealing with the top-level issues, designers will create wireframes and prototypes for your redesigned website. Then they will come up with the design solutions that will focus on the target audience, create a user-focused experience and satisfy your business goals defined before.
To find out more about how design/redesign goes, take a look at our UX design process.
Redesign of the website information architecture
When it comes to IA redesign the task is not only about organizing labels and site components in a way that would be understandable for users, it’s also about allowing them to find information and complete their goals faster and easier.
Empathizing with the user, in this case, is a priority and therefore you need to layer your website’s elements from their perspective. For the best IA redesign, you can carry out these steps:
- Website assessment. To redesign your website’s IA, you need to assess the existing one first. Do an audit and create an IA tree of your website that will show its structure and the placement and hierarchy of content.
- Stakeholder interviews. Stakeholder interviews will help you find out whether there are any constraints or additional requirements to the IA of your website.
- Card sorting with users. Card sorting is a cost-effective way to obtain user perceptions of your website’s IA during which participants organize things or topics into categories in a way that is most understandable for them.
UI redesign
The update of the user interface is a part of the redesign process and can offer you possibilities to improve your website’s accessibility, fix the usability issues, and overall improve your website’s design.
For UI update you can take two paths: UI refresh or UI redesign. UI design refresh covers the style changes that don’t influence the structure or functionality of an interface. It can be the font, color palettes, or a new style solution for website elements. This way you bring the visual updates to your website’s UI without any ground changes, so users still feel familiar with it.
UI redesign is a more complex process when the whole system is reevaluated. This approach isn’t just about the style of your website but also is greatly focused on rebuilding how the elements of your website are placed. This is an opportunity to re-think your website’s UI and considerably update your customer experience.
Post-launch strategy
After the website redesign is complete, the work on your website isn’t over. Usually, the design team will assist you to check whether everything’s working fine and help you with the website’s maintenance. Also, this is the time for you to create your marketing strategy to let customers know about your website’s makeover.
To sum up
The website redesign is a needed procedure for any website. Whenever you feel that your website is underperforming or outdated, the redesign can surely fix that. If you rely on the design team to carry out the redesign, the whole process will be much easier for you. What is needed from your side is an in-depth understanding of your target audience and a clear vision of your business goals.