10 Steps to Create a Winning Website Redesign Strategy

“Your website talks to way more people than your average salesperson does every day.” – Pete Caputa

Your website isn’t just about the look and feel. It goes over and beyond just aesthetic changes. You need to be absolutely sure that you’re redesigning your website for the right reasons because if you’re not, it may cause more harm than good. Here’s a quick read for you to know if a website redesign is, in fact, right for your business and how you can ace it.

Why do you need a website redesign?

The wrong reasons for considering a website redesign are:

• You have not redesigned your website in the last 12-18 months and it feels dated
• Your competitor just redesigned their website and you don’t want to lag behind
• You’ve got a new corporate look and feel
• Your higher management has asked for it

The right reasons for considering a website redesign are:

• More prospects finding you
• A higher lead-to-sale conversion
• An increased ROI
• To improve branding

If your reasons are the right ones to redesign your website, then it’s time to devise a strategic plan for it, before you jump right to the action.

What should be your website redesign strategy checklist?

Here are the 10 steps that you must follow to ensure a sure-fire website redesign strategy:

1. Analyze your current performance metrics: These metrics include:

• Domain authority
• Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors
• Time on site
• Current SEO rankings for important keywords
• Bounce rate
• Number of form submissions
• Number of new leads
• Total sales generated

It’s plausible that some aspects of your website are doing exceptionally well. Therefore, toying with those aspects may turn out to be catastrophic.

2. Check your valuable assets: After your website analysis, you’d get a clearer picture of what is working, bringing in traffic, and converting leads. These assets could be content, keyword rankings, inbound links, conversion paths, etc. It’s also important to determine:

• The pages that are bringing in the most amount of traffic
• The valuable content that can be repurposed into the new design
• The number of pages on your website
• The number of inbound links you have and where they’re coming from
• The keywords giving your site ranking a boost
• The USP of your website

Once you figure this out, you’d need to integrate all of these into the new design.

3. Make your branding slick: Before you jump the gun on a website redesign, ensure that you streamline your branding. Ask yourself:

• Why is my product/service unique?
• Why would one make a purchase with me over a competitor?
• Is my content making visitors stay on my site?

Through this, you’d know what offers can you put out there and how your brand can be accurately represented via your website.

4. Format your homepage: Most customers prefer simple homepages as opposed to the flashy ones. They mostly care about:

• The website being credible
• Finding what they’re looking for
• Returning to the site

Some best practices are to highlight your blog on the homepage, keep limited choices for visitors, set up a 301 redirect (from an SEO standpoint), get a permanent redirect, and add your social media links on the homepage.

5. Pay attention to the original content: People love fresh content and you must present it in every way possible. Original content is the backbone of your website that lets your prospects know what you do and how well you do it.

6. Format your landing pages: A great and efficient landing page has a clear, simple, and unambiguous offer, minimal website navigation, and the form above the fold. Landing pages need to be treated carefully since they’d speak volumes of the offers that you have and those offers woo your leads to the purchase.

7. Create a site map: For physically creating a site map, ask yourself…

• What are the website pages that you want to include?
• What website pages are a part of your top navigation bar?
• Which pages will be visible only if you click on one of the pages on the top navigation bar?
• How do you want the pages’ architecture to be?

The answers to these questions would help your development team make sure that all the pages are there, everything is linked, and the content is laid out neatly and properly.

8. Conduct conversion mapping experiments: The conversion path is what you create using your original content, landing pages, and offers. To derive effective performance out of your landing pages and offerings, you could attach their links in your email marketing campaigns and newsletters, have your PPC ads take the visitor right to the landing page, and use them as a follow-up post an event or trade show.

9. Focus on responsive design: These days, the biggest chunk of website traffic comes from mobile device users. It’s extremely important that your website is optimized to view in all kinds of platforms – desktop, tablets, mobile devices, etc.

10. Track, measure, analyze: Everything on your website needs to be measurable – visitors, leads, sales, revenue, etc! There are several tools that you can choose that would help you track, measure, and analyze your metrics. The most important metrics are pageviews, unique visitors, bounce rate, direct traffic, organic search traffic, referral sites, and load speed.

Now that you know that your website, undoubtedly, isn’t a static catalog, but your biggest marketing tool, it’s necessary that you keep up with the latest updates and trends and keep incorporating them into your website. If you want to get ahead in the website redesign game, incorporating these 10 steps in your playbook is sure to take you a long way from where you are to where you want to be!

Do you want to make your website your brand ambassador?