Don’t you like your current site any more? Would you like to change the design or completely overhaul the structure? Then a website redesign is essential.
The creation of a site is based on two main levers, and it’s essential to ensure that both are in cohesion to create a site that not only looks good, but also meets the needs of users:
- The creative side, which represents the site’s design
- The functional side.
What are the pitfalls to avoid and the best practices to implement when redesigning your site? Here are the 9 steps to a successful site redesign:
Examine your current site
What do you like and what don’t you like?
- A redesign is an opportunity to ask yourself all the relevant questions about your site. Many people equate a redesign with a total change of site design, but this isn’t necessarily the case. What do you want to do with your old pages?
- Create a list of all the things you like about your site: colors, typography, features. And another list of things you’d like to change. Remember: a redesign is an improvement on the current site. Keeping what you like about the site will give you more time to concentrate on what you don’t like.
If nothing on your current site appeals to you, then this is your chance to change everything.
There are major differences between creating and redesigning a website. A new site has the advantage of starting with a neutral liability, in the sense that it’s the first version of the site and there are no points of comparison. Whereas with a redesign, you have experience of the site, and it’s an opportunity to correct what didn’t work the first time. So there’s a greater requirement to get it right.
Successfully redesigning a website and creating a new one are not at all the same thing.
Competitor analysis
Analyzing the competition will always teach you interesting things. But beyond design, look at your competitors’ traffic sources and strategies for generating leads and sales.
Why go to such lengths? Redesigning is an opportunity to modify your site’s tree structure to position yourself on new queries. It’s a good time to reflect on your SEO strategy, and make any necessary corrections. After all, it’s not every day you get to carry out a redesign.
Define your audience precisely
You may have thought about your audience before you created your current site. It’s essential to stay focused on your audience’s needs, and to do that you need to know them as well as possible.
When you clearly define your audience, you’ll know what information your visitors expect to find on your site.
So if you haven’t done it yet, now’s your chance to review it with the benefit of your experience. And even if you have, your prospects may have changed over time. A study can only help.
Explore new functions
How can you improve your site’s functionality?
Now that you’ve identified exactly what your customers want, it’s time to add or modify the functionalities present on your site: create a private area for your customers or add comment spaces, for example. The best thing to do is to draw up a list of the features you want to implement on your site.
As is often the case on the Internet, you’ll need statistical tools to analyze the path your visitors take on your site. Google Analytics is a great tool for this. It will help you understand how visitors interact with your site. The improvements you make should facilitate navigation and increase the conversion rate.
This stage requires more work than the site design part, but it is unfortunately often neglected, even though it is crucial. A beautiful design may attract first-time visitors, but an efficient and intuitive navigation will attract repeat visitors.
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Exploiting Google Search Console data
How healthy is your site? Google Search Console gives you valuable information on indexing status and page errors. If you don’t yet have a Google Search Console account, now is the time to do so.
Redesigning your website is an opportunity to get rid of everything that’s not working on your site and start afresh.
Implementing a content strategy
As you probably know, content is an important lever for your site.
Does your current site cover topics relevant to your business? To attract new visitors and, above all, keep them coming back to your site, you need to produce unique and original content. Regular publication is also essential.
The new structure of your site should serve your content strategy: how should you highlight your news? Should you create a blog page or integrate your news into each category? Setting up an editorial calendar will help you create regular content for your site.
Don’t forget that content doesn’t necessarily mean text. Images and videos are also popular sources of content on the Web.
Review your digital strategy
We’ve just been talking about your content strategy. But it’s your entire digital strategy that needs to be optimized when redesigning your site.
For example, you can consider creating :
- A monthly or weekly newsletter to enhance your digital strategy
- Implementing an e-mail marketing strategy
Is your site designed to effectively convert visitors into subscribers? Take advantage of your site’s redesign to implement the necessary optimizations for your digital marketing.
Optimizing referencing
Redesigning a website is a delicate operation from an SEO point of view. You’ve put a lot of work into setting up a high-performance site and acquiring search engine positions, and it would be a shame to let it all go to waste. It would be a pity to spoil it all. To detail all the SEO operations to be carried out would require an entire article. The easiest thing to do is to enlist the help of an SEO specialist or an agency specializing in website redesign, such as ours.
Setting up a dashboard
This should be your guide throughout the redesign. Even though it may take you some time, you need to have a sufficiently precise dashboard so that you can report on all the stages and follow the progress of the redesign. All the lists mentioned above should be referenced in this document.
If your project includes deadlines with precise dates for each key stage, you’ll find it much easier to implement them and meet your objectives.
Meeting deadlines is essential to the success of your redesign project. Do you have a trade show coming up, or are you launching a new product? You can’t afford to fall behind on your website redesign – the success of your business depends on it.
Now’s the time to get started, keeping these tips in mind.
