In the digital age, your company's website is its "face," the first interaction with its target audience. This is a problem if your website hasn't changed with your company or is stuck in the past. Redesigning the webpage fixes it. Redesigning your website can boost your brand and increase customer access. This piece should help you understand website redesign, when to do it, and how long to redesign a website.
What is Website Redesign?
There's more to website makeover than cosmetic adjustments. Reconsider your site's navigation, content, and user experience. Your corporate needs and goals will determine the breadth of your overhaul. A rebranding may update the logo and other visuals, leaving the basic premise unchanged. A thorough theme/template upgrade may be needed to match a new brand style or web design trends.
Starting from scratch is often the only way to revamp a website. This could include updating content to meet audience demands, branding to represent the corporate mission or market position, and site layout or template to improve usability and accessibility. A full rebuild may enhance your website's performance, security, and scalability.
When should you Redesign your Website?
A website redesign is a major undertaking that requires careful consideration and planning. Knowing how long to redesign a website before making any plans is important. Here's how to tell if it's time to redesign your website.
- Poor user experience: The quality of the user's interaction with a website is crucial. A website that is difficult to use, where users have trouble locating information or completing routine tasks, needs an overhaul.
- Low levels of success: Converting site traffic into paying clients is a top priority. If your website's conversion rate has declined, it may not meet its target demographic's needs.
- Poor mobile compatibility: Your website must be mobile-friendly now that mobile browsing frequently outnumbers desktop viewing. If it is, you could retain a lot of potential clients.
- Outdated design: You should revamp your site if it includes GeoCities-style design elements and comic sans typeface. Users may lose faith in your company if they visit a website that looks like it was built in the dot-com era.
- Slow load times: Users nowadays have high standards for how quickly and easily websites load. Users will only abandon your site before viewing the content if it takes less time to load.
- If your site is ranked poorly on search engines, it may be due to outdated SEO practices or a lack of SEO. The traffic to your site is something that can benefit from a revamp.
- Rebranding: Your company's online presence should reflect any recent rebranding efforts. Keep brand messaging and images consistent to develop and preserve brand identity.
Remodeling by yourself vs. hiring a professional service
Whether you should revamp your website on your own or hire a company to do it for you relies on a number of things.
- Money and time: Do-it-yourself methods can save money if you have the time and patience to learn everything you need. Nonetheless, this calls for a substantial time commitment, and the result might need to be better with industry standards. However, you may get a website that looks professionally designed by an agency in less time for a greater price. You may learn how long it takes to redesign a website here.
- Trained abilities: Redesigning a website isn't limited to aesthetic improvements. Understanding user experience, search engine optimization, website accessibility, and other related topics is essential. Do-it-yourself is an option if you already know how to handle these tasks or are willing to learn. If not, an agency can take it for you with extensive experience.
- The complexity of the project: Your website's complexity should also be taken into account. A do-it-yourself strategy may be adequate for simple blogs or informational web pages. An agency would be better for complex e-commerce sites or ones with extensive features.
- Maintenance and aid: It's crucial to provide after-launch maintenance and assistance. In a do-it-yourself scenario, you would handle all website upkeep and changes yourself. When working with an agency, these features are often included at no extra cost.
- Budget: This choice may be affected by your available funds. Doing it yourself can save money in the long run, but it also takes longer and may turn out differently. Agency fees are expensive, but you get expertise and a larger ROI.
Tips for Redesigning Your Website
Redesigning your website is a massive undertaking, but it can hugely positively affect your online presence, user experience, and conversion rates if done properly. The process is more than just upgrading the appearance and feel; it involves several crucial elements to ensure a smooth transition and excellent results. Let's go over the basics of website redesigning.
- Benchmark site performance: Assess how well your site is already performing. Look closely at page load times, bounce rates, conversion rates, and average time spent on site. You can use this information to determine what needs fixing and establish standards for the new site's performance.
- Identify VIPs: The next step is to single out your site's most crucial pages. These pages have the highest conversion rates or the most visitors. During the redesign, please pay close attention to these pages so their effectiveness is not lost.
- Develop your brand: Your company's online presence should be consistent with its image. So, before you delve headfirst into the makeover, look at your brand standards again. This category includes elements such as brand colours, fonts, voice, and messaging. Incorporate these features uniformly within the new layout.
- Try a different service: Evaluate your present platform in light of your redesign objectives and preferred branding. It may be time to switch platforms if it lacks the required adaptability or features. Search engine optimization capabilities, customization choices, e-commerce support, and cost should all be considered.
- Develop a content plan: Make sure your website's content is interesting, useful, and search engine optimized. Create a content plan that complements your company's values and meets the needs of your target customers. Create a plan for new material and evaluate existing content for updates, removal, or repurposing.
- Migrate content: You'll need to transfer your old data if you're switching to a new service. Ensure you have a solid plan to transfer your valuable content without any data or quality loss.
- Create a 301-redirect map: Setting up 301 redirects, which indicate a permanent redirect from one URL to another, is essential if your redesign will result in a change to page URLs. This makes it so that when people use the old URLs, they are redirected to the new ones. By informing search engines of the new location of the material, you may assist in maintaining your search engine rankings.
- Monitor performance: After relaunching your updated website, watch how well it's doing. Analyze the metrics of the new site about the standards you established using the previous site. You can assess how well your redesign works and where adjustments may be necessary.
- Link Google Analytics: Connecting Google Analytics to your fresh domain is best. You can learn so much about your site's performance, user behaviour, and the efficacy of your marketing from this. You can only evaluate the version of your website makeover with this vital metric.
Conclusion
When you work with iBrandox, you can rest assured that they will create a website that will continue to look great and function flawlessly for years. The newest content management systems will be implemented, making it simple to administer and update your website. After the redesign, you'll get access to the website's source code and be able to update the content and elements on your own.