How to Approach a Website Redesign

Amazingly, those who browse a site need less than a second to subconsciously decide whether it lives up to their expectations. According to the statistics provided by Adobe, a business loses no less than a third of its site visitors if they are not able to feast their eyes on helpful and visually attractive pages. It's no secret that the visual appearance of your landing page or digital catalog is correlated by many with your goods’ quality. If envisioned skillfully, they bring about a robust brand identity and create a favorable contrast with competitors. Furthermore, one can count on consequential improvements in client involvement, increased interest, and heightened financial gains. In this piece, our UI/UX experts will explain how to redesign a website to reinvigorate companies’ online visibility.

What redesign is and why it’s relevant

A website redesign process addresses its analysis, assessment, and consequent rebuilding. Commonly, the urgency for these actions is caused by underperformance and a drop in sales. How to successfully fix these issues? The main point is to optimize customer journeys and guarantee a hassle-free experience.

The rebuild can be cursory with no drastic architectural overhauls but with minute tweaks to the interface; in this case, it’s termed a website refresh. Redesigning, in turn, generally necessitates exhaustive search engine optimization evaluation, a holistic rethinking of the architecture, and major alterations to the codebase, appearance, and content.

The website redesign process can be carried out on different levels:

• UI redesign is aimed at revamping the visual side, e.g. the style in which the graphics are expressed, the combination of colors, etc., while keeping the user experience untouched;
• UX redesign involves improving the logic and architecture while maintaining the visual side;
• Tech redesign refers to refining the output by reconsidering the search engine optimization strategy and tech stack;
• Lastly, a thorough redesign means making transformations at all the above levels.

What are the advantages of website redesign, and how can you bring them to fruition?

• By devising engaging layouts, you’ll attract more clients and increase conversion rates;
• By ensuring a first-rate experience, you’ll encourage visitors to stay and perform the desired actions;
• By linking your company with an aesthetically appealing and highly performant interface, you’ll strengthen brand credibility;
• By persuasively expressing your viewpoints, you’ll attain your objectives;
• Lastly, by elevating the performance, you’ll achieve a competitive lead and secure the success of your marketing initiatives.

Why redesign a website?

How to determine that the appropriate moment for the revamping has come? The demand to bring in adjustments can transpire due to the following causes:

Insufficient speed and inadequate conversion rates

After gathering data insights and making an evaluation, you might uncover that your site is underperforming. There can be several explanations for this, from the absence of crucial elements on your page, e.g. contact information or a CTA button, to the employment of faulty SEO approaches or obsolete technologies. Just the same, inadequacies in performance lead to poor business outcomes. An accomplished company will rectify the problem by adopting time-tested methods and the best UI/UX practices to increase speed and draw organic traffic.

Out-of-date design

If an enterprise is undergoing a rebranding process, is on its way to adopting new technology trends, or is experimenting with alternating its products and services, the current design can become obsolete. How to put things right? In any of these cases, you might need to reconsider the functionality and layouts to establish a seamless user flow while preserving the consistency of style.

The need to remain compatible with a range of devices

When answering the question: ‘Why redesign a website?’ check out these fresh statistics. In conformance with today’s mobile-driven advancements, nine out of ten web surfers worldwide use their mobile devices for over half of their time spent online. This implies that, if your solution isn’t mobile-friendly, it has a slim possibility to capture the market.

Considerations to keep in view prior to embarking on a website redesign

When sharing helpful website redesign tips with you, we couldn’t avoid touching on the groundwork that needs to be done before you set about rebuilding your product. The key points to reckon with are the present state of your system and the expectations of the target audience.

Identify your audience

How to arrange a customer-focused web presence? To begin with, explore who your audience is and what moves them to take the desired actions. To outline buyer personas, i.e. the profile of your typical customers, you can run a survey straight on your platform. This will deepen your comprehension of their pursuits, rationales, social class, tastes, purchasing ability, etc. Keep your customers in focus while redesigning your platform to ensure individualized interaction and heighten satisfaction rates.

Take the present merits and flaws into consideration

Based on your solution’s map and wireframes, carefully inspect each page by means of SEMrush, Google Analytics, and similar tools. This will aid you in grasping where core changes are required to raise conversions, and where, on the contrary, the traffic and conversions are sufficient and, therefore, minor amendments can be applied, at most.

Pay attention to consumer needs that aren’t met by your product

Closely monitor consumer activities by tracking their behavior, employing heatmaps, questionnaires, insights from your sales departments, Google Analytics, etc. Pinpointing the gaps in user paths will aid you in improving their experience through redesign, establishing effectual CTAs, and guaranteeing your clients complete their journeys.

Turning to seasoned Business Analysts will allow you to efficiently perform this comprehensive research. They will also guide you through some of the steps that we’ll touch on in the subsequent part of the article.

How to redesign a website step-by-step

Below is a website redesign checklist formulated by our UI/UX team:

Run an exhaustive website audit

Involve well-versed professionals to evaluate your website’s responsiveness and mark out the impediments that lower it. They will also analyze user paths to define incoherences. Thus, you’ll be in the right position to devise a compelling strategy based upon robust analytics and tested metrics.

Andersen has a proven track record of providing superb services. To give you an idea, we have outlined the work our specialists did while carrying out a website audit for a major Telecom provider. In spite of their considerable spending on tech, the conversions had been surprisingly low, with visitors terminating their website sessions without executing targeted actions. As a result of our engagement, technical inconsistencies were dealt with, which allowed for improved interactions and elevated client satisfaction rates.

Pinpoint your desired outcomes

The detailed picture that you get on the grounds of the analytics will allow you to formulate your goals and align them with your possibilities. Businesswise, it’s essential to know a definite answer to: ‘Why redesign a website?’ It might be that you strive to raise conversion ratios, convincingly convey your values, or get quality traffic. In any individual case, you’ll want to choose a different overhaul type with its techniques, tools, and specialists.

Devise a strategy

If you are wondering how to approach a website redesign at its initial stages, the key is to tailor the entire sequence of actions to your targets. Chart out a thorough sitemap that encompasses all the pages of your revamped system and their items. Figure out how you’re going to convey your ideas to others. Execute testing of the interface prototypes by involving a wide selection of consumers; we encourage all who work on these types of projects to consider A/B testing so that users can settle on options that cater to their needs. Finally, elaborate sound SEO methods to implement modifications that will elevate the performance.

Handpick your agency

Dependable UI/UX teams are ever-ready to assign proficient BAs, SEO specialists, graphic designers, UI/UX designers, marketing specialists, Front-end engineers, and QA engineers to their customers’ projects. To engage a credible partner, verify that it’s favorably rated by leading rating agencies such as Clutch, GoodFirms, Awwwards, etc., explore their portfolio, and quiz their managers on the workflow to confirm that they have streamlined and transparent processes.

Andersen has been rendering superb website redesign services for the past sixteen years. For instance, consider our reworking of the architecture of this finance app for a mobile bank. As a result of our efforts, the company’s infrastructure is now based on emerging technologies and managed in an efficient manner.

Key takeaway

A well-elaborated website redesign process yields remarkable results, although its execution might seem a challenging and complex undertaking. If you think that it’s time to roll out updates and are uncertain about how to redesign a website in a cost-effective and efficient manner, feel free to reach out to us for a consultation. Our top-notch UI/UX professionals will be delighted to give you a hand with evaluating the state of your website and explaining how to leverage the necessary improvements to amplify your firm’s productivity.