Your website is more than just a collection of pages. It’s the face of your business
and your best salesperson. But neither time nor trends stand still. Today’s cutting-edge interface eventually becomes tomorrow’s quaint and creaky antique. As new technical thresholds are reached and become the standard, anything below the threshold falls behind. Functionality is measured against the freshest and slickest examples. Poor or outdated design, sluggish loading speed and muddled navigation won’t cut it when your competitors are peeling ahead. Your website redesign must keep pace with evolving specs and performance benchmarks if it is to stand a credible chance in your chosen market.
So, how do you know when it’s time to take the next evolutionary step? In this blog post, we will unearth the signals, why they matter and how to approach the process in a way that sets your business up for success at the bleeding edge of online commerce.
How To Know When It’s Time for a Website Redesign
Common Signs Your Website Needs a Redesign
If your website looks like it was designed in the last millennium, then it’s definitely time to consider an overhaul. If your metrics are signalling a downturn in traffic and an uptick in bounces, then something is alienating your visitors. Ugly design elements and unresponsive design won’t be tolerated. Neither will constant buffering nor poor presentation and functionality across multiple devices.
First impressions (literally seconds) will determine how much time a visitor is willing to invest.
If your website is missing essential elements like intuitive navigation, optimised images and a coherent content management system, you cannot expect visitors to put in the extra work to decipher what your site is doing.
If you find yourself wrestling with slow loading speeds, lack of responsiveness on different devices, and outdated design and content features, it signals that perhaps the visitor experience is not all that pleasant and defections are probably to be expected.
There is no clearer signal that a major website redesign is required.
Reasons Your Website Might Be Falling Short
Aside from its visual appeal, your website redesign must satisfy a number of expectations. At its core, a website’s job is to provide information and lead visitors to a desired action. The information must be organised and presented in a rational manner. Content should be clear and simple to understand. It should also follow an order that builds the visitor’s understanding in a linear fashion. If content jumps around or is placed incorrectly, the visitor’s eye can be misdirected, leading to important contextual information being missed. This will lead to confusion and frustration, a major cause of visitors “bouncing”.
Clear descriptions must lead directly to the things being described. If a service or product is being offered, show the visitor what the service is, how it works and how they will benefit by using it in very short order. Prioritise highlighting the benefits over simply listing the features. Navigate the visitor through the website, satisfying each question the visitor may ask themselves in the order they would naturally ask it.
Information that meanders or takes too long to make its point dilutes the impact of your call to action. All the juicy stuff gets pushed further and further down the page, killing any sort of urgency your content is supposed to generate. Without urgency, visitors will feel no compulsion to take action at all.
How a Website Redesign Impacts SEO
The Relationship Between Website Redesign and Search Engine Rankings
As a website ages, it’s not just the way it looks that gives its dotage away. Content and copy quickly grow stagnant, meaning they gradually lose their ability to meet the standards of modern search engine specifications. Poor or outdated search engine optimisation means your keywords are out of sync with the moving tide of search-term trends. Imagine taking a trip to Rome and speaking to the locals in Latin. Some of the words might land, but the vast majority will be skewed by a millennium or so of linguistic modification. You would be using a dead language to engage with a living one.
Google, for example, make dozens and dozens of algorithmic adjustments to service what and how people search for things in the here and now. You must keep pace with these changes so your content can at least maintain — and ideally increase — its visibility and relevance in a highly competitive marketplace.
Fresh keyword research and careful placement of keywords in all content and design elements will create a beautiful synergy between the website and search engine crawlers. You also have the additional ability to link content from one area of the website to another. For example, a blog post with carefully inserted internal links can serve as a direct link to the posts located pages away. This creates a self-referencing network of associated content that search engines and visitors will appreciate.
Fast loading speed also boosts a search engine’s ability to find your content and deliver it to searchers quickly and accurately. This will work wonders for your ranking and overall presence on the internet.
SEO is a natural extension of design architecture. Visual elements and keywords act as prompts or markers of interest. Properly optimised, these elements give both the search engines and the site visitors a smooth and highly targeted user experience. SEO is a vital component of any website redesign.
Best Practices for Maintaining SEO During a Website Redesign
Firstly, before making any changes, conduct a thorough SEO audit of your
current website. This helps you identify what’s working and what needs improvement.
Next, create a sitemap to preserve and maintain your existing URL structure as much as possible. You don’t want to frustrate search engines by changing URLs without proper redirects.
Also, make sure your new website is optimised for mobile devices. With more and more users browsing websites on mobile phones, your site MUST function seamlessly for SEO in this format. Any sort of jerkiness, cropped and distorted elements or broken links will alienate search engines and set your visitors running for the hills (If they found you in the first place). This is particularly important for SaaS businesses — one little mistake and your visitors will not grant you another moment of their time.
Lastly, optimise your content for keywords and meta tags parallel to the redesign process. Remember, SEO and design must work in harmony, not in isolation. This gives your website the best chance to rank effectively once it’s live.
Benefits of Redesigning Your Website
How a Redesign Increases Traffic
Bottom line: You need to increase your traffic. Website redesign services, though drastic, function like an organ transplant. The patient is the same, but the old, faulty parts have been switched for new ones. Now the patient feels like a new person. Friends and family will marvel at how well he looks and how much energy he has compared to before. For visitors familiar with your old website, the change will be striking. The upgrade will convey competence, technical savvy and a firm understanding of how consumers engage with online information.
Search engines will be equally enthralled by the intuitive SEO architecture. They will acknowledge and reward your efforts by cranking up your visibility in search results, leading to a slew of new visitors to your website.
Expect a lower bounce rate, too, as visitors indulge in the curiosities you’ve laid out for them. Intuitive functionality, appealing visuals, distinctive brand colours and clear navigational signposts make the visit fun, absorbing, even morish. Calls to action will be harder to resist as the sheer competency of your website redesign provides evidence of your brand’s innate quality and self-confidence.
Enhancing User Experience With New Features
The many ways visitors dip into the internet obliges you to make sure your website maintains “credibility” across multiple platforms. The growing sophistication of mobile devices, wearables and so on means your website redesign has to function perfectly in all manner of shapes and sizes.
Of course, user experience will have to differ from device to device. The layout will change, but it must remain consistent with its parent (desktop and laptop) iteration.
Ease of use is particularly important for people on the move. Consider people on their daily commute to work. Some of your traffic is coming from folks stood on a platform at Victoria Station at 7.30 am.
For situations like these, the user experience must be fast and intuitive. There’s no end to the number of sales you can make from people stranded and bored at a bus stop in the pouring rain.
For this reason, distilling website navigation, especially for mobile devices, gets visitors to the important areas faster. Calls for action can be bigger, and sales forms can be simpler to fill in.
If your website redesign can help these people feel as though their commute was shorter, even pleasurable, that’s an important feat in itself. This can be habit-forming. This provokes them to return more often, perhaps daily or weekly, exploring more services or reading some of the blog posts they saw in passing some weeks before. This is how brand loyalty is earned and the compounding effect of word of mouth is cultivated.
The Role of Website Aesthetics in Conversion Rates
As mentioned earlier, website redesign services that offer an aesthetically and functionally strong build automatically convey a high level of competence. The old adage, “Show, don’t tell,” is most relevant here.
Your content and copy can tell visitors how genuine and true your ethos is and how wonderful and ground-breaking your goods or services are, but the real evidence of that is ultimately demonstrated in how this information is delivered.
Quality doesn’t need to alert visitors to itself. It’s already there in your design choices, from your colour palette to the font and line spacing you employ in your body text. Every tiny element signals taste and ability and practicality.
Smooth functionality demonstrates your deep understanding of modern technical concepts. It also shows you understand what visitors prefer to see in a well-built website redesign. They don’t want unnecessary challenges. They want a smooth, approachable experience that expends as little mental energy as possible in order to achieve a clearly defined goal.
A highly competent website wipes away any sort of objection or doubt a potential customer might have. They can be confident they are in safe hands when they can see for themselves that this is the kind of business that has mastered its craft and, no doubt, can produce goods and services that reflect that.
How Often Should Businesses Redesign Their Websites
Now, this can depend on several factors. As a general rule, it’s wise to consider a website redesign every 2-4 years to make sure you stay fresh and relevant. Of course, if your website undergoes a huge root and branch transformation, you would expect it to carry its own weight for a long time. Like a house, there’s no need to tear up the foundations and knock down the walls when a fresh lick of paint and some new furniture is all it needs.
In the end, a website is never truly “finished”. It will need constant updating and recalibrating to maintain functionality, accessibility and security. New blog posts, products, services and their supporting descriptions will need to be inserted. Small design tweaks here and there may need to comply with new fads and market trends, and policy changes to online commerce may require you to comply with new guidelines.
Remember also that search engines can change their algorithms on a whim, throwing the sturdiest SEO strategy of its course.
So, in a sense, you will always be redesigning your website, in real time, in tiny increments.
Tools To Assess Performance
There are plenty of tools at your disposal that can help you make informed decisions during a website redesign. An analytic tool like Google Analytics, Usermaven or Plausible provides insight into visitor behaviour, showing you where users are dropping off and which pages are performing best. This information is invaluable for identifying areas that may need improvement during a redesign.
Tools like GTmetrix can analyse your site’s load time, helping you pinpoint slow-loading elements that could be driving visitors away.
Another great tool is Google Search Console, which gives you an overview of your website’s indexing status and any SEO issues that need addressing. This can help you understand how well your site is performing in search engine rankings and what tweaks you need to make.
Planning Your Website Redesign
Start by defining your goals. What do you actually want to achieve with this redesign? Are you aiming to boost traffic, improve user experience or update your branding?
Once you’ve figured that out, conduct an audit of your website in its current state and tease out what’s working and what’s not. This will help you make targeted decisions as to what needs rooting out or upgrading.
Next, consider your audience. Who is your target audience, and what do they really want from your website? Identifying what your audience demands of your website will fortify your design decisions, focusing every element towards the goal of maximum usability.
Finally, create a project timeline and budget to keep your website redesign on track. It’s all too easy to get lost in the weeds and waste a lot of time, energy and money on fruitless diversions. Stick to the plan and stick to your budget for dear life.
Staying Aligned with Business Objectives
Always keep your business goals front and centre. You don’t want to redesign for the sake of redesigning. Again, start by clearly defining what you want to achieve — whether it’s increasing website traffic, boosting conversions or enhancing user experience.
It’s also wise to involve key stakeholders in the process, as their insights can help refine your vision and ensure everyone is on the same page.
You should also conduct some testing to gather real-time feedback on every element you introduce. This can help you identify any roadblocks or areas that are missing the mark.
Continuously evaluate your website redesign against your business goals and make the necessary adjustments along the way. This real-time evaluation will save you time, money and heartache later on. Better to confront problems now than after you launch.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
The big one here is failing to set clear goals ahead of time. Remember that a website’s primary goal is to transmit information and make it easy for your audience to take desired action. It’s no good having a beautiful-looking website if it doesn’t serve its primary goal: conversions. Or at the very least, inducing the actions leading to a conversion later on.
Another common mistake is having a redesigned website with a poor user experience. Again, this is all about transmitting information. Beauty might be a treat for your visitors’ eyes, but if your navigation points are in disarray, content not ordered in a linear, rational way and CTAs placed in random locations, then your efforts are worth nothing. If you confuse or frustrate visitors, they will abandon your website very quickly, no matter how pretty it is.
Neglecting your SEO strategy is amongst the most common and fatal mistakes you can make. While it’s not the most glamorous aspect of web design, SEO is what gets you found. Traffic and high search rankings are the lifeblood of online businesses. Invest the time, money and expertise to find those keywords and give yourself the best chance to thrive. If you are not seen, you don’t exist.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if it’s time for a website redesign?
Look for indicators like low traffic and high bounce rates. People are drawn to websites that are easy to find, appealing to look at and intuitive to use. Audit your website’s performance, speed, SEO, content and design. It only takes a flaw in one or more of these elements to repel visitors.
My website is incredibly slow. Should I worry about load speed?
Yes. You wouldn’t tolerate slow service in a restaurant. Nor would you want to watch a screen buffering for more than a couple of seconds. Visitors can forgive less-than-stellar visuals, but they won’t forgive sluggish loading speeds.
Should I hire a web design agency or just stick with my cousin who “knows a thing or two” about WordPress?
Your brand image and competency are on the line. If you’re going to invest in something, hire a professional web design agency. Your cousin may do a half-decent job, but who wants half-decent? It takes years of practical study and know-how to develop and design a website that both functions well and follows best practices.
How often should I redesign my website to keep up with the times?
A website redesign is recommended every 2-4 years. Making general changes keeps you in line with social trends and technological developments. Plus, you’ll want to present new offers, tweak your SEO and make sure your security protocols are up to date.
Massive root and branch redesigns can future-proof you for an extended period of time, but you will always need to modify things piece-meal. So don’t rest on your laurels. Always be prepared to make necessary changes in perpetuity.
Can a website redesign really impact my SEO?
Absolutely. SEO must be updated alongside everything else. That’s what attracts search engine crawlers and brings traffic to your website. If your SEO strategy is years out of date, it hinders its ability to be found on Google and other search engines. Search term trends change at remarkable speed, and your SEO must adapt to these changes to align with consumer search habits. Getting it right will give your business an enormous boost.
My website looks fine on a desktop computer but terrible on mobile. Is that a problem?
Big problem. People are on the move, getting to and from work, sitting in the park, cafes and so on. Mobile phone usage is huge, and the primary source of internet consumption for an ever-growing number of people. Your website needs to function seamlessly on mobile devices. Layout and functionality must adapt to a broad range of screen shapes. Many of your visitors will be browsing your site and making purchases from all kinds of locations. So make extra sure your website is optimised for all portable devices.
Do I need to worry about the ability to update my website after a redesign?
Yes, if you plan to be updating the website yourself. However, it is always the best and safest option to hire a professional for your website maintenance. Maintaining a website entails much more than just posting new content — it includes taking care of backups, making regular plugin updates, troubleshooting and bug fixes, automatic and manual testing, security, accessibility and performance optimisation, DNS management and uptime monitoring.
