Overtime, every website becomes outdated, and eventually you will need to revamp your website to improve its overall quality. Below are a list of the benefits of a website redesign, and how each can improve the quality of your website.
When should you redesign a website?
You should consider redesigning your website when you start to face an uptick in critical hindrances that result in poor user experience for your visitors or internally amongst your team.
If your website starts to stifle business growth and productivity, then it may be time to redesign your website. Redesign could be a major visual overhaul, migrating from one CMS to another, or rebuilding a major component/feature of your site.
In either case, the outcome should result in a measurable improvement in your key metrics.
How long does a website redesign take?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. This could depend on the size of your website, the complexity of the features of your website, how many plugins and features still need to exist and function properly in the new website, and several other factors.
It could take 1 month to 1 year depending on these factors. Before starting on this big initiative, your team should scope out the work involved in updating the total website, estimate its difficulty, and plan a strategy on how to transition to the new site without severely disrupting the experience of your website visitors.
Cost of redesigning a website?
The cost of a complete redesign your website could be the same as designing a new website; it varies greatly. Cost of this initiative depends on the size of your website, what new features you need on your new site, complexity of the migration, cost of personnel needed, and more.
You will first need to scope out the amount of work that needs to be done to complete the project, and get a quote from the personnel involved.
Here are 15 benefits of a website redesign:
- Improve Brand Messaging
- Increase Conversion Rate
- Optimize User Experience
- Increase Leads and Sales
- Update Software
- Improve Scalability
- Add new features and functionality
- Improve content management experience
- Reduce Site Speed
- Improve SEO
- Improve Accessibility
- Reduce Maintenance Cost
- Increase Flexibility
- Migrate Website to a New Content Management System
- Identify Bugs and Fix Broken Features
1. Improve Brand Messaging
It is important for every growing business to gauge their brand perception, and judge how well their target audience understands their mission and value.
A website is a powerful marketing tool, and should be used to highlight all the positive aspects of your business and what it has to offer.
A website redesign can improve brand messaging by giving inbound traffic a fresh and modern aesthetic to express professionalism and high-quality service.
2. Increase Conversion Rate
An out-dated website can lead to poor performing sales and marketing campaigns. The overall structure of your website will have an effect on the conversion rates across any campaign you and your team decide to execute.
Here are some of the top areas you can improve on your website that will impact conversion rates:
- Simplified Navigation
- Improved Content Hierarchy
- A/B Tested Call-to-Actions
- A/B Tested Color Schemes
- Page Speed Optimization
- Optimally Placed Lead Captures (i.e. Lead magnet popups, upsells, etc.)
- On-Site SEO
As you plan your new content strategy and funnels, consider areas of improvement that will optimize conversion rates for your upcoming campaigns.
3. Optimize User Experience
Improving website navigation, page layout, content design, and more are all ways of improving user experience.
During the website redesign process, you get the opportunity to optimize user experience properties such as bounce rate, content discoverability, accessibility, and targeted messaging.
Ultimately, optimizing your user experience will lead to increased conversion rates.
4. Increase Leads and Sales
At the end of the day, a website is a sales tool. Whether you are running an e-commerce site or a marketing site to attract leads, the appearance of your website has a material effect on your sales.
If you are the head of marketing or the head of sales, and your website is a primary revenue generator, take some time to strategize major improvements to your website that will lead to an increase in sales.
5. Update Software
As we all know, the tech industry is a fast-paced industry. It is important to keep all third-party plugins and the tech behind your website up-to-date.
Updates come with bug fixes, security fixes, feature improvements, performance improvements, and more. Over time, certain plugins and software on your website may become incompatible with others, fall out of warranty and support, and begin to take up space on your servers. This can cause your website to slow down.
Redesigning your website is an opportunity for you to update all of the software used to operate your website and free up costly space that outdated plugins and software are taking up on your servers.
6. Improve Scalability
As your website grows in traffic, keep an eye on whether or not your current hosting plan and website infrastructure can support that growth. Too much traffic on a server can cause your website to crash.
In addition to technical concerns, scalability can refer to the growth of your team and personnel responsible for managing your website. You want a platform that can support multiple contributors, and one that makes it easy to collaborate simultaneously on your website.
Many businesses reach a breaking point where their website will not allow them to progress any further, so a website redesign on both the front-end and backend is a notable solution.
7. Add New Features and Functionality
As your audience grows, so does the demands and needs of that audience. The website redesign process would be a good time to plan for new features and functionality to provide optimal service to your growing audience.
You can also take this time to update existing features, and remove any that do not serve a purpose or are not profitable.
Outdated websites tend to become rigid and can hamper the ability to add new features without breaking the site. Update your website to maintain its ability to easily add new client-facing features as well as improve functionality on the backend.
8. Improve Content Management Experience
As your business, team, and content grows, your website will collect a large amount of data and content that needs to be organized. Your content management system is the central component of your website that allows your team to organize content and deliver the best experience to your website visitors.
Occasionally, you will need to make sure your content management system can handle the growth of your content output any new systems your team decide to deploy.
Make sure your content management system does not become a bottleneck in hindering your team’s productivity.
9. Reduce Site Speed
Your website may start to see page load slowdown overtime due to site growth, piled up plugins, and increased traffic. This will poorly affect user experience and SEO performance, which could cause you to lose website traffic and potential customers.
Do site-wide benchmarking to compare the performance of the old version versus the newly updated site. You will be able to identify opportunities to improve overall site performance.
10. Improve SEO
Occasionally you should audit your website to identify opportunities to improve SEO. Search engines often add new features that you can take advantage of to improve site rankings, and may update how their algorithms determine a website’s quality.
Make sure the new version of your website is taking full advantage of search engine updates.
Likewise, take the time to make on-site SEO improvements such as fixing broken link errors, keyword cannibalization, and internally linking to other relevant pages.
11. Improve Accessibility
ADA compliance is a standard to ensure websites are available and accessible to individuals with disabilities, and it is important that the internet provides fair access to everyone.
The web utilizes many different technologies and software to present content and data being distributed via a variety of devices. These softwares need to be available to anyone regardless of their physical or mental abilities.
For web developers, WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a set of tools that can help us build for assistive devices.
12. Reduce Maintenance Cost
Now is a good time to evaluate opportunities to cut costs and save money for the long run. Your website may have old plugins that are no longer in use.
This is the time to cancel those lingering subscriptions and reallocate that money for something with a better ROI.
13. Increase Flexibility
Overtime websites tend to accrue tech debt. Maintaining your website starts to become noticeably more challenging, which eats into your day-to-day productivity.
Making updates, adding a new features, or deleting unused plugins runs the risk of breaking the site. The time it takes to fix bugs has significantly increased. A rigid website will eventually stifle future business growth.
An updated website improves flexibility by allowing your team to work more efficiently, save time, reduce risk, and open your business up to take on more growth opportunities.
14. Migrate Website to a New Content Management System
If your current website infrastructure is unable to handle current business growth then it may be time to migrate to a new content management system or hosting plan.
Executing a website migration is a tall task once you reach a high volume of traffic. You will need a migration strategy to avoid the risk of hurting your SEO performance resulting in a huge traffic loss. Prior to a site migration, you will also need to make sure your new CMS supports your current plugins and features.
If you need help migrating your website, send us a message and my team can help you plan out a migration strategy.
15. Identify Bugs and Fix Broken Features
Last, but not least, redesigning your website is a great time to fix any headaches, critical bugs, and janky features both your team and website visitors have been complaining about for months. One of the hidden benefits of redesigning your website is that random bugs get fixed as a byproduct of the process.
During the redesign and rebuilding phase, you are starting from a clean slate, and your team has much more experience on what the website needs. This is an opportunity for your team to rebuild your website from a more knowledgeable and calculated position than when you first launched your website.
Do you need help redesigning your website?
We have seen the material impact a fresh newly updated website can have on a business, and believe every growing business should keep their website and brand on par with modern standards.
If you need help redesigning your website, our team is available. Whether you need a visual overhaul on the frontend, major updates on the backend, new features built, or want to migrate to a new content management system, let us help you. Visit our contact page, and send us a message.
