A website redesign is an excellent way to improve user engagement and create a more powerful reflection of your brand, product, or service. Website redesigns carry a bit of a bad rap.
According to some strategists, every time an organization hires a new marketer, a new website is sure to follow, regardless of whether that investment is justified. However, choosing a website redesign should be driven by clear objectives — not by one person's personal preference. Web presences have evolved substantially over the years, so it's important to make sure yours meets modern expectations.
Are you wondering how to project manage a website redesign? In this guide, you'll learn how to strategize your website redesign, ensure it's not a flop, and redesign it in-house.
What is a Website Redesign?
In website redesigning, a website is created from scratch or from templates that have been preconfigured. It is important to update information, improve navigation, and redesign the site in order to enhance the user experience.
The days of shallow landing pages with a brief company description and a few contact details are over. Today's websites are much more multi-faceted, like digital properties. By using search engine optimization-based website redesign (SEO), it climbs Google's congested streams of information.
Today's websites can support all kinds of functionality, chronicling a company's journey with its customers through a historical content timeline. You will need a site redesign project plan if you decide to move forward with a redesign.
Why do you Need a Website Redesign Project Plan?
How to manage a website redesign project? Here are a few reasons to consider a redesign:
Your website does not accurately reflect your brand
Inadequate user experience
Incompatible with today's technologies
Your capabilities are not reflected (especially in technology B2B industry)
Branding on your website isn't accurate
Probably the most straightforward reason to redesign your website is to rebrand. An effective website clarifies the brand's feel and message.
Retailers believe that sales begin the moment a customer enters the store. Creating leads and generating revenue through your website is equally valuable in today's digital ecosystem.
A pleasant visual experience is just as important as speed, intuitiveness, and functionality. Functionality-wise, if your website is faulty, slow, or otherwise technical incompetent, that speaks poorly of your company. A good website can serve as a valuable communicator for a business.
No traffic, no leads, no conversions
A modern website is designed so that visitors can interact with it and find out more. Lead magnets play a critical role in collecting a user's contact information.
If we take the example of eating out at an upscale restaurant, one server might regularly check on you, interrupting your dinner conversation, while another might seem absent. In our case, a perfect server gives clients the space they need to browse the menu comfortably but is never absent when they need assistance.
An outdated website cannot collect contact information, can't direct users to relevant information, or simply can't load quickly enough to hold a visitor's attention. When you do, keep in mind that aggressive pop-ups may be annoying, distracting, and generally work against you.
The following are some red flags to be aware of:
The website does not support functionality
No CRM or limited CRM
Unintuitive information architecture
Mobile visitors aren't able to access the site
How to Set Up a Website Redesign Project Plan
We have gathered a website redesign checklist to help you stay organized, build a site you can be proud of, and successfully show your brand!
Define your goals for the website
Your time and resources are wasted if you do not know what you want to accomplish. Goals should be specific and clear. Vanity should never drive goals.
What does it mean to have a vanity goal? The goal of increasing traffic to your website is a common one. However, ensuring your audience has relevant content would increase engagement or conversions. Numbers are not always the best way to describe your goal.
However, if you don't measure success, how will you know if it worked?
Evaluate the reason why you need a redesign
Understanding the reasons behind redesigning your website will help with defining your goals for the website. Defining goals and motivations behind the objectives also serves as a sense check throughout the planning process, helping you validate your actions and ensuring you are confident they will solve your challenge.
Before you start your redesign journey, ask yourself questions like:
Does it just feel like the right thing to do?
Have you received feedback from customers or employees?
Is your business experiencing a decline in sales?
Is your conversion rate down?
Are you having problems with your content?
It is essential to have one person managing from start to finish. One person should understand how and why a website redesign can get implemented. They should be aware of timescales, milestones, problems, and contacts. They hold everything together and ensure that every person involved in the project process is informed about all the factors impacting their work. They often oversee everything.
Define clearly what your target audience needs and challenges
With a website redesign, every element is equally important. It's not like painting a room. You can paint the walls and not polish the woodwork, and the room will still function, but when you skip tasks in a rebuild, the website will have problems - both in style and functionality.
Ask yourself if you have a thorough understanding of your customer segments. A successful redesign is dependent on this. You learn what makes your customers tick, what turns them off, and, more importantly, what they struggle with and need. By understanding these, you can start answering the questions they didn't even know to ask about your website layout and content.
Assess your site's risks and strengths
Using this method, you can quickly eliminate what is no longer needed on your website. Additionally, you can determine what on the site is helpful and what isn't.
Focus on these core aspects of your website to truly see what you need to change and what to keep:
STRENGTHS: Site characteristics that offer you an advantage and help you achieve your goals. Good calls to action, effective content presentation, and e-commerce functionality could be strengths.
WEAKNESSES: Limitations to attaining your goals. Outdated content or a tired brand could be a disadvantage.
OPPORTUNITIES: These things are not directly in your control, but you can take advantage of them before they are lost. Examples include new technology, upcoming marketing activities, and emerging markets.
THREATS: External factors that can hinder your business but are out of your control. Changes in regulation, law, competition, or technology may all contribute to this.
Take action based on your findings and analyze them
Having understood your customers and your website challenges and strengths, you should design a user journey that does two things:
Provides users with solutions to their challenges
Converts them into leads or customers by encouraging them to take the action you want on your site
A user journey should be part art and part science, based on the data you have from your existing site. You can use a variety of tools. Google Analytics is your first port of call, as well as business management tools like CEO-ME.
Create a content audit
During this audit, you will identify the best performing content/pages, discover the themes/topics that your audience engages with most, and discover which content is outdated and harming your audience.
Export your existing site's crawlable URLs using an Excel sheet. Next, you will need columns to enter data about your page title, target keyword, meta description, time on page, and conversions. In this case, you are picking a metric that will help you determine how well each page will perform on your new website compared to the old one.
A page can then be ranked as 'Keep', 'Update', or 'Remove'. Based on this, a site map and user journey will be developed.
Protect your search engine-optimized pages
Your website's metrics will also improve if you get found online. You can't increase new leads, conversions, or sales if no one can find your site and visit it. The following tips will help you optimize your new website for search engines:
Document your most search-valued pages
Identify which pages generate the most traffic, generate the most leads, and ultimately cover the most important topics using marketing analytics. You should create the proper 301 redirects if moving any of these valuable pages.
Create a 301 redirect strategy
Regarding retaining traffic and link value, 301 redirects are extremely important. Identify old URLs and new URLs in a spreadsheet and map out 301 redirects. Give this document to a technical person for implementation.
Do your keyword research
Each page on your newly designed website should be focused on one keyword or topic. Using on-page website redesign SEO best practices, optimize the pages of your website using the keywords. Moreover, you may consider adding new pages to your website that address particular topics and keywords that your current website might miss.
Create a site map
You can use a site map as a reference point for a clear two-dimensional structure throughout the redesign process. When you understand the performance of the pages you want to keep and have locked down your user journey, you will be able to create your site map. Site maps are extremely useful for cross-checking the build with the original plan. This original plan includes a site map. By doing this, you avoid creating unnecessary pages or overcomplicating your structure.
Create wireframes for your key page templates
Simple wireframes can show what content will go where and how it will be displayed. It helps you visualize the site's main page types. You would have a wireframe for each page type, such as Home, Landing, Content, Blog, and Contact.
You can assign a page type to each page in the website once you've identified the different types you think you'll need. You now know if any pages need a different template or wireframe. As a result, you will not have to discover this much later in the process. Clearly, wireframes help you save time on the overall project.
Be realistic with your go-live date
The design phase alone takes a considerable amount of work, let alone moving forward with the rest of the redesign. There can also be a lot of delays or halts as a result.
One day, you may find yourself faced with a full copy rewrite as well as the need to source images. It takes longer than you expected to pull all the blogs and news.
Think about the date that would be ideal for you to launch, then add a few weeks. That's great if you're super confident about your content and the process. It's always better to underpromise and overdeliver if you're making promises to other stakeholders!
Choose the right software
Choosing the right website design and management software at the end of the website redesign process is crucial. It's used for developing, designing, and publishing your website, and it's called a content management system (CMS).
The benefits of CMS software are numerous. A CMS can help you create a beautiful, functional website, whether you are a digital marketer or a web developer. You should select the right CMS based on your business, such as what CMSs you're already familiar with and which features your website redesign requires. The only CMS and ERP that combines the two are CEO-ME.
Get Started on Your Website Redesign Today
Your new website is ready for planning, building, optimizing, launching, and analyzing. The following steps will help you rethink your website to appeal to more consumers, impress more visitors, and convert more leads.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to Manage a Website Redesign Project
The task of redesigning a website involves significantly changing elements such as the code, content, structure, and visuals of your current website to make it more user-friendly. When a website is redesigned well, it usually boosts revenue, lowers bounce rates, and improves the user experience (UX).
How long does it take to redesign a website?
It can take 45 to 90 days or even longer for a website to undergo a redesign, depending on how complex the project is and what the site needs to accomplish. A whole redesign can seem like a daunting task, especially if you're new to web design.
How often should you redesign a website?
Most companies undergo a redesign every 6 months to 2 years.