Website Redesign Guide, Tips, and Examples

A website is the hallmark of any business. If it is outdated, slow, or has poor functionality, this will immediately influence sales and sustainability. Have you recognized these issues? Then it’s time to learn more about the website redesign. 

Arounda team has redesigning experience in several industries. At Bold meditation app, we started with a UX audit and finished with the complex product development. As for the QTalent SaaS HR platform, website redesign was a part of the ecosystem development. Metricly project taught us the ecommerce website redesign.

In this article, we have gathered guidelines and tips to help you overcome redesign website challenges with ease and confidence. 

What Is Website Redesign?

Website redesign is the process of revamping your site, which includes re-evaluating and restructuring content, updating the visual appearance, optimizing website speed, functionality, and SEO.

A complete website overhaul is a huge project. It implies analysis, setting clear goals, teamwork, strategy, and budgeting. Let’s differentiate website redesign from website refresh. In the first case, the structure and the code change significantly, while refresh means minor changes like updating the color palette, typography, and page layouts. 

So, before investing time and money into the drastic site change, let’s find out what are the most widespread reasons for this improvement.

Top 6 Reasons Why You Should Redesign Your Website

Consider redesigning your website on average every 2-3 years. As time goes by, customer preferences, browser technologies, and accessibility standards change, and your web performance needs to keep up. Moreover, the business organization and the products naturally evolve and require adequate online representation.

We point out six common reasons for a website redesign:

1. Outdated appearance

2. Rebranding

3. Launching a new product or service

4. Poor functionality

5. Low conversions despite high traffic

6. Optimizing for a responsive web design or an inclusive design

The main idea behind redesigning a website is to help businesses grow and be profitable. So, if you need more motivation to dive into the change, remember that website improvement boosts revenue, lowers bounce rates, and enhances user experience. 

How to Redesign a Website

If you have been dealing with outdated designs and unoptimized pages for a while, you are probably willing to burn everything to the ground and start from zero. Nevertheless, the nutshell of the redesign is to change things that aren’t working and save those that deliver great user experience. 

We suggest our clients think of a website redesign as an apartment renovation. This is a complex project which implies measurement, analysis, planning, and teamwork. If done right, it can solve a lot of problems, but if wrong — alterations can harm or even ruin the business. That is why it is vital to invest time into the website redesign strategy and avoid skipping the steps of the process. 

Steps of the Website Redesign Process

Here is a step-by-step instruction to guide you through the challenge of website revamping.

1. Determine the business objectives

First of all, document your current performance metrics, such as the average time users spend on the website, the number of visits, and the number of leads generated per month. Otherwise, you will have no data for the “before and after” comparison. But the most accurate parameters to measure the success of the website redesign are KPIs related to your purchases:

• Number of conversions
• Conversion rate
• Revenue
• Average Order Value (AOV)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) 

2. Establish a dedicated team 

Get your colleagues involved in the redesign process early on. You will be amazed by the number of insights from sales, support, designer, and developer teams. 

If you don’t have all the talents in-house or your people have to work on other tasks, search for a UX design agency or a freelance specialist.  

If there are chief executives above you who influence the website redesign process, invite them to participate in the major decision-making. This way, you will hear their expectations and concerns before you finish remodeling. 

3. Carry out user research

Do you know who is visiting your pages and why? User portrait helps you to clarify who you are designing for and keep their intentions and drivers in mind. 

• One of the useful tools to understand your audience is to split customers by the type of motivation “I want to know, I want to go, I want to do, I want to buy”. 
• You can also turn to a quick empathy mapping tool. 
• Don’t forget such tools as surveys, user interviews, screening, and feedback from loyal customers.
• Use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Heat Maps, and other quantitative data to analyze customer behavior. 

4. Find out what’s working and what can be improved

A good way to detect the most valuable content of your website is to investigate the relationship between traffic and conversions. It allows you to classify your pages into one of 4 categories and deal with them accordingly:

• Pages with low traffic and high conversions — redesign with care
• Pages with high traffic and high conversions — redesign with tripled care
• Pages with high traffic and low conversions — redesign to improve
• Pages with low traffic and low conversions — redesign as you wish

Another vital aspect of the website redesign is to know what stops your customers while surfing your homepage. What are the barriers they stumble upon and what are the hooks that captivate their attention? 

5. Launch the design process 

When it comes to visuals, the first step is to look for inspiration. Collect pictures, patterns, and colors on the mood board and discuss them with the team. Next comes wireframing, when you transfer drafts from your whiteboard or notebook into the computer with Figma or AdobeXD. 

6. Start the implementation phase

Once everything is finalized, it’s time to provide the developers with all the necessary resources like prototypes, fonts, colors, and logos. During this phase, UI and UX specialists should stay close to the developers to communicate which button does what and adjust the design if it’s infeasible. 

7. Test the usability

There is a great temptation to redesign website at once, but it is safer to make small changes that will result in a big difference and test them on the go. You can start with pain points on the most valuable pages and make sure you are moving in the right direction. 

If you have enough traffic, A/B testing will deliver quantitative results in a few days. If the traffic is poor, consider organizing moderated usability testing sessions. Invite real people to try out your new page and ask about their positive and negative experiences. 

8. Launch and optimize

Finally, a moment of glory and relief: all the improvements are made. And yet, we know from experience that technologies and customer expectations are always changing. So, a website redesign is never really finished. There is always something that you can optimize. 

How to Create Successful Website Redesign Strategies and Roadmaps

One of the top website redesign mistakes is chasing an unreasonable timeline. Like any other project, website redesign requires a roadmap and milestones to keep the team on track. A roadmap helps your coworkers see the project from a bird-eye perspective and aim for the common goal. 

Note that the redesign process may not always be linear. Some stages may be parallel or overlap. What is more, prototype testing can move the redesign back to the previous phases. But it’s a normal part of the process; each iteration brings you closer to an excellent outcome. Try relying on the Agile methodology and applying the Design thinking method. 

Conclusion

Website forms the image of your company and needs renewal as time passes and technology and trends change. The right website redesign can help increase conversion rates and revenue, boost new products and services. It is a complex project that requires a UX audit, setting clear business goals, planning, teamwork, talent, and funding. 

As a design agency with more than five years of experience, Arounda has tried out numerous design and branding strategies in projects for startups and SME clients. Each task is unique and requires an individual approach, so we have tested a lot of methods along the way. In this article, we share best practices that we are confident of. We hope that they will help you with your website revamping. 

If you need more assistance in UX audit, redesign, or rebranding, we are here for you!

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