When is the right time to redesign your website?

Your company’s website is the most important element of your digital strategy. It is the face of your company in the digital world. There still are many companies that have a web presence but their websites are outdated. And just as fashion changes and house styles evolve, websites need to evolve too. After all, nobody likes to have an old fashioned dress or a website.

Your prospective clients get information about your product, services, business and team through your website. So it needs to have a solid first impression. If the website is poorly designed, it immediately shuns away potential clients, causing them to never return.

Users only trust websites that have clear information and simple design. Thus, you must keep your website updated in terms of content and design which makes it more relevant and gives more conversions.

Blue Fountain Media conducted a survey on UX trends, and they concluded that 81% think less of a Brand if the website is not up to date. It is clear that if your website is old enough, website redesigning is necessary.

But how do you know if your website needs redesigning and what is the first thing you need to do to redesign it?

Should you redesign your website?

Many say that you should be redesigning your website every three years to keep up with the trends, but we believe that you should think of redesigning only if there is a need.

To find out when is the right time to take up this project, you should gather data on the current user journey, user flows and map out everything.

Are your users bouncing or leaving your site without taking any action? This is when you need to analyze user behaviour and find out the reason.

You need to conduct user experience research to find out whether they can easily find what they are looking for, can navigate the website with minimum friction and how appealing the website is to them.

Why you should redesign your website?

Based on our decade of experience, we found out the top reasons why you need to redesign your website.

Your website is not user-friendly & responsive

It is now 2021, a year after the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the world. Internet services have seen rises in usage from 40 % to 100 %, compared to pre-lockdown levels.

Users expect the website to load faster and have intuitive navigations and a non-intrusive design that clearly communicates your business offering. If that is not the case, they will leave your website.

With the advent of 4G, mobile internet penetration has exploded and the telecom industry has witnessed a total data growth of 60 per cent in India in five years.

This shows that people are now more active on the internet on their mobile devices than ever before.

It is highly likely that they will browse your website on their mobile devices first before switching to the desktop version. So, they are definitely going to bounce off of your website and never return.

Hence, having a user-friendly and responsive website is necessary.

It is not aligned with current market goals

For your company to grow and evolve, you have to align your sales and marketing strategies with the current market trends. Digital Marketing is now an inseparable aspect of any marketing strategy. Your website is a part of digital marketing and it should be in sync with the evolving digital trends.

If your website just talks about how and when your business was founded, and the services you provide without any clear call to action, you will not get any conversions.

So, in that case, you have to redesign your website and strategically place calls to action. This will help in achieving your goals.

c) Website does not look trustworthy or credible

Poor website designs generate mistrust in the users’ minds. If your website is not well built, has an outdated design or content is placed haphazardly, it will come off as sketchy to your website visitors.

Around 48% of people believe website design is the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business. Hence, your website design is the reason why people are converting through your website. 

You might need to consider redesigning and making your website visually appealing. It will send strong trust signals to your users which will lead to favourable decision making.

Is not SEO friendly

Poorly optimized websites do not appear as the top search result on Google or any other search engine.

Old websites do not have appropriate tags, coding or meta-descriptions which is required by search engine algorithms. 

This means your website is missing out on thousands of visitors who can convert without spending any ad money.

So, you need to get your site updated with relevant and effective SEO keywords and descriptions.

If you have a WordPress website, this article will help you optimise it.

e) Has a high bounce rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who visit a specific website and abandon it after checking out only one page. The bounce rate can be viewed in Google Analytics if you have installed the GA code and linked it with the Google Search Console.

If the visitor doesn’t have a positive experience while navigating your site, they may leave your site without visiting the other page, causing a high bounce rate.

High bounce rates will throw your website down below on the second or third page of the search engine results page and you will never be able to get any conversions.

If your website has been facing a high bounce rate, it is time to update and redesign your website.

All these reasons could be a sign that you need to redesign your website. But to do so, you need to plan a strategy so that all the changes you want are incorporated and the end goals you want to achieve are met.

Planning a strategy for redesigning the website

Planning the project, setting priorities and setting end goals is the first and the most important step in redesigning. Understand and keep the users’ needs and behaviour in focus so that your website matches their requirements and expectations.

After this, you must create prototypes to better understand how your new website would look to match all their requirements.

It can be achieved by user testing. It will help in checking if the design you have is right and if it is working with the users. Always use data and feedback from users to create a user-friendly, easy and smooth journey for your user.

Checklist for redesigning your website

1. Analyse what works and what doesn’t

You can’t change what you can’t measure. Use analytics to see what your visitors find valuable, and what they don’t.

Analyse the data from a KPIs perspective: Why do you have low page views? Why there are fewer clicks on the call to action buttons? Gather these bits of information to identify the areas of improvement.

2. Establish clear goals

You need to set goals for how well your website works for SEO & marketing, not just how nice it looks. What good is a car that is a beauty but does not run?

How to set goals?

i) Clearly define what you want from your website redesigning efforts. Maybe you want to increase the number of visitors or get leads or increase the conversions through the website. Set those Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

ii) List down the specific design goals like the website should have a clean, modern look with ample white space or it should have bright colours and subtle animations, etc.

iii) You can also list down any specific functionality that might get your user’s attention like – more CTAs, easy to fill forms etc.

3. Know your users’ requirements 

Before redesigning you have to know who you are designing for and what they like. Knowing the target audience helps you get a clear understanding of what you need to make.

Hence, first understand the requirements, preferences, browsing styles and keywords that your target audience is using. All this information will help you in creating the best website that properly caters to their needs.

4. Check your competition

Knowing your competition and what they’re doing is a great way to understand where you are in the market and how you could improve your website.

Try to understand why your competition is doing well, and what is it that they’re doing with their website that is lacking in your current website. This will give you an idea of how you could potentially do better in redesigning your website.

5. Review your website content

While you are thinking of redesigning, you might as well think of reviewing and rewriting your content. It is a commonly known fact that design and content work together.

One cannot sell itself without the other and both need to be updated regularly if you want your website to give you your desired results.  You can look up best practices for user engagement and plan new blogs, and when to publish them on your website.

One simple way to understand what content to put out there is by looking at what content is doing well and then using it as a template to plan future content and strategy.

6. Boost your site’s discovery with SEO

Obviously, you are planning on redesigning your website to boost your marketing and generate sales. But, for that to happen your site first needs to be discoverable by your prospective users.

This is where SEO comes into the picture. You can optimize your site for SEO in various ways like-

1. Have really well-written page titles, meta- descriptions and permalinks for all the content on your website.
2. Write content for readability. It should describe your product in an easy-to-understand manner. Also, make sure you include headers and subheaders everywhere.
3. Target the right keywords on all landing pages.
4. Check site loading time and try to make it as little as possible.

7. Make it responsive and mobile-friendly

Back in 2016, mobile browsing bypassed desktop browsing and has been increasing since then. All your users are on their mobile phones and tablets more than on desktops while they check your website.

Therefore, your website needs to be responsive and mobile-friendly so that it can reconfigure itself based on your user’s screen size and device. If your website is not optimized for mobile and other devices, your users might leave and look elsewhere.

Moreover, having a responsive design will also help boost your SEO as Google’s algorithm favours websites that have a responsive web design for their mobile search results.

The process for good redesign website

Following this process will lead to an increase in conversion rates.

A survey by Google found that website visitors make their first impressions of a site’s attractiveness within 1/20th of a second. And “visually complex” sites were consistently interpreted as less beautiful.  Hence, simplifying your design can help keep your visitor focused on the content that matters.

At Octet Design Studio, we have redesigned quite a few websites that have gone to do well for their respective businesses (you can check them out here). We follow a simple and minimalistic approach by using the Design Thinking strategy and Lean methodology.

If you think your website is facing any of the above-mentioned problems and needs a redesign you should definitely consider contacting us.