STUDIO FIVE

Is It Time for a Website Redesign?

Is your website in need of a makeover? Planning a website redesign can be exciting for any business owner or professional. However, it’s essential to approach this process carefully to avoid some common and costly mistakes. This blog post will discuss the top website redesign mistakes and provide valuable insights on avoiding them.

Learning from others’ experiences can ensure your website redesign project is a resounding success. So, let’s explore the key strategies for maximizing its success while avoiding potential pitfalls.

Your website is the virtual face of your business.

Whether it’s a landing page for your startup, a website for your small business, or a million-dollar e-commerce store for your global product brand, your website design and functionality are indispensable elements in generating revenue.

In this increasingly digitally-dependent world, your website’s appearance will determine whether people should trust and do business with you. It’s do or die for your ROI.

Web technology is an ever-changing field. Unless you keep up, your website can go down and out before you know it.

Here is how you can tell if you need a website redesign.

So, should you just change things haphazardly if you’re considering redesigning your website’s look and functionality? No!

Website redesign is a tricky process. Unless you do it right, you’ll have to deal with repercussions. To help you do better with your website redesign project, I will outline 13 of the worst mistakes and how to avoid them.

Why You Must Avoid Website Redesign Mistakes

If you don’t do your best to avoid making website redesign mistakes, you’ll have to deal with regrettable risks.

Your website’s ranking will go down, and fewer and fewer people will see it when they make queries on search engines.

• You will lose leads – your potential clients
• Your marketing efforts will go to waste
• Your brand can get discredited in the industry
• You’ll be giving undue advantage to your competitors
• Your business can close down

Redesigning a website is more challenging than hiring a web designer and telling him how you’d want the website to look. It involves more than that. Many businesses made mistakes that cost them. Here are the biggest website redesign mistakes you must avoid.

13 Costly Website Redesign Mistakes

Not Checking Analytics, Current Design, and Feedback

Relying on gut feeling or peer opinions alone is a formula for a website redesign disaster. While you might already have a new website design in mind, checking your previous analytics on your current design will help you answer why you need to redesign it.

Starting with analysis and feedback will ensure that your redesign efforts go in the right direction, your budget is well-spent, and your income goals are met. Make a list of your website’s outdated features, fun, functional technologies, and elements that still need to be added.

You might need to upgrade to a better content management system and migrate your data.

You should also check which pages have the least visits, how many pages a unique visitor visits and what path he takes, the bounce rates for each page, and other important KPIs.

If you still need to utilize Google Analytics, now is the best time. This free analytics tool will help you know your website’s weak and strong points and help you track visitor behavior when on your website.

Once measurable data is in place, it’s easier to see what needs to be changed and which pages to prioritize. You can also use a heat map to check which parts of your web pages have the most engagements. This will help you see what you just changed and what you should retain in your current design.

Lastly, it would be best if you also considered feedback. When choosing a web designer to redesign your website or online store, it’ll be helpful to contact a couple and ask for an initial analysis of the website and what they plan to change. This way, you’ll get expert feedback and also get to choose the best person to do the job.

Not Setting Realistic Goals

After gathering analytics insights and testing, you have the data needed to identify loopholes, what to change in your website, and why it needs a redesign. Once you have the data, you’ll see what problems you’ll be solving, the challenges that need to be addressed, what resources you’ll need, and what comprises a successful website redesign.

For example, if you’re an e-commerce site, one problem you may find during analysis and testing is a massive drop from the add-to-cart page to the purchase page. Seeing this, you can set a goal to reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions.

You may have found out from the analysis that website visitors have a significant problem with navigation. You then set a goal of making the navigation easier by reducing the visual clutter on each page.

Setting goals will give you the proper perspective for your redesign project and help you easily determine its success. Otherwise, you’ll need help handling human resources, budgeting the redesign, and choosing vital integrations. Without a goal in mind, it’ll be easy for you to change plans at the very last hour, wasting resources and time spent working on the project.

Not Using Artificial Intelligence

We are now experiencing a substantial transition in developing and constructing websites. Previously, designers mainly depended on their intuition and expertise to create functional and visually appealing websites.

With the advancement of AI tools, designers can leverage additional categorical data to enhance their decision-making process and develop highly complicated and personalized user experiences. Design tools enhanced with AI can process extensive data and generate designs tailored to improve user experience and personalize it for individual users.

Moreover, AI-powered design tools are set to revolutionize the industry by automating numerous laborious and time-consuming tasks currently in web design, freeing up designers to focus on more creative aspects of their work.

While AI has already started to take over numerous tasks performed by web designers and developers, it’s important to note that it will only partially eliminate the need for the creative individuals responsible for these duties. Human creativity will continue to play a crucial role in web design.

Not Sure What Functionality to Add

What does your website need? Are you a service business that needs to offer exceptional customer support? You will need a live chat feature.

Are you selling your products online? If so, you must integrate a review page to prove your product’s quality and credibility.

Do you own a personalized product website? You’ll need integrations to facilitate customers’ communication of references.

Know what integrations help lessen friction in the conversion path. This way, you won’t be swayed to purchase technology that seems like a fancy addition but makes no significant contribution to your website.

Additionally, doing extra research on the latest version of an integration will give you considerable time before needing another website redesign, which will save you funds.

Not Setting a Realistic Budget

The “crossing the bridge when you get there” attitude in this aspect of the website redesign process will only get you so far. Chances are, you’ll exhaust your funds to the last drop and still haven’t finished the website redesign.

If it has been years since your website first went live, the budget you set for it won’t be enough for the redesign. Web designers’ fees increased, more advanced features are required, and additional plugins needed to be purchased for added functionality.

That’s why the previous point mentioned determining which technology and integrations to use; it’s a big part of setting a budget.

Also, setting a timeframe for the project will help set the budget. Without a timeframe, the website redesign process can take longer than expected, exhausting more funds for the resources needed.

Not Focusing on Mobile Users

A functional website seamlessly works between different browsers and different operating systems.

According to TechJury, 83% of mobile users expect a flawless experience whenever they visit a website with any mobile device. And for good reason: most people search the internet using their mobile phone or tablet rather than desktop computers.

You can’t guarantee that a network of people use the same browser and operating system. If one of them recommends your brand to another and your website doesn’t work with their device, you’ll lose potential customers. This shortcoming can quickly be fixed by cross-browser testing so that you can eliminate any bugs.

Another thing to keep in mind is responsiveness. Nobody likes clicking on one button but opening another. Always check if the website is responsive to your commands.

Responsiveness also involves fast load speeds. Ensure that the elements you include on your website, especially images and videos, are light enough. However, you must also choose file sizes that don’t compromise the image and video quality.

With this in mind, when redesigning your website, optimize for mobile-friendliness and continuously check between different devices to ensure they work well on various mobile systems.

Prioritizing Aesthetics Over Functionality

A website redesign isn’t done to make your website look better or more appealing. There’s no point in being appealing if visitors get a terrible user experience and bounce right off the site, never to return.

You can’t generate sales and get the ROI for your redesign investment this way.

My point? Functionality should be the utmost priority; visual appeal is only second. Ensure that the redesigned website doesn’t just look good; more importantly, it has to work better.

Navigation should be accessible, and unnecessary pages should be removed or merged into another page for supplementary content. Otherwise, your website’s conversion rate will suffer.

Overcomplicating the Design

When planning a website redesign, a balance must be struck. Integrations are great for user experience, but going overboard can harm it.

What is the latest trend in web design? Simplicity. I don’t mean making the pages look dull; I mean avoiding too much visual clutter that distracts the user from the parts where you need their attention most.

If the web design has too many elements, it can be overwhelming and distracting. Visitors will likely hit the back button the second they see how the website looks.

So avoid putting too much information on the front page, especially above the fold. You only have a second to convince visitors that your website is worth exploring. Keep things simple but enticing to keep them captivated. If they don’t see too much information the first time they set foot on the website, they’ll be more motivated to scroll down and check out your offer.

Categorize elements on the website to make them easier on the eyes. For example, if you have a lot of blog posts, divide them into categories. If you have lots of contact information, you can add dividers or make the spaces between information big enough to make visual segments easily perceptible.

Not Having a Content Strategy

A redesigned website is only as good as its content. Fresh content containing keywords with high search volume will drive the very people for whom you redesigned the website to your business.

Before planning a website redesign, you must create fresh content to establish an initial list of leads for improvement.

With them, you will have an initial set of testers to check if your redesigned website is functional enough to drive more leads and conversions.

Not Optimizing for Lead Generation

Driving visitors to your website will only be helpful if you can convert them to leads.

Your website must act as a catch basin for people you can sell your items to. You can move them further in the buyer’s journey if you have lead generation mechanisms.

First, you have to show your brand’s credibility. Once you break through that initial trust barrier, you’ll have more chances of converting casual visitors into buying customers.

If you develop a robust content strategy but require additional lead generation tools, it’s akin to shooting an arrow without directing it toward the intended target.

So, how can you aim your arrows at the target? Here’s how:

• Define your target audience.
• Create short educational articles to help your target audience and position you as a thought leader in the industry.
• Create a lead magnet to collect website visitors’ names, email addresses, and phone numbers. When visitors realize you’re a credible source, they’ll want to learn more from you.
• Create an email marketing sequence that will build your credibility further and answer questions about your product that prevent them from converting.
• Schedule calls with those who provided their phone numbers so you can ask them about their concerns, assist them, or motivate them to convert.
• Once they convert, continue to nurture leads by providing valuable content for recurring revenue.

There are a few ways of offering a lead magnet; some insert it in a blog post, while others are more direct by offering it on the homepage.

However, some people prefer getting direct answers from your team. So, create a “Contact Us” page so they can contact you through their preferred channel. A live chat feature will also be helpful so leads get the information they need instantly.

Add call-to-action buttons on your landing, contact, and blog pages. This tells visitors what action you want them to take.

Neglecting SEO

Creating a website that doesn’t rank well on search engines is like building a store in the middle of nowhere – you won’t get customers.

According to a report by the Search Engine Journal, around 60-70% of companies lose organic traffic after a website redesign.

Hence, neglecting search engine optimization is one of the biggest mistakes when redesigning a website. No matter how good your website looks, if people don’t see it in search engines, you’ll be the only one appreciating it.

Because of this, you should always stay on top of the latest SEO trends. If you’re hands-on with the project, you can use SEO tools to control your website visibility better.

The work involves:

• Submitting a sitemap to major search engines for your redesigned website to be crawled, indexed, and ranked for any related query.
• Ensuring old website URLs are redirected to the new ones through 301 redirects. It’s best if you keep the old URLs.
• Security is also a search engine ranking factor; install security measures, such as an SSL certificate, to ensure visitors’ browsing safety.

If you feel that you’re spreading yourself too thin by taking on the responsibility of working on the SEO, you can always hire an SEO agency to do the job for you.

SEO is vital for your landing page, product page, and blog content, so you shouldn’t neglect this strategy.

Rushing The Project

If this is your first website redesign, you’ll likely have to do a significant overhaul. It will take time to analyze the current design, get feedback, plan and implement tests, decide which integration to add, and assemble everything. Drag-and-drop website builders are available but won’t be an overnight project.

Think about building a house. Would you trust the structure enough to live and sleep peacefully if it took just a day to build? Quality will always be questioned in these cases, and the same goes for redesigning a website.

To get a reasonable time frame, consult with a few designers. Tell them what the work involves and how much they think it will take. From their various responses, you can take the average duration.

It might help to divide the redesign into phases and set deadlines for each phase so that progress can be easily seen. But again, you have to consult with the web designer to set workable deadlines that will not compromise the output.

Not Testing Enough

Other than checking for analytics, before you can do the actual website redesign, it will be helpful to do the following testing:

• Functionality
• Testing third-party integrations
• Setting up 301 redirects
• Cross-browser testing on the computer, tablet, and mobile phone
• Checking for on-page SEO
• Grammar and spelling check
• Load speed check

Testing for these will help you see what works well so you can continue implementing it on the redesign.

But the testing continues beyond there. The same test must be performed before and after the launch.

This extensive testing process will ensure lapses are addressed so no blunders arise and the website is bug-free once it is fully operational.

Additionally, you’ll avoid the risk of applying the same outdated logic and structure from your previous design. Many testers have found this to be a common blunder when redesigning websites.

Making the Most of Your Website Redesign

Keep these 13 things in mind to make the most of your website redesign and avoid costly mistakes. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your website looks better and converts better.

Don’t underestimate the complexity of a website redesign—it’s more than just hiring a web designer. Maximize your success by taking these precautions and enhancing usability and functionality. Don’t let your efforts go to waste. Contact us for more information.

Is It Time to Update Your Online Presence?

A website redesign brings long-term cost savings and a high return on investment. It also improves website performance, raises search engine rankings, and enhances user experience. These advantages increase lead generation, sales, visibility, customer engagement, and satisfaction. By focusing on a well-designed user experience, businesses can use website redesign to drive growth and achieve sales goals.

Don’t miss out on these benefits – contact us today for more details and start your website transformation journey. Our team of professional e-commerce designers will be happy to help.