Website Redesign: Why and When?

Today, companies race to build a strong digital presence across various channels. The website is the company’s front and the most important element of its digital presence, which leaves visitors with their first impression of it, is the source they take their information about this company from, and is a fundamental factor in convincing them to do business with it.

But sometimes, as a company grows and its business develops, its website may become obsolete and no longer meet the company’s growing marketing purposes. In this case, the company needs to redesign the website so it keeps up with the development and aligns with its forward-looking vision.

In this article we’ll cover website redesign, the motivations behind it, and how to do it.

The Importance of Having a Website

The website is often the decisive factor that convinces a user to do business with the company. So every company must craft a good website that draws an excellent picture of it and its brand in the audience’s mind and contributes to turning leads into customers.

Reasons that drive companies to have a good website:

1: Credibility

With so many competitors in the market and the spread of common misconceptions, it has become essential for every company to have a professional website that makes it stand out among competitors, and a trusted source of information that clarifies what the company can offer to audiences and the value it can add to their lives.

On top of that, the website is essential to the company’s legitimacy. Audiences today expect every company to have a website and a strong presence on social media platforms before they consider shopping from it.

2: Brand Awareness

The website is the face of the company through which it builds a picture in audiences’ minds of it, what it represents, and what it can offer. By having a website optimized for search engines, audience awareness of the company’s brand grows and the likelihood they’ll join its customer base rises.

3: Generating Leads

One of the most important reasons to have a website is generating leads. Once a user has become aware of the company’s name, they’ll head to the website to get information from it and learn about what the company offers — and when they’re ready to buy, they’ll find every detail they need to get in touch and shop for its products or services.

4: Attracting Organic Visits

By preparing the website’s pages for search engines (SEO) and publishing informative content on the site’s blog, this site’s visibility in search results will grow for users searching for various topics related to the company’s industry. This way, audiences’ awareness of the company’s brand grows and customers are drawn to it.

SEO delivers tremendous value that lasts a long time, even though it requires effort and patience. Users can find the site’s content in search results for years and years without any additional costs — unlike paid ads, which generate leads only as long as the company pays search engines or social media platforms to run them.

5: The Website Is a Pivotal Stop in the User’s Journey

Most marketing efforts across channels have the mission of delivering the user to the website. This site is like the store where they get all the details they need, and it has the impact of convincing the user to take the last step and turn from a lead into a customer.

6: Digital Marketing

For companies operating in e-commerce, the website becomes an indispensable element — instead of relying on sites like Amazon and others, which take a significant cut of profits. If the company has its own store and markets it properly, that delivers significant profits and a better return on investment. On top of that, the website is essentially a store selling products around the clock compared to physical stores limited to specific business hours.

7: Improving Customer Service

The website contains all the information the user needs — whether address, business hours, or any additional details they can get without calling or searching elsewhere. These simple aspects improve the customer’s experience and their impression of the company.

8: Absolute Authority Over the Site

The website is private property, and so the company has absolute freedom in designing the site and the ease of making any edits it wants, and in publishing all types of content — articles, videos, case studies, social testimonials, and others — unlike other platforms such as social media, which put restrictions on what can be published.

Website Redesign

Website redesign is the process of changing and updating the site’s programming, structure, content, visual elements, or navigation system between its pages, with the aim of improving its performance level, delivering a better user experience, and converting more visitors.

The scope of change in the website matches the company’s needs and goals for this redesign. It can be just a simple update in the site’s look, colors, and visual elements while preserving its overall build.

Or the redesign can be a complete restructuring of the site’s build and image to align with the new brand (Rebranding) and the direction of the company’s vision toward the future, plus edits to the site’s content to meet the audience’s needs, or upgrading the technology the site uses and the servers it runs on to improve performance and speed and keep up with the company’s growth.

When Do You Need to Redesign Your Site?

Website redesign is a process that requires some effort and time, and so the company must know the motivation behind the redesign to be able to plan it effectively. 

Some reasons that may drive companies to redesign their website:

1: The Design Is Old and Outdated

Older designs users grew used to seeing at the start of the internet era may leave a poor first impression of the company on them and suggest that this company is stuck in the past and doesn’t keep up with progress. If the look of the website reminds the visitor of the past decade, the company must redesign it.

2: Rebranding 

The brand’s visual identity must be unified across channels and in every marketing campaign, to draw a consistent picture of this brand in the audience’s mind. If the company has updated its brand, the website must inevitably be a direct reflection of the new identity — and here it must be redesigned.

3: Poor User Experience

The user’s movement between the site’s pages and finding what they’re looking for should be as easy and clear as possible, especially for people visiting the site for the first time. If it turns out that new visitors are struggling to find what they’re looking for or facing difficulty completing some simple tasks, this is where the site’s structure and its main and sub menus need to be reconsidered.

4: Low Conversion Rate

One of the main jobs of the website is turning visitors from leads into customers. A drop in this rate may have several causes — but if it turns out that the site’s design is the main reason standing in the way of users completing their purchases, a redesign should be considered.

5: Slow Loading of Website Pages

This is one of the most important reasons to redesign. The era of slow internet is over, and users expect speed and smoothness in browsing any website. If long page-load times are noticed on the site due to too many visual elements or bad servers or other reasons, it’s time to redesign the website.

6: Lack of Mobile Compatibility

Statistics in recent years indicate that the largest share of traffic to websites comes from smartphones, and Google’s search algorithm now favors mobile-friendly websites over others in search results. That has made mobile compatibility a fundamental necessity for any website — if the site doesn’t have this feature, that’s a sign it needs a redesign.

7: Poor SEO

Organic visits are one of the most important sources of traffic to a website, but the site won’t win many of these visits if its pages don’t rank well in search results due to poor implementation of SEO practices. In this case the site may need a redesign to boost its visibility in search results.

How to Redesign a Website

Website redesign is a process that requires proper planning to get the greatest benefit and to move in the right direction. The steps of this process are as follows:

1: Setting a Performance Benchmark for the Site

Before starting to draw up a website-redesign plan, you have to know your starting point and how the site is performing in its current state. You do that by documenting the monthly values of the website pages’ performance metrics — including number of visits and visitors, bounce rate, conversion rate, time visitors spend on pages, the best-performing keywords and their ranking on search engines, and many other measures.

The importance of each of these measures varies with the goal for which the site is being redesigned — but broadly, studying the values of these metrics points to the weaknesses in the current site and the areas that need improvement when redesigning it.

2: Setting the Goals of the Redesign

Knowing the goal of the redesign draws a clearer picture of what needs to change on the site. Is the goal getting more visits? Lowering the bounce rate? Raising the conversion rate? Increasing page load speed? Getting a higher ranking in search results?

Setting these goals precisely contributes to clear, effective communication between the site’s owner and the party that will do the redesign, and puts performance metrics in place to evaluate the improvement the site gained after being redesigned.

3: Applying the Brand in the New Design

The website is a direct reflection of the brand, so all aspects of this brand must be employed in the new design — including colors, fonts, tone of voice, and the message being delivered to its target audience — to preserve a unified brand look across channels.

Any visitor who arrives at the website should directly understand what this site offers them and the benefit they can get, and their attention should be grabbed to stay and browse more of its content. So these matters must be taken into account during redesign.

4: Preserving High-Ranking Pages

This includes the pages that win a large number of visits, a good conversion rate, and a high ranking in search results for pivotal keywords. These pages must be identified and a plan must be set to preserve their effectiveness so the value they carry moves over to the new design — this is represented by a redirect plan (301 Redirect).

This plan is an operation performed by a website programming specialist — its content is redirecting the URLs of the old pages to new URLs, where a visitor pressing on the old URL is taken directly to the new page. That way the page preserves the value of the backlinks that reach it and its high ranking in search results.

In addition to all that, research can also be done on new keywords the previous site didn’t cover sufficiently, and a new content plan can be prepared to be put to work in the new design and to gain more organic visits coming from search engines.

5: Performance Monitoring 

Using tools like Google Analytics and linking them to the new site, the site’s performance metrics must be constantly monitored and compared with the values documented for the old site before the redesign, in order to measure how successful the redesign was and identify the aspects that still need adjustments.

Measures for the Quality of a Website’s Performance

There are many metrics that can be monitored to measure the quality of the site and its efficiency in achieving its marketing goals. A decline in the performance of some of these metrics may indicate the need to redesign the site, including:

1: Page Load Speed

We explained earlier how important page load speed is and its effect on the user experience — but if we want to go deeper into the details of this metric, it splits into several parts:

• Time to Title: the time elapsed between the request the visitor makes (that is, their pressing the page link) and the moment the site title appears in the tab of the browser they’re using. Speed on this metric is essential as a signal of the site’s legitimacy.
• Time To Render: the time elapsed between the request the visitor makes and the moment the page’s content starts to appear in the browser. Speed on this metric is essential for keeping the user on the page rather than bouncing to somewhere else.
• Time To Interact: the time the user needs to start interacting with the page’s content — such as pressing links, typing in dedicated input boxes, or scrolling down to browse the content. Speed on this metric is essential for keeping the user on the page before they get frustrated.

There are several other metrics related to page load speed, such as server response time and others — but the idea stays the same: page-load speed is essential for delivering the best possible user experience. Several free tools are available that can be used to measure page load speed.

2: Error Rate

The error rate is the share of user page requests that receive an error message such as Error 404, compared to the total page requests over a certain time period.

It’s natural for some errors to occur at times, such as periods of heavy traffic and load on the website like holidays and sale seasons — but if a sudden rise in the error rate is noticed, that may indicate significant problems on the site that must be fixed as quickly as possible before they compound and hurt the site’s reputation. So this rate must be monitored constantly.

3: Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate It’s the share of users who visited one of the website’s pages and then left without moving to any other page or taking any action. Typical bounce-rate thresholds vary by the page’s purpose, but broadly speaking a high bounce rate causes a drop in conversions and hurts SEO — it signals to the search engine that the page isn’t delivering the value it promised the visitor.

There are several factors that cause a rise in bounce rate, such as slow page loads, technical problems, and poor design. So this rate must be monitored constantly and, in case of a rise, the causing factors must be found so they can be fixed.

4: Keyword Rankings

I mentioned earlier the importance of organic visits coming from search engines. Keyword rankings on search engines are in constant flux, and that’s natural — but a sudden, significant drop in the rankings of some of the site’s keywords, especially the core ones in its field, is a warning sign that could cost the website plenty of free organic visits.

So the ranking of the most important keywords for the company’s industry and its website must be tracked, and content plans must be set or the main plans adjusted when needed.

Website Maintenance 

Website maintenance is a periodic process consisting of monitoring the website’s performance to ensure its quality and freshness, that it works efficiently and smoothly, and that it does its jobs of serving visitors and preserving their engagement.

There are several maintenance tasks that must be done to preserve the quality of the website’s performance, chief among them:

• Security updates: these updates are put to work on the site as soon as they’re released, to protect it from the risks of security breaches.
• Content updates: all content forms on the site are updated to preserve their accuracy, their service to the user, and a good search-engine ranking. This includes adding new articles, editing page descriptions, and removing outdated content pieces.
• Fixing technical problems: this includes any problems that affect the site’s performance, such as broken links, problems in the code, problems that affect content display, and anything else that negatively affect the user experience.
• Performance optimization: such as monitoring page load times and detecting any problems causing long load times — like large image sizes and other factors that affect the site’s responsiveness.
• Backup and Recovery: it’s essential to make periodic backups of the site’s contents. That gives the ability to roll the site back to a previous version in case of sabotage or a security breach — and that way the company protects itself from data loss.