how to redesign your website
So you want to redesign your website? A redesign can be a huge success –or it could fail miserably. It’s a long and tedious process. But that’s where this guide can make your job a whole lot easier. Whether you’re working with an agency or redesigning in-house, this guide will serve as your guide to strategizing your website redesign.
Every redesign starts with a vision and/or problem. The better you are at defining this vision and/or problem at the very beginning, the more successful the redesign will be and the smoother the entire process will be as well.
There are seven stages of website redesign .
But none of the latter six stages can be completed without focusing time on the first stage:
strategy……….
This guide will serve as your offical resource for defining your redesign
strategy so you can successfully commence a website redesign.
The strategy stage is the most crucial, and often overlooked, step
of a website redesign.
Start by defining some of the following:
Clear benchmarks
Realistic goals
Your brand and target audience
Relevant keywords
Competition and market opportunity
A full inventory of all content assets
The next seven steps will outline your strategy and take the steps needed to getting started in more detail.
Benchmark Your Current Metrics
Before you begin planning your redesign, document your current performance
metrics. Start by analyzing your existing site over its history in areas such as:
- Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors
- Bounce rate
- Time on site
- Current SEO rankings for important keywords
- Domain authority
- Number of new leads/form submissions
- Total amount of sales generated
If you don’t have access to this information, then try adding a tool
like Google Analytics or HubSpot’s marketing analytics for
better tracking and visibility into site performance
TIP: Keep note of which tools you used to determine these benchmarks.
Ideally you’ll want to use the same exact tools when collecting post-design
metrics – otherwise you’ll be comparing apples to oranges!
Determine Your Goals
When considering a redesign there needs to be a good reason behind it.
Many times we hear “it’s been a while since we’ve done one,” or “I want
our business to look bigger.” These are not good enough reasons. It’s not
just about how your site looks, but how it works.
Be really clear about why you’re doing the redesign in the first place and
tie it to measureable results. Then communicate your goals with your
team, designer or agency. Consider the following objectives for your own
website:
- Number of visits/visitors
- Bounce rate
- Time on site
- Domain authority
- Number of new leads/form submissions
- Total amount of sales generated
- Current SEO rankings for important keywords
Many of these goals are dependent on one other. For example, in order to
get more conversions, you need to increase traffic while decreasing the
bounce rate.
Define Your Brand
Before you begin crafting your content, be clear about your branding and
messaging so that it’s consistent across your entire website. A new visitor
should immediately understand what you do, how it relates to them, and
why they should stay on your website and not flee to your competitors.
Make sure you sound human, and don’t use industry jargon (aka gobbledygook).
Consider the following example of how we could describe
HubSpot in a gobbledygook way:
HubSpot helps companies across multiple countries reduce churn by backfilling the
sales pipeline with highly qualified traffic that generates leads that convert into customers
with high lifetime value. We achieve this by providing leading-edge software that
integrates all marketing channels for a synergistic view of the data that determines and
prioritizes high value marketing activities.
What? Let’s translate that into the way people actually speak:
HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing software helps more than 6,000 businesses in 45 countries
attract leads and convert them into customers. A pioneer in inbound marketing,
HubSpot aims to help its customers make marketing that people actually love.
Ahh yes, much clearer!
Define Your Buyer Persona
Your website is not just about you. Your visitors ask, “what’s in it for me?”
Speak to them in their language by designing content around buyer
personas.
A buyer persona is when you slice your marketplace into individual groups
of people. They are fictional representations of your ideal customers,
based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior,
along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations,
and concerns.
For instance, if you are a marketing manager at a hotel who is looking to
bring in new business, you might target five buyer personas: an independent
business traveler, a corporate travel manager, an event planner, a
vacationing family, and a couple planning their wedding reception.
Protect Optimized Pages
Getting found online is essential to improving the rest of your site metrics.
If no one is coming to your site, how can you increase leads, downloads, or
sales? Here are some tips to designing your content with search friendly
topics:
Document your most search-valued pages
Figure out which pages receive the most traffic, inbound links, convert
the most leads and ultimately cover the most influential topics. If you
plan to move highly valuable pages, create proper 301 redirects.
Create a 301 redirect strategy
This is important in terms of retaining traffic and link value associated
with a page. Try creating a spreadsheet to record and map out your
301 redirects (old URLs vs new URLs). Then hand this document to
someone technical for implementation.
Do your keyword research
For every page, pick one keyword/ topic that the page will focus on.
Once you determine the keyword(s), use on-page SEO best practices to
optimize those specific pages.
Analyze the Competition
While we don’t recommend obsessing over your competitors, it helps to
know how you compare. Here’s a few tips:
Run your website through Marketing Grader – marketing.grader.com –
to get a report card of how your website and marketing is performing.
Run your competitors through Marketing Grader so you are aware of
their strengths and weaknesses.
Take a look at competitor websites, and note what you like and what
you don’t. This is not meant to copy them, but to uncover what you
can do better.
Once you run the analysis, put together an action list of what areas you
can improve and what you can do differently than your competitors
Inventory Your Assets
While a redesign is a great way to improve results, there are countless
ways it can hurt you. Your existing website contains many assets that you
have built up, and losing those during a redesign can damage your
marketing. For instance, such assets might include:
- Most shared or viewed content
- Most trafficked pages
- Best performing/ranking keywords and associated pages
- Number of inbound links to individual pages
For example, if you remove a page that has a higher number of inbound
links, you could lose a lot of SEO credit, which will make it increasingly
difficult for you to get found.
Keep in mind that many web designers don’t consider this step because
they are neither marketers nor SEO specialists. Don’t hesitate to remind
them about this step or take the initiative to do it in advance.
