The Ultimate Guide to Planning Your Website Redesign Project

If your website has existed for a long time, this is a reason to think about redesigning it. The fact is that web development trends are constantly changing, and the things that attracted users around five years ago may seem high and dry today. 

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In particular, several years ago, the independent web resource GoodFirms conducted a survey among designers to find the reasons why users leave their websites. It turns out that about 40% of respondents were sure that this was due to the outdated design. Do you need to look for more explanations as to why you need a redesign? If you don’t, this article is for you. 

What Is a Website Redesign?

Website redesign is a modernization that involves changes in the design, content, and functionality of a specific web resource. There may be not only a change in color scheme but also in the website’s structure, which also implies a certain optimization of the HTML code.

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Redesign can be done every two years, or less often, every three or four years. However, when the appearance of your website remains the same for five years or more, your users are likely to begin to believe that your business is idle and, therefore, will likely choose a more successful competitor.

Why Is a Site Redesign Important?

Let's imagine that when you launched your website first, it generally satisfied its visitors. However, after a few years, its traffic began to gradually decline, although the quality of your service and/or goods did not decrease. Most likely, the problem is that your website’s design is outdated. Although this may seem to be the only reason why you need a redesign, there are several other reasons that also lead to it:

• You are going to migrate your website to a new engine;
• Despite regularly taking SEO measures, your website is not ranking well in search engines;
• You are planning to expand your audience reach and scale your business;
• Your company has rebranded, and now, this should apply to your website as well;
• You are entering a new market;
• Your product range or the concept of its promotion has completely changed.

Why You Need a Website Redesign Project Plan

In general, there are many goals that you can achieve through a redesign. The benefits of website redesign include improving the user experience, rebranding, increasing reputation, optimizing traffic indicators, conversions, etc., involving the website in marketing campaigns, and so on. 

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At the same time, whatever goal you pursue, its achievement must be consistent, and each step must be justified from the point of view of business and available resources. Otherwise, you will act chaotically, and the result of these actions will most likely not live up to your desires. To prevent this from happening, you actually need a project plan for website redesign.

How to Redesign a Website: Applying Key Principles for Success

Now, it's time to find out what five sequential phases the correct redesign strategy includes. 

Setting Clear Objectives

Any well-thought-out project plan for website redesign implies matching goals and needs to redesign tasks to be completed.

Understanding the Need for Redesign

At the very beginning, you will need to correctly identify the reasons for the redesign. For example, this could be an outdated design, a not-mobile-friendly user experience, the functionality update and complicated website structure related to it, etc. You need to describe all these reasons as precisely as possible to make it easier for your team of designers (and possibly developers) to decide on the scope of work.

Defining Your Goals

Once the reasons are clear, you can define SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals. Special cases of such goals may be increasing traffic, achieving better conversion rates, improving user experience, etc.

Research and Preparation

At this stage, you will have to complete more complex tasks that will lay a solid foundation for your team's further work. They will also help you understand how competitive your website is at the moment and which aspects of it have the highest priority.  

Analyzing the Current Website

Your website is probably already connected to some analytics system where you can evaluate the dynamics of its traffic, conversion rates, abandoned carts, and so on. Thus, you have to collect this data, evaluate its changes for better or worse over the last year, and compare these changes with seasonal and local trends in your niche to get the most objective assessment of your website.

Competitor Analysis

You will also have to analyze the websites of your main competitors to understand in what they are good at and what needs optimization. Through this analysis, you will be able to prioritize the tasks that your technical team will have to deal with.

Target Audience Identification

Refine your audience data – this is especially important if you're looking to enter new markets or scale your online business. However, even if your goals are less ambitious, you'll still need to refresh information about your potential customers – their demographics, pain points, goals, needs, etc.

Content Audit

Finally, you should conduct a global content audit – for this, you'll probably need the help of SEO experts. Specifically, if your website's main problem is low search engine rankings, it's likely due to poor-quality content that will need to be optimized or replaced with a new one.

Planning and Strategy Development

Actually, you are left with the last steps before you hand over your website rebuild project to your technical team.

Site Structure and Navigation

Based on the key indicators of your website displayed in the analytics, you will be able to determine which of your website’s navigation elements and structure components need to be changed.

Visual Design Considerations

If your current website seems visually outdated, you will need to identify relevant examples from your competitors and indicate which graphical aspects of their websites you like the most.

Technical Requirements

If you find that your website's performance is suffering or, for example, the website itself is not fully displayed on some mobile devices, optimizing these aspects will require the participation of web developers.

SEO and Content Strategy

If the problem is the poor quality of the content (lack of necessary keywords in the texts, low-quality images, outdated data, etc.), you will need to involve SEO specialists in the project as well.

The Design and Development Process

Now, it’s the practical part of your website redesign roadmap, which requires the involvement of technical specialists and the designers themselves.

Wireframing and Prototyping

Now that the project is in the hands of the designers, they can start creating wireframes according to your requirements for the updated version of the website. As your requirements become more detailed, they will build prototypes based on these wireframes.

Design Mockups

An intermediate stage between the development of wireframes and prototypes can be the creation of mockups. Essentially, these are medium-fidelity sketches of your project that, like wireframes, schematically demonstrate the main components of the website but already have a pre-defined color palette and some graphic objects. Typically, this intermediate stage is necessary for websites with a complex and/or non-trivial structure.

Development and Coding

If your site requires migration to a new CMS or you have discovered problems in the previous stages that can only be solved through changes in its program code, you will have to involve developers to eliminate these bottlenecks.

Testing and Quality Assurance

And, of course, don’t forget to staff your project team with quality assurance specialists who will check if the updated version of your website works correctly before it goes public.

Launch and Post-Launch Strategy

Finally, you can begin preparing for the website relaunch.

Preparing for Launch

If your updated website looks the way you like and all the inconsistencies have been ironed out, it makes sense to check its effectiveness on the representatives of its target audience. This way, you may get additional insights about optimization that can still be implemented before your website’s launch.

Launching the Website

Now, developers can upload a new version of the website to the hosting. It may require you to choose a new hosting provider or a new tariff plan from the old one – this makes sense if you plan to expand the reach of your audience.

Post-Launch Activities

This stage will last exactly until the next redesign. In particular, you will have to monitor the analytics of your update to see whether the new key indicators meet your original business requirements. You will also need to constantly work on your website's SEO by regularly uploading new, relevant content.

Conclusion

We hope that in this article, we have helped you understand how to website revamp, and now, you can begin this procedure as consciously as possible. If you are looking for specialists ready to take on not only the planning task but also the implementation of your redesign project, feel free to contact us, and our team will bring your most ambitious goals to life within your budget and timeline.

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