14 May
Thinking about redesigning your website? You’ve landed on the right page. With all the design trends changing so fast, you need to refresh or redesign your website regularly in order to stay relevant and appeal to your audience. Even the best-performing websites need a redesign once in a couple of years.
I know, you’d want to delay this time- and resource-consuming process, but if you want your business to grow, you need a relevant, modern and functional website. Remember that it’s the face of your brand and you need to make a good first impression on your future clients.
Website Redesign VS Website Refresh
Before we start, let’s clearly identify what website redesign is. A website redesign is a process of updating and changing a website fundamentally, including its content, structure, code, design and many other things.
Note that there is a difference between redesigning a website and refreshing it. Redesign involves fundamental changes, whereas refresh means simply updating content or changing some simple design elements. Redesign usually includes changing and updating both the design and structure of the website.
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How Often You Should Redesign
There is no fixed frequency for redesigning a website. It largely depends on your industry, website performance and budget. Redesign requires a lot of time and resources and brands won’t do it that often. And that’s completely natural, as your website won’t need any fundamental updates every month. Depending on industry specifics, some brands would need to redesign once a year, some would need to do it once in 2-3 years.
You need to consider your industry, business needs, your budget and the performance of your website to decide whether you need a redesign or not.
How to Redesign a Website
Now let’s explore in detail how you should do the website redesign.
Audit Your Website
The first thing you need to know about the redesign is that there is no need to delete everything and build a new website from scratch. Especially if you’re an established brand and have customers who are loyal to you, you can’t risk their trust. There may be some features they like in your website, and by deleting them you can lose their trust and interest in your brand.
In order not to risk anything, you need to analyze your website. There are plenty of analytics tools like Google Analytics that can help you to measure your website performance.
Check the metrics such as bounce rate, number of visitors, the time spent on each page, website traffic, total sales generated from your website, and link clicks. At this stage, you should find as much information as you can to decide which pages are performing the best, which ones visitors like most, etc.
As mentioned above, you don’t need to change everything. You need to be very careful with the pages and website features that visitors like. If you change them, you might lose customers.
Also, pay attention to which devices your users use most. You’ll need to be careful with the versions they like the most as well.
Identify Your Goals
The next thing you need to do is to identify your redesign goals. Why do you need a redesign? Maybe you’re doing a rebranding? Or your website is too outdated and the performance is very bad? Or maybe you’re launching a new product or service and need to add a lot of new features?
In any case, you need to have clear goals for redesigning. Here are some examples of redesign goals:
- To increase traffic
- To increase sales
- To increase your domain authority
- To improve SEO performance
- To increase leads generated, etc.
Make sure to set clear and measurable goals and KPIs, and track the results if you don’t want your efforts to be in vain. Check the audit metrics and see how you can improve them and include them as your KPIs.
Update or Create Buyer Personas
Remember that whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it for your users. And you need to understand their needs perfectly so that they enjoy using your website and in the end become your loyal customers.
To do so, you need to update your buyer personas or create them if you don’t have them yet. A buyer persona is your ideal customer, the description of your target audience. Do some research and find out who your customers or potential customers are, what they like, what is their age, profession, hobbies, favourite brands, etc. The more you know about your audience the more relevant your website and products can be.
Don’t forget about the user intent. You need to know why people are visiting your website and what they expect from you. Maybe they are looking for information, or want to buy a product or compare it to another one. This is important to know in order to understand what you need to change in your website to help them reach their goals.
Do Competitor Research
Analyzing competitors is also part of a redesign. Of course, I’m not suggesting copying from them, but it’s good to know what they are doing. Find the top companies in your niche and analyze their websites. Take notes on what you like on their websites, what features are working perfectly, and which ones are not.
Pay attention to their design, website architecture, content structure and everything in between. Also, you can use SEO tools such as SEMrush for competitor analysis to do it more in detail.
Pay close attention to what’s not performing well on your competitor’s website. Make sure you’re not making the same mistakes.
Consider How Your Team Uses Your Website
Don’t forget about your team. Make sure you know how they are using the website and what redesign can change for their job. Your actions may complicate it.
Besides, your team members can give you valuable information about the website and what can be improved in it. Especially the sales team, who works directly with the customers, will definitely know more about users’ needs and tell you what you need to change.
Plan Your Redesign
So, now as you’ve gathered all the information, you need to start planning the redesign. As this is a bit of a long and difficult process, it’s better to document everything from the start so that you know who is responsible for which part.
You can create a spreadsheet or use any other tool as you prefer to organize everything. Note all the elements of your website: website architecture, design, logo, content, etc. and write down what you need to change in each section. Make sure to mark the features visitors like so that the developers or designers will be careful with that.
Then you need to understand who will be responsible for each change and assign the tasks to your team members.
Test
Before launching all of the new features and pages of your website, it would be best to test them. A/B testing can be very helpful here. This method of testing shows 2 versions of the same page or feature to different visitors at the same time to understand which one works better. It’s also possible that none of the versions will deliver the expected results.
So, before changing any questionable feature you can test it and make sure visitors would love it. Here you can find more about A/B testing.
Launch
When everything is ready, and you’ve finished all your A/B tests, it’s time to launch your website. Do not forget to redirect all the links to your new website. Make sure none of your visitors gets 404 errors!
Key Things to Remember When Redesigning
SEO and Content
Besides changing the design and architecture, you shouldn’t forget about marketing. You’re making this website for the visitors, what’s the point of it if they can’t find your website? So make sure you work on SEO as well, to drive traffic to your website, especially if that was your initial goal.
Also, check your content, do not simply copy your previous content into your new redesigned website. Make sure the writing conveys your desired message and the voice of your brand. Delete all the outdated content and rewrite everything that doesn’t correspond to your brand’s voice.
User-Friendly Website
You’d probably say that user experience is the designers’ responsibility. But still, there are so many brands that focus on design and creativity and forget that their website must be easy for visitors to navigate. It’s better to have a user-friendly and simple website than a website with a very cool design but difficult navigation.
Responsiveness
Mobile-friendliness is not simply an advantage, it’s an absolute necessity for every website. People use different devices to use your website, especially with smartphones getting more and more functional.
So, make sure to create a mobile-friendly version of the website.
Create a Blog
If you don’t have a blog, create one. It can help you drive more traffic and attract more visitors. It’s not necessary to write a new article each day, but adding some new articles from time to time can help to grow your audience.
Research what content your audience is interested in and write about it. Show some helpful tips and information about your products and industry in general.
Optimize for Voice Search
When optimizing for SEO, consider optimizing your website for the voice search as well. Especially when you’re a local business, optimizing for keywords like “near me” can help you attract more customers.
Of course, optimization depends hugely on the industry and how people find your business. During the research find out how visitors land on your website, and if they use voice search a lot, then you definitely need to optimize for it.
Strong Visuals
People pay a lot of attention to the design and visuals, so you will need to have high-quality visuals. You may have great content, but visitors won’t stay on your website if your visuals take too long to load. So, make sure to choose high-quality visuals and don’t forget about their optimization.
How Much Should a Website Redesign Cost?
Now, we’ve talked about how to redesign a website, now let’s talk about how much it can cost you. As you see, you need to do a lot to properly redesign your website and as a result, it can cost you a lot.
Of course, everything depends on your industry, the size and functionality of the website, how many changes you need to do, but still there is an average cost for each option.
Redesigning on Your Own
If you have a small website and don’t have the budget to hire specialists or agencies offering website redesign services, you can redesign a website on your own. There are thousands of templates that can help you to do it and many of them are free. You just need to do research and find out which one is the best for your business.
This can cost anywhere between 0 and 2,000$, depending on the size of your website and your skills. But remember, that money is not the only cost, the real cost of redesigning on your own is your time.
Hiring a Freelancer
Another option for redesign is to hire a freelancer. If you want your website to look more professional and have a custom design, then you need to hire a freelancer or an agency. Of course, in this case, it is implied that your website is not too big, as one freelancer won’t be able to deal with all the web development, design and marketing issues of a large website.
When hiring a freelancer, a website redesign cost can range from a few hundred dollars to 5,000$-10,000$, depending on the functionality and complexity of your website.
Hiring an Agency
The last option is to hire a website redesign company to handle everything. This is the best option for the brands that have bigger size websites and need to deal with a lot of features and functionalities. Doing a redesign on your own will take too much time in this case.
Of course, hiring a design agency can cost you a lot, but if you’re a big e-commerce business and your website is your main source of income, it’s worth the effort. In this case, a website redesign cost can be anywhere between 3,000$ and 70,000$. A big advantage of hiring a website redesign company is that generally they have specialists from different spheres and can deal with both development, design and marketing.
At our design agency, the website redesign costs start from 3000$. But again, this is a very general number, the cost depends a lot on the scope of your project, how many pages you need and what kind of design you need. If you just want to redesign a one-page website with a simple design, it will cost you less. You can contact us so that we give you more exact estimates of your project.
Wrapping Up
A website redesign is indeed a long and tiring process that a lot of brands want to avoid. But if you do it right, you can significantly increase your performance, clean up all your website, and increase your sales and business growth.
Consider all the pros and cons of doing the redesign on your own or hiring specialists. Remember that your time is more valuable than anything.
Good luck in redesigning your website.
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