Why and how do you redesign your website?

Definition

The principle is simple, radically change the structure and design of your website. Editing text, replacing an image, or creating an additional page is not a website redesign, it's just maintenance. Redesign is necessary periodically to revitalize your site and adapt it to new web practices that are constantly changing and evolving.

A redesign will therefore aim to change the visual aspect of a site in depth, but it is also an opportunity to review your user journey and the entire structure.

Overall, there are two aspects to the redesign:

• A visual redesign of the site: It is the modification of the webdesign. You have a news visual identity in your organization? You need to do a redesign to make your site reflect your business. You can also make changes to the appearance of the pages and their structure. Unfortunately, this is often what motivates a redesign when it is not the most important.
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• A structural overhaul : Here we are tackling profound changes in architecture andTree. One can also opt for a change of CMS, for example in a structural redesign to meet technical constraints. This is the best reason to start a redesign, the objective of your site is that it serves your business, not only that it looks good but that no one sees it.

Of course, depending on your goals, your specifications and the state of the existing site, your redesign will be more or less important. It is the audit of your site that will determine the extent of this redesign project.

What is the difference between creating and redesigning a website?

Creating a website is an approach that starts from scratch. It involves the implementation of all the constituent elements of the site, from architecture to content design, including design and SEO optimization. On the other hand, the redesign of a website occurs when an existing site requires improvements. These may include visual changes, architecture reorganization, or the addition of new features. It is crucial to note that redesign does not necessarily mean a total overhaul; it can be partial, focused on specific aspects that need to be improved.

Why redesign your website?

Let's make it simple: If your website seems useless to you, you need to do a redesign. If your website does not contribute or no longer contributes to your acquisition strategyis that it deserves an overhaul. If you're ashamed of it and looking to hide it, too. But to be more specific, here are four good reasons to redesign your website.

To better transcribe your positioning

Many websites created 3 to 4 years ago are already obsolete. The design is outdated, the loading is slow, the architecture is no longer optimized, the adaptation on mobile devices is poorly carried out, etc... All reasons that should push you to make your site evolve.

But in reality it is not only design that is obsolete, a company is constantly evolving and so are its customers. Your offers, prices and organization are no longer the same and you are missing out on opportunities because your website no longer does justice to who you are and what you do.

Your website is the contact point that should best convey your posturing today, it is an obligatory crossing point for your prospects so do not neglect it.

To boost your natural referencing

It's one of the best answers to the number 1 business frustration: “My site doesn't appeal to anyone.” A website must generate traffic to generate opportunities, but no, traffic does not happen by chance. If you open your Google Analytics and find with despair that there are as many people on your site as in the driest areas of the Gobi Desert you will have to get to work!

Working on your natural referencing requires most of the time a complete redesign of your site because The architecture, the technique and the user experience it offers have a major impact on SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

SEO is an important job, which can be frightening, but its effectiveness is undisputed and the acquisition costs via this channel are probably among the lowest of all marketing levers.

To convert better

Even more importantly, conversion! If you want your site to be a pillar of your acquisition, it will have to convert. This is a key subject that does not only concern e-commerce but all websites.

Conversion is an art in itself, it's not just about putting out a call to action and praying for the conversion rate to increase. The conversion is started from creation of the website, it is the result of a clever mix between a precise architecture that accompanies the prospect throughout the buying process, effective ergonomics and the good use of calls to action.

Conversion can be worked on, on the other hand, remember that to optimize it and for it to work, you need traffic. No offense to optimists, mathematics is formal, no relevant statistics without a representative sample of data!

To simplify its maintenance

A website must live. If you don't do anything about it, chances are you're using it very badly. You need to constantly update it, add content, and adapt it to your needs. This maintenance has a cost, in time but also in money if you depend on a technology that is not very flexible and complex.

It is therefore very important to choose the right CMS because it will have a significant impact on the profitability of your site in the long term. This is one of the reasons why we switched most of the sites we manage to Webflow.

Keep this aspect in mind during your next redesign, a site must live and therefore you must be certain that it will be easy to keep it alive.

How to successfully redesign your website?

Preparing the redesign of a website well to successfully renew it

The redesign of a website must be properly prepared to be successful. To prepare for the redesign of your website, do not hesitate to look at what your competitors are doing to identify their strengths and find inspiration. Likewise, identify the negative points for yourself and your competitors to optimize and improve your website.

Conduct an audit of the current site

The first thing you need to do to understand what is working and what needs to be improved is theAudit of your site. Your analysis will help you rework your target to better understand their journey and needs. So you need to look at:

• seafaring : are your menus clear for your visitors?
• The conversion journey : does your site allow you to convert your visitors?
• the SEO strategy : keywords, links and performance
• technical aspects : loading time, responsive design, etc...
• The visual aspects : does your site represent the image of your company?

Crawling your site allows you to take into account all the resources available to your website (images, HTML, JS pages, content, etc...). Save this data for a before-and-after comparison to determine if your redesign was relevant.

By using tools like SEMrush, SEobility, Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights or Screaming Frog, you could target pages on your site that don't work. Your audit will help you analyze the quality of your conversion journey and readjust it as needed.

Define your goals and expectations

Since there are several reasons to redesign your website, it is important to define which ones prompted you to start this project! You need to define your expectations and determine the goals you want to achieve: a better traffic rate? More conversion? Optimize your user experience? Put back your Graphic charter up to date? What are your deadlines? What is your budget? Are you planning to outsource all or part of your project? Etc...

You must also define the KPIs that will allow you to analyze the results of your redesign and think about what actions to put in place to achieve your goals.

Establishing a specification

For companies that want to use a web agency, you can write specifications to structure your project. You should include various elements to help stakeholders better understand and complete the project:

• the general context of the project and your expectations,
• information on your graphic charter (colors, typography, logo, etc...),
• functional and technical indications (languages, constraints, tools, etc.),
• and other elements such as the deadline or the budget.

The structural redesign of your website

Step 1: SEO and content

A structural redesign for your website does not have to start from scratch. You can take over existing pages and give them a boost in SEO and rework your contents. You need to analyze if:

• your CTAs are clear and convert in line with your goals,
• your content is efficient enough, if you need to make updates, if it can be adapted for different formats,
• you have broken links, with bad redirections, which can affect your bounce rate,
• your menu is relevant, your various categories are useful, if your structure meets the expectations of users.

Step 2: The tree

Once you have reviewed your site, you can rethink the architecture of your new site. What pages do you want to edit, delete, or create?

You need to think about your internal networking and to the content of your website to maximize your chances of being visible on search engines. Use a sitemap to have a clear and relevant tree structure.

Your architecture must respond to the different types of decision paths of your targets. It is difficult to make an exhaustive list, the devil hiding behind the details, but we can generally differentiate between 3 types of routes:

• The course centered on “what” : We are dealing with a visitor who is mature about his needs who is looking for a specific product or service. It's the most obvious route, but it's not always the most interesting.
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• The course centered on “who” : For some customers it is very important to know that your products or services were designed for them and that you already work with similar companies and people.
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• The course centered on “why” : it is the most important, the most profitable path (yes yes) and that cannot be found on any site... The idea is to deal with the issue, the problem of your visitor who does not yet know how to solve it.

Finally, don't forget to add a good dose UX design : the user experience. In other words, you need to think about how you want your visitors to act on your pages and how you are going to convert them.

Step 3: Redirection plan

Creating a redirection plan will prevent you from losing all of its traffic once your new website is online due to non-indexed URLs or 404 errors.

Concretely, how does that happen? You need to list all old pages to refer them to their new equivalent.

You will of course have to audit your backlinks beforehand to make sure you do not delete a page that would receive links. And if you plan to remove or modify some of your links, don't forget to include them in your redirection plan at the risk of losing visibility.

It is quite technical and unfortunately many companies completely hide this point during a redesign. It is serious. It has to be done, there are no exceptions.

Work on visual aspects

Step 1: Mockup

In the case of a visual redesign, you can at first model your project to visualize your new pages and the tree structure of your website. To do this you will have to go through the phase of wireframe to project yourself on the aesthetic and ergonomic improvements of your website.

This step is important when working with some CMS, if the integration is complex it makes it possible to ensure that the design suits you before incurring heavy development and integration costs. On the contrary, some CMS allow you to do without them because the integration is simple, but even for them you should at least make sure you have anticipated the structure of the pages and the “logical blocks” that will compose them.

Step 2: Development & integration

Then, the developer team will start working on your site itself. They will develop the various pages and key functionalities to allow the integration of your content and your design, according to well-defined specifications.

Everything is taken into account in the integration: colors, animations, typography, styles, images, effects, etc... But also technical optimizations (which you should already be aware of during the mock-up stage) such as loading or markup.

You must also migrate and integrate your content on your new website. At Sales Odyssey we experience this and we can tell you that there are always particular cases to manage and that you must constantly check that everything is displayed correctly.

Step 3: SEO Optimization

Once the content and visuals are fully integrated and the technical performances optimized, we move on to SEO optimization. There are a myriad of items to review: Slugs, meta title, meta description, alternative tag, structured data, the semantic optimization of pages etc.

Ideally, this optimization should be done in duplicate, a pre-launch audit then a post-launch audit a few days later to verify that everything went well and that no errors were reported in the search console for example.

Check and test your website

Once you have checked off all the elements of your redesign and your website seems complete, you need to have it tested! You will then be able to note anything that is a problem and readjust if necessary before the official release. Ideally, submit it to people who haven't worked on it to get objective feedback.

And in the days and weeks that follow, we remain on the alert to repair 404 errors and to listen to possible problems or misunderstandings.