Design

Website redesign: why and how to do it

Veronika Ovchynnykova
Veronika Ovchynnykova
17 minOctober 23, 2024
Website redesign: why and how to do it
Website redesign: why and how to do it

If you have been running a business for some time, you have probably faced the necessity of catching up with all the upcoming trends and user requirements. You know that the market is dependent on an array of influences and is constantly changing, as is the world we live in. Your prevalent task is to keep your business afloat and do everything possible to improve it. As it is known, a sleek, user-friendly website is key to unlocking the full potential of a business and building its stable financial future. When you hesitate about your website’s relevance and effectiveness, it should become the first step towards immediate improvement and update. By redesigning a website and making it a convenient platform for users, you can please your target audience and keep people returning and choosing you and your business repeatedly.

The ability to adapt to current challenges and demands will help you stay competitive and attract even more users to your business. A results-driven website is a necessity for a compelling brand identity and overall business prosperity. Of course, it can take some time and particular effort to redesign a site. But the result will most likely be worth the wait and will justify all your expectations. In this article, we explore the details of the website redesign process, its importance, and the necessary steps to transform your site into an engaging and effective web space that lures people to try out your services or products.

Reasons for redesigning a website

Your website is a powerful tool to attract new customers, retain the existing ones, and make a statement as an influential business. Whether you are running a large company, launching a new business, or an innovative startup, responsive web design is a must that your project should possess. Here, we have compiled some crucial reasons to redesign your website, so explore them and start your compelling redesign journey in no time.

Reasons for redesigning a website
  1. Outdated design
  2. One of the primary reasons for redesigning your website is its outdated look and feel. If you have noticed that competitors’ sites have new features, maybe it’s time to evaluate your website and its current functionality. Pay attention to website navigation structure, website accessibility, and its aesthetics. Look at your website’s visual design elements and assess how they align with your current business strategy and marketing efforts. Find out whether your site has broken links (for example, 404 error pages), missing images, and other errors. If some elements on your website don’t work the way they are supposed to work, then you probably need to ponder a website redesign. Ensure your website is greatly maintained and well-organized. Also, consider changing the content management system (CMS) if your current system does not make it easy to add new pages and update your information.

    Check out all the latest web design trends and think of which of them can match your business and how to implement them effectively. Pick the proper tools and approaches to make some quick adjustments, and you will be surprised with the upcoming results. Remember that an up-to-date website will attract new people to your activities and help you retain the ones you have.

  3. Brand status
  4. By revamping your website, you can please your target audience with seamless browsing experiences and offer them smoother navigation. It will enhance your brand image and convince people of your professionalism. Surely, the website redesign process may take some time and effort, but it will justify all the work done. A user-friendly and well-optimized website will help you foster a closer connection with your target audience and make them resonate with your concepts. It will strengthen your brand status, which is super important for your further growth, and demonstrate that you are aware of all the trends in your niche and ready to adapt to new demands. Significant website performance optimization can also stimulate your project development.

    If your business has already achieved some strategic goals and reached some point of success, refreshing your website is a great recipe to reflect your accomplishments. It will highlight all the work you have done to become a stable brand, making a focus on how you operate and what messages you communicate to the world. Vivid website branding is key to making a memorable statement and earning loyalty. Imagine that your favorite clothes shop, where you usually buy your items from and order them online using their website, neglects its site optimization and design refreshment, and it takes forever to download a page. Not nice, right? So, care about website redesign and enhance your brand status in a sleek manner.

  5. Optimization for mobile
  6. According to some statistics and research, website owners get half of all organic visits from mobile devices. It looks like a massive reason to craft a mobile-friendly design for your website. Nowadays, we can not imagine a single day without our smartphones. People perform a range of daily tasks using their mobile phones. Starting from ordering some food and choosing a proper outfit online to getting financial services, users depend on their smartphones and are used to doing practically everything with a mobile device. So, it’s no wonder a website redesign and making sites mobile-friendly are crucial for your business.

    Mobile optimization allows you to attract more users, turn them into future customers, and retain existing clients. It unlocks a range of promotional opportunities and makes it possible to engage people on various devices. By picking the right website redesign strategy, you can produce a responsive and transparent website design, preventing your customers from looking for alternatives and making them your loyal customer base. A mobile-friendly website with quality and well-thought-out content will drive more traffic and help potential visitors discover your brand with its services or products. So, don’t hesitate for a minute and start your website redesign journey right away to see the desired results soon.

  7. Poor UX
  8. In our age of digitalization, positive experience is king when it comes to developing a business and promoting it to a wider audience. If people have a negative experience with a site, they avoid visiting it next time. So, you should care about the website user experience (UX) and make every effort to address issues like broken links, complicated user journeys, and cluttered space. Adjusting to evolving customer needs and implementing the features your potential users prefer will help you win over their hearts and minds and make them return again and again. By implementing a UX website redesign, you increase your site’s performance and generate more engagements with potential customers.

    A smooth user experience ensures that people will remember your services or products and share positive feedback about your brand. Look at your website functionality and assess what can be improved and added. Check the website loading speed, content relevance, and website analytics to get the complete picture of how your website works and whether it meets users’ requirements. By maintaining your website on a regular basis, you make your digital presence noticeable and keep your web platform up-to-date. Consider adding a live chat to stimulate more user engagement and interactions and make other necessary adjustments to your website design. For instance, you can offer instant support to your customers by introducing a chatbot. You can also engage website visitors with quizzes, polls, and specific leaderboards. These steps encourage people to watch your activity and turn to your brand when needed.

  9. Enhancing SEO
  10. One more reason to redesign your website is that it can help you strengthen your visibility on the internet and boost your SEO results. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for your business growth, so you should get the maximum out of your SEO efforts. You can optimize and adapt your website for search engines during your redesign process. Explore the latest SEO approaches and trends to be aware of what can help you boost your search position and incorporate them while redesigning your website.

    Develop a well-thought-out website redesign strategy to optimize your site for search rankings and include all the necessary SEO components in your website structure. Produce high-quality content, nourish it with the right keywords, and use popular search terms in your texts. By refreshing such elements as meta descriptions, blog posts, guides, headers, and titles and saturating them with the required target keywords and semantically related words, you can help search engines identify the value of your content and improve your SEO results. This way, you will achieve significant organic traffic and unlock more development opportunities for your business. Keep SEO in mind when redesigning your website to improve its visibility and effectiveness.

Overview of the website redesign process

Now you understand the importance of getting a website redesign and its significant impact on your business development and growth. So, it’s time to explore the website redesign process in detail. Here, we look at the necessary steps you should take to redesign your website successfully.

Overview of the website redesign process
  1. Define the goals and objectives
  2. First, you should clearly understand why you need to redesign your website and make certain adjustments to the current design. What do you want to achieve with your redesign? What mission does it serve? Answer these questions honestly and define your primary objectives. If you want to refresh your website’s look and feel, you should make your redesign align with your business goals. For example, you may want to boost your SEO, improve lead generation, or better user experience. Whatever your targets are, you should tailor your redesign to them and elaborate an appropriate redesign approach. Different goals require different adjustments, web development tools, skills, and expertise.

    When you identify what exactly you need to redesign your website for, you can easily define the elements that need optimization. Establish clear goals and write down your expectations concerning the redesign. This way, you will concentrate only on significant points and boost the whole redesign process.

  3. Understand your audience
  4. Once you have set your essential goals, you need to think of your target audience’s needs and issues. What challenges do they experience? How do they relate to your brand’s values and concepts? Look at their behavior and define what bothers them. Research your target audience and form detailed personas. This will help you redesign your website effectively and nourish it with the desired features. If you want to meet their expectations, you need to know their preferences, pain points, and primary wishes. Also, imagine how they interact with your website and think of the way they perform some needed action. What features do they need to complete their tasks? Does your website possess the required functionalities and the data they may look for?

    Your target audience is a powerful resource, ultimately defining your business success. Explore them in detail to understand what they need and what matters to them most. This information will help you saturate your website with relevant and useful content that people will appreciate and maybe even share. Plus, it will enable you to make suitable adjustments to your website’s structure and create a convenient and sleek digital platform.

  5. Review competitor websites
  6. This step is a crucial task you should perform to understand what is relevant in your industry and what things you can change in your current website design. Look at your competitors’ websites and assess how they look and feel. What design trends do they include? What content do they write? Explore also how people react to their content and check whether it contains some relevant news from your industry. Pay attention to their site structure and the functionalities they offer to their users. What features do their websites have that your users may like, and what interactive design elements do they have? Look through their websites thoroughly and answer these questions to get the complete picture of how your competitors operate in the digital space. This will help you identify the things you need to fix in your website and provide you with valuable knowledge about what to add to your site to make it more up-to-date.

  7. Plan the website redesign strategy
  8. Developing a website redesign strategy is a vital step toward a successful website redesign process. Planning an efficient website redesign strategy will help you grow your sales, enhance your SEO position, and attract more traffic to your website. Think of all the benefits a website redesign can bring to your business, keeping in mind how your site is performing now. Usability tests may help you find out how your site operates, whether it has some outdated features, and whether all the elements load quickly. In addition, you can check your current metrics to know how many visits you have, what pages users visit mostly, and how long they stay on your website on average. All this information will help you plan the desired adjustments and get the expected results at the end of the day. Being aware of all the current metrics will also prevent you from meaningless alterations and time loss. For example, after checking out the metrics, you realize that some of your website elements work great and need only minor updates. At the same time, some of your website components may require heavier edits.

    Plan your detailed strategy around the set objectives. It can be increasing the number of site visits or growing form submissions you get. According to your primary goal, elaborate action plans and stick to them while redesigning your website.

  9. Create a site map and wireframe
  10. Crafting a site map and wireframe will help you turn all your ideas concerning website redesign into a targeted outline. A site map lays out your site’s organization and depicts the process of which pages relate to each content. A wireframe reflects the visual design of a website and shows the layout of each page. By creating a wireframe and site map, you will see a certain system in your website design and know that all your website pages have a clear user flow.

  11. Focus on mobile-friendly and responsive design
  12. Responsive design is key to attracting more traffic to your website and benefiting from new growth opportunities. By focusing on a mobile-friendly design, you can create a modern and user-friendly website that people will enjoy while using it. Nowadays, we all use our smartphones and tablets on a daily basis, we place orders, and we resolve our greatest issues with them. That’s why it is crucial to work on your website's mobile friendliness. This way, you will enhance your online identity and presence and attract more customers to your services or products. It will also help you retain your current clients and keep them amused.

  13. Optimize website for SEO
  14. As we have mentioned earlier, you should work on your SEO while redesigning your website. It will make people see your site more often and will generate more traffic to your platform. Make sure all your web pages are optimized, and search engines can consider them as valuable assets. Find the appropriate keywords and include them in your meta descriptions, body content, titles, and headers. Think of the technical side of SEO and ensure that your website is indexable and crawlable by search engines. Also, fix the loading speed if needed, as it can influence your SEO results.

  15. Integrate visual and branding elements
  16. The visual part of your website is essential as it allows your users to identify your business image, its core, and its values. This way, people will have a certain perception of your company or startup and understand whether your business aligns with their preferences. By integrating cohesive branding elements, you can shape a powerful first impression about your business and make people remember your brand. It will also enhance your brand image and establish your brand as a professional business in your industry.

    Choose your brand colors and include them in your branding elements, such as logos, imagery, and videos. Research color psychology and pick colors wisely, as they will reflect your brand’s nature. Also, be careful about the fonts you select for your branding to portray your values and brand personality.

  17. Test website performance and functionality
  18. Conduct a website performance test to craft better online experiences for your website visitors. Test your website’s functionality, loading speed, and other design elements to understand what things may require more adjustments. Such performing testing allows you to satisfy your users and meet their expectations and requirements.

  19. Launch the redesigned website
  20. Once your website is redesigned, you can test it through various devices and browsers. If it operates smoothly, doesn’t have any broken links or technical issues, and has a good loading speed, it is time to launch your website. Work with your development specialists and ensure everything runs seamlessly.

  21. Post-launch optimization and maintenance
  22. This stage involves monitoring essential metrics to understand whether your website brings the desired results and what else can require some fixing. Track conversions and user behavior with tools like Google Analytics. If you want to keep your website efficient, maintain it on a regular basis. Make necessary adjustments, test new popular features, and update your content according to trends in your niche.

To sum up

Delivering a website redesign may take some time and a bunch of resources, and it is a pretty daunting task. The process includes a preparation stage and a range of steps needed to revitalize your online presence effectively. From defining your business goals to launching the redesigned site, you have a lot to execute. However, it is worth all the effort, as a refreshed website will help you make a powerful statement in your industry and earn loyalty among users. It will enhance your marketing efforts, boost your SEO results, and strengthen your brand image while unlocking an array of other benefits for your business.

If you notice that your website looks outdated, lacks some necessary functionalities, or has a very slow loading speed, consider redesigning your site. Make use of our detailed guide in your redesign journey and get the maximum out of all the redesign opportunities and approaches. Redesigning a website requires certain skills and is often time-consuming, so if you want to concentrate on more vital tasks such as your business operations or public relations, then turn to design professionals like DreamX who know their stuff very well.

At DreamX, we provide website redesign services tailored to your unique needs, whether you're looking for a complete overhaul or just a few key improvements. Our team is ready to assess your current website and offer suggestions on what changes will make the most impact, helping you decide whether a full redesign is necessary. Don’t hesitate to reach out - let us help you transform your site into a modern, high-performing platform that truly reflects your brand.

Team Lead of UX/UI Designers
Veronika Ovchynnykova
Team Lead of UX/UI Designers
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Veronika is a UX/UI design team lead driven by a passion for user-centric design. She spearheads the creation of innovative and effective design solutions that elevate the user experience.

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