10 Tricks to Redesign Your Website that Actually Add Value

Reconsider Your Goals

Before you begin rebuilding your website, you must first determine the goals you want to achieve.

Is it more important for you to reach a new audience or to improve your SEO performance standards? Do you need a mobile-friendly website?

Mobile devices recorded 47.07 % of web traffic in the United State 47.07 % of web traffic in the United States in the first quarter of 2021, up from 45.95 % the previous quarter. This shows how the usage of mobile-friendly websites is increasing day by day.

If you want to rebrand your website, for example, the new redesigning elements should be able to reflect that. Ideally, you should choose fonts, animations, and colors that are realistically appropriate for your site’s new aesthetic design.

Do Not Change Everything That Is In Your Current Design

Many businesses treat a makeover as if it were a total change. They don’t strive to remember or reflect on what they’ve learned in the past.

That is the mistake: even if you plan to entirely change the aesthetics of your website, reorganize the structure, or add new sections, there are still a lot of insights to be gained from your current site. There are a lot of lessons you can learn from how your clients act and interact with your current design and copy and apply them to a new site.

However, many businesses are so ready to demolish the old site. They are nearly drooling at the prospect of having this spectacular new design that they fail to learn from what is currently happening. They don’t draw the connection between today’s conduct and tomorrow’s conduct. As a result, they’re repeating many of the same flaws in the new design.

Do Look Into What Attracts Visitors To Your Website

The most impactful thing you can do as part of a website redesign is to thoroughly understand why people visit your site and make sure you’re addressing their demands while also removing any barriers.

Imagine how you would feel if you landed on a website that wasn’t what you were looking for. You type “best mobile app development software” into Google and land on a HubSpot sales page. But what you actually wanted was a comparison of the top software, as well as a third-party review.

It’s possible that the same thing is happening with your design!

For example, if someone visits on a page and the only thing they want to know is the price, the greatest thing you can do is provide them that information.

They are adamant about not converting. They aren’t thinking about it right now. So don’t try to persuade them to buy—just provide them the information they need.

To accomplish so, you can utilize the LIFT model:

Your value proposition will be discovered through customer interviews and surveys. Using your design, try to highlight that proposition. Then, add a sense of urgency to it, decrease distractions, and eliminate any anxiety-inducing factors that work against it.

You’ll need to back this up with web design fundamentals like:

· Giving comes before taking, and it’s usually in the form of free content.
· Small asks, like a call to action (CTA) that invites visitors to sign up for your email list for a coupon instead of making a purchase, are very helpful to build commitment.
· Using scarcity tactics such as countdown timers or ‘low stock’ warnings (but only if they’re accurate—don’t try to fool or scare your clients into buying).

Do Think about Your Clients When You’re Redesigning

It’s a typical blunder to be so taken with your own product that you want to tell everyone about it. Your redesign ideas include a long list of features and requirements… yet your customers may not want them.

Customer blind spots are the most common issue during a redesign: not serving consumers, not collecting data from customers, and being too product-driven rather than customer-driven.

It’s difficult enough to send out a survey, let alone process all of the results. However, in order to avoid customer blind zones, you must do so.

Using a Design-First Approach Is Not a Good Idea

Often, a company undergoing a makeover will become enthralled and go right into mockups, wireframes, and color palettes without considering the text that would be required on the page. They’ll create exquisite solutions with blocks of Lorem Ipsum language, then bring in a copywriter or content person at the end of the process—when all this person can do is hope they can come up with nice phrases that fit the provided frame or settle for a mediocre copy.

Copy and design are generally brought together from the start in the optimal workflow:

· A marketing team (including both content and design representatives) comes up with a basic notion for the page/website they wish to revamp.
· The same group does customer and market research, identifies trends and trouble areas, and uses this information to improve their initial concepts.
· The copy person (copywriter, content writer, content strategist) creates the copy that will appear on the page based on research.
· The copy is reviewed and approved by the team
· UX designers, creatives, and others lay out the copy and develop wireframes, graphics, and illustrations, among other things.

If you start with the design first, you’ll overlook an important point: even the most beautifully designed page with weak, unconvincing writing will likely underperform compared to a little uglier one with persuasive language that helps users do what they came to the website for.

If You Want To Measure Success, Don’t Utilize Vanity Metrics

The bounce rate is a prominent indicator for a website redesign. Designers frequently aim to reduce the percentage of visitors who exit a website after viewing only the page on which they have arrived. This difference is sometimes used to compare an old website to a freshly remodeled one.

But ask yourself this: if the purpose of your redesign is to give people what they want, they may suddenly be able to discover it on the exact same page they landed on, rather than trying to travel through many web pages. As a result, your bounce rate will increase. Isn’t this, however, a sign of success?

Another example of selecting the incorrect metric. My friend shared this with me. His team focused on increasing the amount of sales demonstrations scheduled through the site when we conducted a website redesign for a client. The number fell after the redesign, and the revamp was considered a failure.

But there’s more to the story: his client was used to delivering demos to people who weren’t planning to buy anything. While the redesign encouraged only the quality clients to schedule a demo. He said they would have recognized it if they had focused on a revenue-related metric.

However, everyone was confused about what to track, making the entire revamp appear to be a huge disaster.

Do De-clutter Your SEO And Make Your Website More Accessible.

Take advantage of the opportunity to clean up any clutter by combining material where it makes sense during a significant website revamp. Any major pages should be 301 redirected, and don’t worry about the minor ones; Google will find them out in due time.

Put the proper keywords in your URLs, especially for existing URLs that use abbreviations. Using shortened versions in your URLs can lead to you missing out on some excellent keywords. It’s also a good area to use keywords that aren’t allowed in content.

Finally, ensure that your site is accessible to ensure that it functions smoothly for all users. It will take a lot more time and effort, but it will be definitely worth it because Googlebot is your most important blind user. This means it will support your SEO efforts while also preventing future lawsuits.

Do Be On the Alert If Your Redesign Involves a Technological Shift

While relaunching a site or app, be cautious when updating both the underlying technology and the design. I read this somewhere when a team was launching a new version of the website on a different domain, which meant that neither the ‘stay logged in’ capability nor any browser-saved passwords were transferred. As a result, a substantial number of clients forgot their passwords and were unable to log in.

To make matters even worse, the new system had difficulty dealing with all of the forgotten password requests. This forced the users to contact customer service. That led to causing even more aggravation and internal operational turmoil among the support team.

It was hard to tell whether users were having actual technical issues with logging in, just forgetting their password, criticizing or having problems with the new design, or any combination of the above. In retrospect, it would have been safer and easier to separate the technological and design modifications, ensuring a smooth transition from the old to the new site.

Do Make Extensive Use of User Research to Guide Your Redesign

When working on website redesigns, there are times when the user research was either insufficient or, worse yet, the insights gathered from user research were mostly ignored in favor of other factors such as competitor sites or industry trends.
One of my colleagues shared this case with me:

In one scenario, when revamping the website of a finance software company, we were excessively affected by other software businesses’ designs and the fact that we considered our current site to be outdated. We were preoccupied with making ourselves appear more like a modern, high-tech SaaS firm.

According to the metrics and feedback, our ideal customer profile, accountants at enterprise organizations in industries such as retail and construction who saw themselves as non-technical were alienated by the resulting redesign. They needed a reliable, consultative partner who would take the time to learn about their processes and help them improve using technology.

Many people have been wounded in the past by the latest Silicon Valley tech innovation and leaned largely on tried-and-true solutions. The lesson we got was to be guided mainly by user research and to consider the user in all redesign decisions.

Do Not Make the Mistake of Changing All At Once

Many start-ups make the mistake of altering too much at once while relaunching their website.

Concentrate solely on the redesign of the website. This is not the time to make major changes to your lead funnel and flow, how you score leads, your email nurture (unless it’s just a few minor branding tweaks), or anything else.

If you update everything, you risk burning out your team and missing small details and important change management processes. You won’t be able to determine which updates are due to your website redesign versus changes in lead scoring, etc.

Whether the re-launch is successful or not, you should set some timeframes for it and give it some time to establish a baseline with the new site. Then begin experimenting and updating. You can’t accurately predict without baselines.

And if you can’t predict what will happen next, you’re not being a good leader for your company!

At Bytes Technolab , you can get your website redesigned according to your needs.