When it comes to redesigning a website, there are many reasons to give your website a new look. However, the most compelling reason could be to increase your audience’s engagement and use your website to increase interaction with your followers further.
Redesigning your website can be a success or a flop. It can consist of small changes or be a lengthy and nerve–wracking process.
Therefore, before you start the redesign, you should have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and where your online presence will go afterward.
Long gone are the days when you could change your website and its elements as quickly as the billboard on the side of the road. When a user visits your website, they want to connect with your brand in a flash and see interaction opportunities.
So how can you revamp your website to increase audience engagement and turn your visitors into loyal customers?
What is a website redesign?
A website redesign is a comprehensive overhaul that significantly changes elements such as the code, content, structure, and appearance of your current website to serve your visitors better. A good website redesign usually increases sales, lowers bounce rates, and improves user experience (UX).
Reasons to redesign your website
Computer and mobile technology evolve as quickly as design trends. As a result, the focus of your online presence may also change. Therefore, your website needs to catch on and keep up with technology. The top reasons to redesign your website are:
Outdated CMS: Some web platforms and content management systems can’t keep up with the technology of more modern systems like WordPress. If you built your website on an older platform, you’re already limited in features and vulnerable to cyberattacks. By redesigning your website on a versatile, innovative, and secure platform like WordPress, you can instantly adapt to the latest trends and maintain your online presence secure.
Outdated design: First impressions are crucial in business. You have a couple of seconds to get hold of and keep a user’s attention. The design and quality of your website are directly related to this. If your website looks like it’s from the dot-com era of the 90s, there’s a good chance users will look elsewhere for a better experience.
Not suitable for mobile devices: More people are online than on desktops. And mobile users want a quick and easy experience on their devices. It is essential to have a platform that can provide this for different smartphones and tablets. Another essential advantage of a WordPress website is that the platform itself provides a mobile responsive experience.
Doesn’t produce results: You may think that your website is a work of art by Michelangelo himself. Or you may prefer a minimalist website design. However, your main goal with your website is to attract visitors and new prospects and convert leads into customers. If you do not see results on your current websites, it may be time for a change.
New business goals: In business, everything can change. One day you have a priority, then a trend in your industry pops up, and you have different goals. Social media integration and cloud applications didn’t exist ten years ago. You need a redesigned website that integrates with the latest technologies and aligns with your new business goals.
Common website redesign mistakes
Before you start improving your website, you need to know how to avoid the most common redesign mistakes:
No goals/strategy: The spontaneous approach to redesign can take you far and allow you to share your creativity, but will it be effective? Will your redesign produce the results you want if it’s done without an objective? We highly doubt it. For instance, if you want to increase your email subscribers by 15%, you understandably require to enhance your landing pages, opt-in forms, and CTAs. If you didn’t have this goal in the first place, you wouldn’t even be thinking about this improvement.
Don’t rely on data: Data should be at the heart of your redesign process. If you know what to measure, you know what your future goals should be. If you forgo analytics, you’ll miss the opportunity to grow your conversion rate and customer base.
Keeping the same content: It doesn’t matter if you invest hours, days, or months in developing your current content. If you decide to update your website, you will need to update your content, mainly if you include new pages with new categories, services, or products. You must make sure that you have high-quality content on each of your pages, perfectly combined with your redesign.
Analyze your website
Examining the present state of your website is a great starting point for your redesign. If you think your site is a complete mess, you might want to start from scratch. However, if you have some elements on your site that are working perfectly and generating sales, you may want to start building your new design around those elements.
Reviewing your website will provide you with a good overview of where you are with your online presence and how you are presenting your business to your online visitors. It would be best to clarify that your design should unite your target customers with your brand. The things you need to focus on when analyzing your website are:
First impression: How do users feel when they land on your site? What feelings does your site evoke? The first clicks and steps on your site are also necessary: Is your site structured, and do visitors quickly find what they are looking for?
Content: Do you have valuable and easily digestible content? Examine how your content feels and how the visual elements of your site contribute to the overall picture.
Site Architecture: Do you have free navigation links on your site? Are these links something your target users expect to see or are something missing from your site? Navigation on your site needs to be intuitive and workable for users. It also applies to every button and menu on your site.
Benchmarking metrics
Before you begin your redesign, you need to determine what you will measure afterward and what a particular KPI must do at a minimum to be considered a success. Your current and future focus should be on the following:
- Number of unique visits per month
- Average monthly bounce rate
- Average monthly time spent on the website
- Best performing keywords
- Number of inbound links
- Number of new leads per month
- Monthly sales figures
- variety of pages that are indexed
- The number of pages that receive traffic
To have instant access to this information, we recommend using Google Analytics. Log in to Google Analytics, add the code snippet found under Property > Tracking Information > Tracking Code on your website, and begin tracking how your site performs.
Define website goals
It would be best if you had good reasons why you want to redesign your site. It shouldn’t just be about “looking good.” Your site is about more than how it looks – it’s primarily about how it performs. Be transparent regarding why you want to redesign your site, and tie your goals to something you can measure. Some of the key goals you should consider are:
- Increasing the number of unique visits
- Decrease the bounce rate
- Increasing the time spent on the website
- Improving domain authority
- Increasing the number of quality leads
- Increase in the number of sales
- Improving SEO ranking for your keywords
- Address your buyer persona
Websites shouldn’t just be about “me, myself, and I.” When users come across such a website, they will often think, “What’s in it for me?”
To successfully redesign your website, you need to address your target persona. That is your perfect website visitor, and you need to tailor your redesign to this person. Your personal opinions and preferences should be set aside at this stage.
Check your SEO
Your redesign is irrelevant if users can’t find you with a simple Google search. If customers can’t find you, you can’t expect new leads and more conversions from your website. Before you start your redesign, review your SEO and consider the following tips:
Document your most valuable pages: Using Google Analytics, determine which pages on your site receive the most traffic and inbound links and are most relevant to your target audience. Before moving these pages, make sure you have 301 redirects in place.
301 Redirects: A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one page URL to another. It sends website visitors and search engines to a different URL than what they originally typed into their browser or clicked on in a SERP. This is important to retain web traffic and links from a particular page. Open a spreadsheet and write down each of your 301 redirects. Then implement them when you redesign your site or find a web developer to help you with this.
One keyword per page: You need to focus on one keyword for each new site page. Optimize your pages using white hat and SEO best practices. Add new content and pages related to your main keywords and topics you neglected on your previous site.
Competitor analysis
Go straight to the heart of the matter. The first thing you need to do is examine your competitors’ websites and the first impression they give. Write down all the emotions that your competitors’ design evokes and why it evokes those emotions.
The next point is the structure of the websites. Do they have a clear structure? Are the page elements arranged in a pattern that leads the user directly to the CTA or not? And most importantly, would you apply this structure to your new design?
What about the UX of your competitors? Your competitors may have something that discourages users from taking action or leads them directly to the desired action. If they have a functional design, their website navigation must be perfect. Always look for reasons why users should visit your competitor’s website.
Sometimes your competitors use interactive elements like hero images with opt-in forms, sliders, or carousels to attract or distract users’ attention. Check how you can use the same elements in your layout, if they are beneficial for users and how you can change them with something else if you have them on your website.
Next, your competitive analysis needs to look at the content itself. It would be best to examine how readable and interactive the content is. Do they use a specific font for the sliders, headings, or paragraphs? Does the font dimension make the content readable or affect the spacing between letters and sentences?
Again, consider why your more successful competitors use this font or font size. Is it short-form or long-form content? If your competitors rank well on Google, they are most likely offering relevant long-form content for their target audience.
When analyzing your competitors, the most important thing is to change your POV for each page. There are various elements like landing pages, blogs, galleries, and portfolios, and there are likely different people from your target audience consuming them as content. Don’t forget these contrasts when evaluating your competitors.
Increase engagement through redesign
Right here are the eight steps you can take to redesign your website to increase engagement:
1. Update your content
When visitors land on your new site, the most noticeable thing has to be fresh and revamped content on your homepage, blog, and landing pages. If you’ve already used Google Analytics to find out which pages users spend the most time on, you’ll know where to update content and add completely new and different copy.
Your content strategy needs to be innovative and exciting because that’s the only way to keep your visitors on the page longer. People don’t intend to open a page and read the “last post” from a year ago.
2. Know your target audience well
If you are serious about expanding your service, you should invest in visitor statistics. You’ll learn more about your target audience and how best to target them by tracking where visitors come from and what steps they take before coming to your site.
It would be best to look at the number of sessions and page views to get a better sense of what your website users are interested in. You can use this data to improve the content and design of your website. You can also personalize it to focus more on essential aspects of your target audience. In short, visitor analytics is a crucial tool to grow your business by learning more about your website visitors.
Google Analytics is a helpful tool for tracking website activity. After collecting all this data, you can use it to understand better your target audience – where they come from, what kind of material they like the most, etc.
The data collected at this stage can help you make more informed, data-driven decisions throughout the media planning process. Google Analytics will give you a better sense of who your target audience is and what they want, so you can design more targeted and effective campaigns that lead to a better return on investment.
3. Improve navigation
Visiting and using your site needs to be effortless. Don’t make users click more than three times to access anything on your site. Again, use Google Analytics to check what users are searching for when they land on your site and bring that content closer to them with your redesign. Make search simple and the search bar easy to find. Sometimes the search bar is the easiest way for users to find what they are looking for on your site.
4. Use visual elements
The only way to breathe life into your texts is through videos and images. You can utilize tools like Lumen5 to create short videos that match your blog post. Or you can use infographics to support your text and present data from your research. Be creative and think about how to repurpose your content and increase its impact by sharing it on social media with innovative designs and presentations.
5. Improve the mobile design
Mobile is the present and the future. It makes no sense to ignore website optimization for mobile devices and think your audience will be more comfortable on a desktop PC.
When redesigning your website, you require to think mobile from the beginning. Depending on the day or conditions, users may access your website from anywhere. It would be good to give them a flawless transition on any screen, whether a laptop, smartphone, or tablet.
6. Don’t hide your CTA (call-to-action)
When users land on your page, one of the first things they need to focus their attention on is your call to action. Don’t hide your call to action. Your CTA should be relevant and highlighted to your target audience. You need to use CTAs throughout your site because any content on your pages can lead your audience directly to the CTA. Test different approaches and find out what works best.
7. Impeccable opt-in forms
Don’t hide your sign-up and opt-in forms either. They can provide your organic audience growth a considerable boost and endless opportunities to engage your subscribers. Signing up for your email list should be easy. The form needs to be easy to see, and you shouldn’t ask for more than a name and email address. You’ll have more opportunities to gather information if you connect with your subscribers regularly.
8. Integrate social networks
Besides SEO and email, social media is your most enormous opportunity to increase engagement on your website. If you don’t have social networking and sharing buttons on your current site, you should include them when you redesign your site. This way, you move the conversation from your site to social media and vice versa. Social media also allows you to listen to your audience and what they are saying about your brand or niche.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the more you apply the above tips when redesigning your website, the more engagement you will get. Make sure that your redesigned website works well on mobile devices and that you provide the best possible experience to the target users. Your redesign will help your brand last for years to come and evolve online.
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