Website Redesign: Planning, Ideas, Strategy, Tips, and Costs

A design is the most crucial part of any website. Moreover, design plays a vital role in the success of any website. It is the first impression that users have of your website.

According to Stanford’s research, 75% of users decide a company’s credibility based on its design.

As per on research of Adobe, 38% of users stop engaging with a website if its content or layout is not attractive.

Therefore, if you have not updated your website for a long time, you should consider a website redesign.

Moreover, if you are not getting enough traffic & sales on your website, you should consider a website redesign.

There are some important reasons to design a website, such as follows:

• It has complex navigation
• Difficult to manage your website
• Your website is not compatible with the latest website design trends.
• The website runs on outdated technology.

Apart from this, there are various other reasons why you should consider a website redesign.

Now, if you have decided to redesign your website, you have to follow a thorough strategy.

Here, we have done the hard work for you and created a proper website redesign strategy & planning. Apart from this, we have also provided some trending website redesign tips & ideas. Lastly, we have also provided an estimated cost to redesign a website.

So, let’s look after each point in detail:

Website Redesign Strategy & Planning

Follow this proven website redesign strategy that answers the question of how to redesign a website in brief:

Go through your current stats

Before starting the website redesign, you should make a report of the current website states. By this, you will have a better understanding of where your website is and the enhances you need to make to reach the goal.

Here is the list of performance metrics you should look upon every month.

• Number Of Visits/Visitors/Unique Visitors from Google Analytics
• Sensible destinations/Bounce Rate
• Your Target Audience
• Huge keywords Research
• Competition and Total proportion of Sales Generated
• Fresh content for your new site

These metrics will help you redefine the goals of your website.

Determine your Website Redesign Goals

If your targeted audience and technology is changed, then your website should also reflect it. In the same way, if the local audience is not giving you any results, you should target an audience beyond your locality.

When you do this, make sure your website is also flexible in coping with the change. If you are planning to redesign your site, you should be very much clear with the fact why you are updating your website. All the quantifiable results should be added to your website.

Define your targeted audience

Here you need to know first is for whom you are redesigning the website and who is your targeted audience. Below are some of the questions which you must ask yourself to define the targeted audience:

• Who will visit your website?
• When will they visit?
• What will they do there?
• Why are they visiting?
• Where will they click most?

Define your Branding and Messaging

Creating an effective brand identity is one of the crucial steps where the majority of businesses make mistakes.

The majority of businesses write an engaging story and state that they offer services at the lowest price. By doing this, you will lose most of the users. Never try to fluff more and more services that you don’t offer to users.

Here, you should be clear about branding, messaging, and the unique value proposition before the website design and the content.

Here, you can convey information in a story format and ensure that anyone who visits your website, quickly understands what you provide, how you can benefit from them, why they should hold on to your website.

Moreover, it is believed that a company that convinces its audience about its products/ services in a story, achieves success quickly. For this to happen, you have to ensure that your website content addresses the pain points, needs, and wants of the users.

Also, you should analyze and decide whether you want to change branding and messaging or just one thing. If you decide to change it, then make a list of the same.

When you plan to convey a different message, use precise and straight language. Always use jargon-free language to sound like a human.

Besides this, when you consider branding, look after the overall appearance, and list out things that need to be changed. Also, if you have updated color, logo, or anything, make sure that it appears the same throughout the website.

Protect your search engine optimized pages

Ensuring that your site is visible online and easily getting reach from the audience is one of the most essential website factors. In case your audience is unable to discover the website, how can you enhance your leads, reconversions, or sales? Consider things given below for redesigning your website:

Define high ranking pages

With the help of any of the analytics tools, define all the pages that get the highest traffic, inbound links, leads, and are the most valuable pages of your website. If you are planning to shift any of these pages, then build a proper 301 redirect.

Build a 301 redirect strategy

Talking about the 301 redirect, they are highly essential to hold the value as well as the traffic of the particular page. For this, you can list out all the 301 redirects into a spreadsheet and later provide these links to a person who can do it quickly and efficiently.

Conduct keyword research

For every new page, you create on your website, choose a particular keyword for that page. Then apply the latest SEO strategies to optimize the pages. Later, find the gap and introduce new content and pages based on the specific keywords and topics which you haven’t covered till now.

Conduct Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is a highly crucial step in the website redesign strategy. Here, you should find three competitor sites that are not only visually appealing but also consist of a robust architecture style and a good foundation of SEO.

Then, you have to thoroughly check these websites and make a note of things that look wow and things that look aww. This process will help you determine things that you can improve on your website.

When you do competitor analysis, highlight things that you want to improve on your website and then take your website to a new level.

Select the correct software

The last step in the website redesign process is selecting the correct software on which you want to develop a website and host it. The software that is mostly used is the content management system, and it’s useful for developing, designing, and publishing a website for the world.

Lastly, a better strategy is to hire a website redesign agency, that will carry out the entire process mentioned above, choose the best software for your website, and deliver it accordingly.

For any business, a website is a key that represents your business. It offers 24/7 visibility, accessibility, and is proved to be an effective sales channel. Nevertheless, if you are willing to deliver a notable return on investment, you need to redesign and build as per the user’s perspective.

Follow the below-given website redesign tips & ideas to make your website look modern and attract new users.

As you are redesigning your website for the targeted audience, providing a proper user experience is a must. User experience mainly includes how your audience interacts with the site. Here, you can provide a smooth, intuitive, convenient, etc. experience to your client based on the requirement.

While you create a fresh design for your website as per user behavior, habits, and needs, you need to also consider its attractiveness, functionality, and business goals.

Also Read: UI UX Design Tips

Integrating web animations is highly important to keep users engaged on the website. Besides this, you need to ensure that your site loads quickly along with those animations.

If your web pages take more time to load, then users will leave your website immediately. Later, you will be left with just a handful of users.

You should design your website considering mobile-first indexing. The main reason for this is that Google started implementing “mobile-first indexing” by default on all the websites on July 1, 2019. Hence, if your website design is not mobile-friendly, then it will not rank in the search engines.

Therefore, you should consider a website redesign as soon as possible. After redesigning your website, you can also check your website on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to know how it functions on mobile devices.

Here you will have a clear idea about whether your website is qualified for the test or not. If your site is hasn’t qualified for the test, you will be provided with the set of changes to qualify for the same.

Today, Pinterest is one of the most excellent tools to create a mood board. You can pick visual elements that you think will help you to redesign a website. These elements can be images, layout, colors, existing sites, and a lot more.

Often, a mood board acts as a central hub for your designing inspiration. Besides, you can also share it with clients or collaborators so that they can also contribute to your website redesign plan.

Working on the structure of the website is one of the most essential website design tips. It allows you to check the overall layout of the website.

For creating a structure, you don’t need a computer. Here, you can take a pencil and paper and put all the thoughts on it. To make it somewhat attractive and useful, you can take the help of flipcharts and a whiteboard.

A better strategy is to utilize a post-it note to draw the entire website. By doing this, you can stick to the basics. Also, you can use different shades of grey to make it more attractive.

While designing a website, designers always think of creating something new and integrating it into the website; that’s good and acceptable. However, it’s essential to set some limits on these things. You may have a question, why?

Because website design has its standards and various visitors are accustomed to certain elements. When you try to integrate something new, they might not be able to understand it properly.

Here are some web basics:

• The logo always on the top left corner
• Navigation from the top of the screen
• Contact details in the top right corner
• Branding should be proper on all the pages
• Social media icons on the website footer
• Quick & effective search in the header

When you redesign your website, all the logos, icons, and background graphics show the solid existence of your business. To provide a better visual experience to the users, you can include suitable videos, photos, and other attractive content on your website such as infographics, GIFs, memes, etc.

Why? Because people like solid elements & graphics. Moreover, one study conducted by Nielsen Norman Group identified that images are highly catchy as compared to various other things.

For instance, real photos of people draw more attention than stock ones. In the same way, big photos and information-carrying images are more engaging.

The main reason is that visual elements attract higher visitors.

As soon as you have an in-depth understanding of the mission and vision of your website, you can eliminate all the things that don’t help you to achieve the final goal. Minimalism emphasizes simplifying the design and also keeping it visually alluring.

Here are several things you can remove from the design:

Menu Items: You want users to explore more and keep them hooked. But, a crowded menu can confuse them and also negatively affect their experience. Hence, it is recommended to hold on to the basics.

Sidebars: The majority of websites are removing the sidebar. So, before removing the sidebar, you should ask questions like, do you need a sidebar? What is present in your sidebar?

Technical Jargon: Don’t use any kind of old phrases, cliches, and empty words that users don’t like on your website. Here, you should eliminate all these things and integrate powerful words and write a compelling copy.

You should optimize the website for social media because around 30% of traffic will be coming from social media.

Here are some of the essential things that assist you to discover whether your site is linked completely with social media:

Correct Social Snippets: Every post that you share on social media should be effective. This means the link you post should have a proper thumbnail, title, and description.

Branding Compatibility: Ensure that the users who visit your website or social media should not get baffled by looking at the branding and the other things. For this, all of your colors, images, and other aspects of branding should be consistent on all the platforms.

Notable Social Media Links: All of your visitors must be able to visit your social media pages from your website. While redesigning your website, you must ensure that your site has proper social media links. Here, you can place your social media icons on the footer, header, or sidebar.

Effective workflow: In case you are operating a blog, then there should be an automated process to share your blog on the relevant social media platforms. Here, you can utilize the popular social media tools for the same.

PWA has become famous over the last few years. Various eCommerce sites have also adopted PWA as allows users to experience a website as well as an app.

As per the AppInstitute, PWA increases mobile traffic by 68%, and also increases the engagement rate by 137%. Apart from this, there is a wide range of benefits you get when you integrate a PWA into your website.

One of the most challenging things that businesses need to consider is content before the design.

The majority of businesses plan to design a website and then integrate content into it accordingly. All the businesses who are following this strategy are making the biggest mistake.

Putting content into the already present design can result in design changes or compromise on the quality of the content.

Here, content must always match the layout of the website pages.

Here, businesses consider a design-first approach because they are not sure what to include in the content. However, they should not follow this strategy.

One of the better strategies is to check your sitemap to get an overview of the overall content and then divide it into smaller groups. Here, you can manage all the pages that you require on your website using tools like Trello, etc. Later, you can create a content wireframe and put all the content on the pages accordingly.

The primary thing that you can do is to analyze and list out is the top 30 questions that you hear from your buyers from time to time regarding the products/services and answer all these on the website pages.

To take your website to the next level, regularly conduct UX updates and improvements. There is not any shortcut behind the success of any website.

Custom web redesigning from a website development company costs from US $1000 to $5000. If the project is quite complex, it can cost from US $5000 to $10000.

Here we conclude our guide on website redesign strategy, planning, tips, ideas, and costs.

By thoroughly following the strategy, you will be able to grow your website traffic and boost conversion. Although your main goal is to increase sales by redesigning, you should focus on offering an exceptional user experience. The rest will follow.

Now, if you want to redesign your website, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

At Guru TechnoLabs, a professional website design company, we have a highly creative team of designers who have designed high-quality sites for clients worldwide.

Hence, you can share your project with us, and we will redesign your website as per the latest design trends.