Important Factors That Will Make Your Website Redesign Process A Success

A website needs to be refreshed every now and then. Whether you’re rebranding, moving to a new CMS or your website is not getting the results you desire, redesigning may be necessary. Effective web redesigns can potentially transform your website into a sales machine, attracting targeted visitors, generating qualified leads and ultimately turning and converting visitors into paying customers. Whether you’re doing the redesign on your own or you’re working with a freelance designer or a web design agency, make sure to keep these things in mind.
Analyze your existing metrics

Analyze your current website including its bounce rate, number of visits or visitors, present SEO rankings for vital keywords, time spent on site, domain authority, total amount of sales produced and number of form submissions or new leads. Use Google Analytics if you don’t have access to these data. This tool will let you better see and track the performance of your website.
Know your goals

Why are you redesigning your site in the first place? Tie your answer to measurable outcomes. Communicating with your team and agency or designer will help you determine the best steps at this point.
Evaluate your assets

Redesigning may be totally necessary, but you might be hurting yourself by getting rid of assets that you’ve accumulated. These assets include the number of inbound links to separate pages, best performing associated pages and keywords, pages that receive the most traffic and most viewed or shared content. Eliminating a page with a high amount of inbound links could lose you lots of SEO credit. This will also decrease the rankings of your keywords. Ensure your team, agency or designer implements a 301 redirect on all page urls that changes. A 301 redirect basically says, hey, Search Engines: My page is no longer here, and has permanently moved to a new page. Please remove it from your index and pass credit to the new page.
Examine the competition

Examining the competition will help you determine your current position. To do this, there are several online tools to measure your site performance against your competitors. Some of this sites are;

UpCity’s SEO Report Card
Moz’s Open Site Explorer
HubSpot’s Marketing Grader
GTmetrix’s Website Speed and Performance Test

run your site and the website of your competitors through some of this online tools to know their weaknesses and strengths. Evaluate their site and note what you don’t like and what you like. Don’t copy them, but find out and review the things that you can do better. After running the reports, create a list of actions that you can improve.
Design your website around your customer’s persona

Communicate with your customers in their language by designing your website around their persona. This persona is where you divide your marketplace into separate groups of people. They’re imagined depictions of your ideal clients based on actual data about online behavior and customer demographics.
Optimize website for search – SEO

If you want to improve your website metrics, you have to be found online. Without anyone visiting your website, you will lose sales, downloads and leads. This is where search engine optimization comes in. To do this, you need a combination of clean web design, in-depth keyword research – to know what keyword you want to optimize your new site around, clear content marketing strategy focused on quality of content, quantity of content and distribution of content.
Determine CTAs

CTAs or Calls to Action are elements on the site that drive visitors to a certain action that further engages them with your company, whether it is to contact sales or to download a free eBook. When planning to redesign your website, consider all possible conversion opportunities like free trial, promotions and contests, email newsletters, whitepapers and eBooks and product purchase. Focus on the functionality of your website. Ensure you have lots of CTAs so that your visitors don’t get lost or lose interest when they visit your site.
Include some extras

A website should have the basics – industry resources, contact us and about us page, homepage and product/service pages. On the other hand, adding some extras can make your website stand out. You can add a news or blog section, email subscription or RSS signup form and social media links or icons to your pages.

Follow these tips to help you better prepare for redesigning your website and focus on the important factors that make the whole redesign process a success. Let me know if there is anything worth mentioning i left out. Thanks.

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