Now that you’re equipped with more information and insight you are better prepared to plan your website redesign strategy. Your website redesign strategy will help you define the scope and scale of your project, set a realistic timeline, and allocate resources and budget effectively.
Step 1: Define Your Website Redesign Goals and Objectives
The first step in planning your website redesign strategy is defining your goals and objectives. What are you trying to achieve with your website redesign?
- Are you simply looking for a more professional, visually appealing website?
- Do you want to improve your website’s user experience, navigation, mobile-friendliness, page-speed?
- Do you want to rank higher in search engines?
- Do you want to increase conversions?
- Do you want to update your design, or rebrand?
Defining your goals and objectives will help you stay focused and ensure your website redesign meets your needs and expectations.
When setting your goals and objectives, be specific and measurable. For example, instead of saying you want to improve user experience, you could set a goal to reduce your website's bounce rate by 20% in the next six months.
Identifying your goals and objectives will help create a clear roadmap for your website redesign, which will, in turn, help you stay focused and ensure that your redesign meets your business needs.
Step 2: Plan Your Website Structure
The next step in your website redesign strategy is planning your website's structure. Your website’s structure is the process of organizing, structuring, and labeling content to make it easy to find and use. It outlines how the website will be laid out, including the main categories and subcategories.
Your content audit should inform your website structure. During the audit, it is recommend that you categorize content by type (e.g., blog posts, product pages, case studies) and topic. Use this categorization as a starting point for grouping related content. By mapping out your pages into primary categories and then delineating them into supporting sub-categories, you create a hierarchy that enhances user experience and search engine visibility.
This structured approach not only simplifies navigation for your visitors, making it straightforward for them to find the information they need but also streamlines the indexing process for search engines. A clear, logical site structure is instrumental in boosting your SEO efforts, as it allows search engines to understand the hierarchy and importance of your content, enhancing your site's visibility and ranking.
High-priority content, like core product information, should be easily accessible. Less frequently accessed content, like detailed white papers, can be housed in a dedicated section. The content audit will expose content gaps or redundancies. Leverage this insight to streamline user flow. For example, if you have multiple pages on similar topics, consider merging them or creating a parent page with subcategories for subtopics.
Create a visual representation of your website structure using a sitemap. The sitemap shows the hierarchy of pages and how they connect, ensuring smooth navigation for users. Tools like flowcharts or mind maps can be helpful for visualizing your website's structure.
Step 3: Create a Content & SEO Strategy
Your content is pivotal to the success of your website redesign. It’s important that you have content that will convert that also caters to every aspect of the buying process. Developing a solid content plan can increase conversions as well as help you rank higher in search engines.
Developing a Content Plan
Before creating new content, review your existing content and create a plan for content creation or migration. Determine what needs updating, archiving, or enhancing. Ensure that you have content to support your new sitemap.
From an SEO perspective, it’s important to catalog each page that exists on your website, including how much traffic each page receives, what keywords it is currently ranking for, and its page title and meta description. This helps ensure that you don’t update a page's content and lose your SEO rankings in the process
You can use tools such as Google Search Console, SEMRUSH, Screaming Frog and Google Analytics to help you with this task.
Once you have cataloged all your content, you should have a clear picture of the pages you wish to keep as is, the pages you wish to update and the pages you wish to delete or archive.
You may also find that there are pages that are missing or that you wish to add to help boost your SEO, you can also add these pages to your content plan as well.
Implementing SEO into Your Website Redesign
To implement SEO into your website redesign, here are a few tips to get you started:
- Preserve your existing URLS, if your URLS were not search engine friendly and you plan on changing them, ensure you do a 301 redirect so that you don’t create unnecessary errors. 301 redirects also help you to preserve your page authority and pass authority to the new pages.
- Conduct keyword research and identify relevant keywords and phrases to optimize new and existing pages for.
- Optimize your website's structure, including its URL structure, header tags, and meta descriptions.
- Use internal links to help search engines understand your website’s structure and the relationship between your pages.
- Optimize your images by using appropriate descriptive file names and alt tags.
- Ensure that your site is mobile-friendly and loads quickly.
Step 4: Design, Branding, and User Experience
When it comes to website redesign, design, user experience, and branding are critical factors that can make or break your website. A well-designed website with a clear brand identity and a user-friendly interface can help you attract and retain visitors, increase engagement, and drive conversions.
When it comes to the visual aspect of your website, it’s recommended that you compile a list of at least three websites, that you like or is representative of the direction you would like to take your website in. Define what you like and dislike about it. This will help you to give your website redesign company insight into what you envision for your own design.
Finalize Your Brand Style Guide
Ensure you have a brand style guide that outlines your brand identity and guidelines. This will make it easy for your website redesign company to create a design that is appealing to your target audience while staying on brand. Your brand style guide should include color schemes, typography, imagery, and overall aesthetics to create a cohesive experience that reflects your brand message.
Ask yourself:
- What colors you would like your website to be
- What fonts do you like
- What types of images would you like to use, would you prefer using your own images or stock photos
- Are you comfortable with iconography?
Technical Considerations
When redesigning your website, there are several technical considerations that you need to keep in mind to ensure that your website is optimized for performance, search engines, and accessibility.
Mobile Responsiveness
With increasing numbers of mobile users, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is essential. A responsive website design adapts to different screen sizes and devices it’s being viewed on and is also recommended by Google. Look at your website analytics to determine what device type the majority of your website visitors come from. If your website visitors tend to access your site from a mobile device overwhelming, you may also need to consider creating a separate mobile website or app, depending on how much traffic you currently receive or at the very least design your responsive website with mobile in mind.
Site Speed and Performance
Optimizing your website's speed and performance is crucial for user experience and SEO. Slow-loading pages can lead to higher bounce rates and lower search engine rankings. Techniques to improve site speed include optimizing images, minimizing the use of heavy scripts, leveraging browser caching, and using a content delivery network (CDN), if you have a slow loading website or a large website you may need to address site speed with your website redesign company to develop a plan.
SEO Preservation
When redesigning your website, it's important to preserve your existing SEO value. This involves carefully planning URL structure changes, implementing 301 redirects for any changed URLs to maintain link equity, and ensuring all meta tags (title tags, meta descriptions) are correctly transferred to the new site. It’s also critical to maintain the structure and quality of your content, as drastic changes can affect your search engine rankings.
Website Security
Website security is paramount, especially with the increasing threats of cyberattacks. Ensure that your website is equipped with SSL encryption to protect user data. Consider implementing security measures such as firewalls, security plugins, and regular security audits to keep your site safe from hackers. A common issue during website redesign is not all images reflect the SSL, ensure that this is tested, and this concern is addressed by your website redesign company.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO elements are foundational to your site's visibility to search engines. Ensure that your website redesign incorporates technical SEO best practices, such as creating an XML sitemap, optimizing site structure for crawl efficiency, using schema markup to help search engines understand your content, and ensuring that your site is free of duplicate content issues.
Cross-Browser Compatibility
Your website should provide a consistent experience across different browsers. Ensure that you identify the top browsers and versions that users access your site from to ensure that the new website works well across those browsers.
Data and Analytics
Ensure that your redesign includes the integration of analytics tools like Google Analytics. This will allow you to track website performance, user behavior, and conversion metrics post-launch. Setting up proper tracking will enable you to make data-driven decisions and continuously optimize your website.
Backup and Migration Plan
Before making any changes, ensure that you have a complete backup of your current website. This precaution will allow you to restore the original site if anything goes wrong during the redesign process. Plan your migration carefully to minimize downtime and ensure a smooth transition to the new design.
By considering these technical aspects, you can ensure that your website redesign not only improves the visual appeal and usability of your site but also enhances its performance, security, and SEO. This holistic approach to website redesign can lead to a more successful online presence and better results for your business.