What is a Website Redesign and Why Does My Business Need One?
A website redesign is a complex project that updates your online presence to be fully in line with consumer expectations, your business goals, and your customer journey. The design team addresses the layout, content, navigation, and coding to update the frontend (customer experience of your website) as well as the backend (the coding, functionality, compatibility, and the management of your website) of the site, and should be revisited periodically to ensure continuous improvement and refinement.Your website is your digital identity and, for many customers and clients, it’s the first interaction they will have with your business. So, it makes sense that you would want this to be a great first impression.Like old buildings, websites become out-of-date as they age, looking dated and tired, and not offering the capabilities that customers want and expect from modern technology. When business owners can’t deliver this, it makes your business look less relevant and it’s easy for customers to move to a competitor who can. This is especially important if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, if you can’t offer e-commerce functionality, or if your website loads very slowly.This can also affect your search engine optimisation (SEO) because of changes that major search engines like Google regularly make to their algorithms. Old websites tend to lack what these search engines are looking for or have used SEO practices that have fallen out of favour over the years, which make your website harder for customers to find as a result.So, if you think a website redesign is what your business needs, where do you start?Step 1 – Audit Current Website
To set goals for your new business website, the issues in your current website need to be identified. Your design team will complete a thorough evaluation, but it’s still a good idea to pull up at least the last 3 months of analytics reporting if you have Google Analytics or analytics tracking enabled. Heat maps can also help you track how people are navigating and spending their time on your website. The key indicator to look at include:- High bounce rates
- Low total traffic per month
- Conversion rates
- Most popular pages