Your website serves as your company’s 24/7 point of contact with potential customers, staff, and business partners. Most businesses need to revamp their websites every three to five years since technology, and design trends are evolving quickly. You should update the site more frequently if you work in a competitive sector. Compile and review a website redesign checklist to ensure that it achieves your business objectives, engages and converts website users, and accurately represents your company.
What is a Website Redesign Checklist?
A business tool is your website. It serves as a sales pitch, a business card, an advertisement, a listing, and a display for goods and services. Each of these tasks is crucial to your online and offline business success. The design of your website becomes more crucial than ever when you approach it in this manner. You might even begin to reconsider your entire appearance, or perhaps you already do. If you’re at this point, a website redesign checklist should be kept in mind for the best results. This will assist you in creating the finest website you can for a strong online foundation.
If your company already has a website, a “website redesign” project would involve updating and upgrading the site’s overall aesthetic. A website makeover project could also involve switching the website’s platform or introducing new features like e-commerce or membership, which needs a redesign website checklist. A complete website redesign is generally necessary when switching from one platform to another, such as when moving from HTML to WordPress. It will be simpler to maintain existing content and functionality if you have a WordPress website and want to improve its appearance. However, you still intend to use WordPress for the content management system.
When Do You Need a Website Redesign Checklist?
Redesigning a website requires a significant time and financial commitment. Without completely redesigning the site, you can make many style adjustments and enhancements to WordPress websites. This website redesign checklist will help you decide whether to redesign your website.
1. Role of Website in Your Business
The first part of website redesign considerations is to determine the role of your website in your business. Your website can still be an effective tool for attracting new customers, even if most of your revenue comes from recommendations. Even if they were referred to a firm, most customers now check out their website before getting in touch with them. Many companies that previously relied on recommendations and word of mouth may suddenly experience a decline in new business due to an outdated website. Analyze the conversion and revenue levels of your website. It might be time to redesign the site if you notice a decline in traffic, a high bounce rate, or reduced conversions.
2. Outdated Design
Your website represents your company to past and present customers, potential partners, workers, and customers. Nowadays, a company’s website is frequently used as a basis for judgment. If your website is outdated, website visitors may assume that your company is not operational, not reputable, or unreliable. It’s time to update the site if the existing version needs to accurately reflect your company in terms of both design and content.
3. Updating & Managing the Site
Websites were once created using HTML and unique coding. Unless you are a coder, these sites are exceedingly challenging to maintain and modify. Most contemporary websites are created using a content management system like WordPress. The management of these websites is significantly simpler, and non-developers may easily update the material and add new articles. Many businesses may begin with a website created on a platform for website builders like Squarespace.
4. Investment
Investing time and money is usually necessary when redesigning a website. Numerous elements will affect the project’s final cost. It could be preferable to wait if your company is still waiting to invest significant money in the site. You get what you pay for with websites, as with any other product.
Website Redesign Checklist for You
After considering the criteria above, it may be obvious that your company needs to revamp its website, but you may still need to be more confident. Redesigning a website is frequently compared to relocating. It’s a significant change, so it’s common to feel anxious about how things will turn out. The key actions for a website redesign checklist are shown below.
1. Audit Website
Before setting your new website’s objectives, you must comprehend your current web scenario. First, look at your site’s data for the last three months to see if you have enabled Analytics or another analytic tracking on the page. You can also analyze the data for the previous year and six months if your firm has certain slow seasons. Pay close attention to these metrics:
- Monthly traffic volume to the website
- Home page and primary page bounce rates
- Top pages visited
- Conversions – phone calls, live chats, and contact form submissions
Assess your site’s security and speed next. There are various free speed tests available, and it’s usually preferable to use a few of them to average out the time it takes for a site to load a page. Check the website for any security flaws as well. Installing an SSL certificate and turning on HTTPS for the site are requirements. Look for defects or issues by reviewing your site’s main pages. You’d be shocked how many website owners need to check their sites regularly. Finally, do some competitive analysis and look at your rivals’ websites. Examine the websites of companies that are leaders in your market’s industry.
2. Goals & Web Team
Prepare your top objectives for the new website after finishing your audit of the current one. These could entail increasing the speed and performance, enhancing user experience and conversion rates, and including additional functionality and integrations. Your top priorities and project objectives will guide your search for the ideal web team. For instance, if your organization is B2B, you should look for a web agency with experience designing efficient B2B websites. Alternatively, if you want to add an online store to WordPress website, look for a WooCommerce e-commerce development company.
Remember that a high-quality website requires the three extremely specific abilities of online strategy, web design, and web development when choosing a partner for the project. Finding a single freelancer who excels at all these many skills is uncommon. You’ll normally discover that a small to mid-size web firm will have at least three professionals working on the web project, including a user experience web strategist and a website design development team, depending on your project budget. Additionally, you’ll want to confirm that the development team knows the web platform you’ll be using to host the website.
3. Visitor-Centric Approach
If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase, a visitor-centric approach refers to putting your website visitors’ demands first when building the site. Many companies will need to determine what they want on the website against what their leaders want on the site. That’s good, but the website is for your website visitors, not your staff. Understanding the various visitor types and making the site relevant to them is essential to enhance conversions and engagement. You can concentrate on the website visitors by working with a web strategist at the outset of the online project. A web strategist can then create the home page’s wireframe, ensuring that it directs visitors to the appropriate content and encourages them to convert.
4. Content Mapping
You should choose the new website’s structure before beginning the design process. A web strategist can assist you in developing the information architecture, which involves naming and ordering the site’s primary pages and navigation. You can decide on the site’s most crucial pages and material by researching your visitor groups and the issues that worry your website and visitors. Look at your current site’s most popular pages to ensure the content is maintained and improved. The navigation of the website, as well as any drop-down and internal pages, will be visually outlined in the information architecture.
Try to minimize the number of pages when planning the content for the new website. There used to be many pages in drop-down menus on many older websites. Nevertheless, most people browse websites on mobile and tablet devices. On small devices, long drop-down menus are exceedingly challenging to navigate. Additionally, you want to provide your customers with only a few choices. Most material on modern websites is moved to blog postings or resource sections. This is a fantastic way to maintain content for SEO and educational purposes.
5. Design & Development
You’ll start the design process after finishing a content plan and a wireframe (or wireframes) for the new site. If you are spending money on a bespoke website design, your web designer will use Photoshop to make several mockups of the website. Because the designer can include your branding in a premium, contemporary style, a custom web design offers several benefits. Your web team will begin the coding or development process once the design mockups have been approved. The development team should adopt a mobile-responsive WordPress framework and adhere to best practices in terms of security and performance when designing a site using a content management system like WordPress.
6. Prepare to Launch
After creating every page of the new website, you’ll start the last round of quality assurance and get ready to launch. This final stage of a website project might seem as stressful and drawn out as the final two minutes of a professional basketball game. A new website’s launch can cause much worry, and some customers might want to keep adjusting until everything is right. The site’s launch is still ongoing if you’ve developed it on an easy-to-manage platform. The website can and should be improved further.
Conclusion
This is our website redesign checklist for you! It can be complicated to do everything exactly as it should be, especially when there are deadlines or other time restrictions. However, adhering to it as closely as possible will enable you to turn your new website into the lead- and traffic-generating machine of your dreams. If you want to revamp your website, contact us. Arturo Digital has a team of exceptional designers who deliver a step higher than your expectations.
Read more: What Is Product Branding, And What Are Its Benefits for Your Business?
