Establishing a Website Redesign Plan For More Leads

Alongside that design practices also evolve.

A user experience design that would have looked accessible and good back in 2010 is no longer that user-friendly now.

These days, accessibility is one of the most important factors that users look out for.

Users will first access the page’s layout, look for navigational links or the overall navigation structure.

Other than that, your content can also get old.

In that case, you will only have to make small changes to revamp it.

However, designing the website may require a full plan of large-scale changes.

Either way, before implementing these changes, you need to know about your goals and why you feel there is a need for change.

Why Should You Change Your Site Design?

One of the most important things for people while creating websites is to have a higher conversion rate.

If that is falling down, there is something wrong with your site design.

Similar to that is a high bounce rate.

Users leaving your site soon after landing on it can be because of the poor design.

Other than that, poor user experience is also behind users leaving the site almost immediately.

According to changing trends of design and accessibility, your website needs revamping too to provide a better user experience.

Hence, if your site is outdated, it needs a change in design, appeal and accessibility.

Similarly, your old site may not be responsive on all devices.

Now your website needs to work on a laptop, tablet and mobile phone according to their formats.

If your website does not fit in any of these, you need some major changes.

Also, notice if your website is SEO-friendly.

If it is difficult for bots to crawl it and that affects ranking, then go ahead and make some much-needed changes.

In order to understand whether you need these changes or not, you need to see things from a user’s point of view.

Keep these considerations in mind:

• Check if you can navigate around the website easily.
• Do all the pages load properly on different devices?
• Is the branding all right?
• Notice if you can easily find the information you need
• Are the pages loading quickly?
• Is navigating around the website streamlined?

Once you find loopholes while answering these questions, you can compare your website with your competitors.

If your website lacks something, refreshing it is a good idea.

However, ensure that your goals are defined.

Get a team of content managers, designers and developers to carry out your vision and make changes to the website.

Auditing and Updating

Auditing Content

Using tools like SEMrush, you can carry out a full site audit.

You can also perform a content audit in order to identify what are your stronger pages with low bounce rates and higher conversion rates.

After all, content determines the active presence of a website.

Content marketing is an essential tool for 82 percent of marketers.

After you have results from a content audit, you will know what elements you want to retain and what blogs should be revamped.

It gives you an idea of what pages and keywords are the most crucial for your site.

Plus, your ranking and traffic statistics will also give you an idea about what is more important to your site and where you can make possible improvements.

Updating Navigation Structure and Information Architecture

The information architecture of a site determines how to structure the navigation.

It is about the organization of information in your sitemap.

Whereas, navigation is about the organization of the site itself.

People will first notice a site’s navigational links and layout.

So it needs to be organized while keeping in mind what the site is about, what will users want to search in it and what is the most important information you can convey.

Update your information architecture accordingly by first beginning to make a map of the existing one and look at your competitors.

Use tools like Microsoft Clarity to find out where your users are clearing and what activity they do on your site.

Collect the data and make the main heading as well as subheadings of your site.

Next, organize the URLs under the subcategories.

Finally, create a new sitemap with all the information that you have to set an organized information and navigation structure.

Map Your URL redirectors and Optimize Content

URL redirectors

When you are making changes to your website, the URL of certain pages may be now different than what it used to be.

This means, that wherever you linked the same URL as an internal link, will now show as a broken link.

This is a big SEO misstep as the search engine bots will not be able to crawl the links and rank your website higher.

You end up losing the traffic the page brought the domain authority and backlinks.

Naturally, some URLs may change when you are fixing the site’s structure.

One way to retain the links is to apply URL redirects.

You will have to map them carefully so that if anyone clicks on the old link, they do not get an error but are redirected to where the new one is.

Write down the URLs you will be using and those that you won’t use.

Also, list the URLs that will change but have content you want to retain.

Match the old URLs to the new ones and those you want to eliminate, match with new content on a similar revised topic.

Give these content mapping scenarios to your developers to implement the redirects.

Optimizing Content and Page Speed

Refresh old content now that you have gone through it.

Made a list of best products in 2020, no one will read it now.

Write about the latest products and services you offer rather than old content.

Revamping old content and giving it new lease of life can increase your organic traffic.

If you do not, then remember that your competitors are always updating their content.

When there are new trends in content and SEO, your best pages are pushed down in rankings.

It can further cut down your traffic to half.

Hence, rewrite content that is not performing well while also adding other elements such as videos and pictures, expert opinions and data points to increase its value.

Besides that, you also need to optimize your website speed.

People have become more impatient in this technologically advanced world.

However, your site speed will slow down if it bloats over time.

To correct that, first ensure the images have the correct format and size.

Reduce the number of HTTP requests, embed videos of a smaller size and clean up HTML.

Updating Sitemap and Testing the Site

After you are done with all this, manually add all new URLs on your XML sitemap.

Sitemap acts as the blueprint search engines use to crawl your website and rank its content.

You can also add this automatically through Yoast Plugin.

If you do not, then crawlers may ignore an entire site if their XML sitemap is incorrect.

Once all the setup is complete, it is time to test your website redesign plan.

You may want to begin by checking the internal and external links first.

Then proceed to the navigation links, whether they are in the right place and clickable.

Do all CTA’s (call to action) buttons work?

Review your pop-ups and forms.

Check your purchasing pages and interactive content.

See if there are any links showing errors.

Lastly, test on Android, iOS, mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop to see if it is responsive on all sites.

Explore your site through a user’s eye.

Then you will see any loopholes and go through with your developer to correct them.

There are several benefits of redesigning your website, let’s discuss them in more detail below!

The benefits include:

• Make the user experience simple and easy
• As a shop or e-commerce store, it becomes attractive for customers
• Load speed becomes faster
• Improves site speed, performance and SEO
• Refocuses the content strategy
• Security is up to date

Through a website redesign plan, you can make changes to the fundamental structure of your site in order to make it more attractive, feasible and accessible.

Think of it this way, if a physical store near you has poor lighting, a messy interior and a broken sign, would you want to step in? More son, would you think of purchasing something from there? Probably not!

The same goes for a website, its look matters.

The first impression that they may get is that it’s out of date and maybe your products are as well.

Plus, a redesign gives an opportunity for the user to navigate your site properly and move around the parent and child pages.

You will also be able to make your design simple rather than complex.

So notice if your sales, leads, rankings and conversions are falling down, it is time to revamp your site.

Choose a simple website redesign plan and ensure you keep SEO in mind while making the changes towards a more successful and on-trend website.