June 2024
Website redesigning is a part of business. Trends come and go, and as technology advances, you need to keep up with the changes. If you’re rebranding or trying to present a new image, you can also revamp your site.
But what should you focus on with your redesign?
An RFP website redesign is important to deliver to potential web design firms because it outlines:
You’re planning a website redesign and finding an agency to handle the redesign is a major decision.
Most redesigns are meant to do a few things:
In fact, the average lifespan of a website is just 2 years and 7 months before it is redesigned. Your site may not need a redesign this often, but if it’s 5-10+ years old, a refresh may be worth the investment.
A website redesign checklist is something your developer should provide to you, but a few things that you’ll want to check off your list to verify that they’re included in the redesigning a website steps followed are:
Your RFP website redesign document should define a lot of the goals for your site, but before doing that, you’ll want to focus on the pre-assessment stages of the redesign. Benchmarks can help you understand:
You’ll need to use your pre-assessment data to verify that the redesign was a success.
Website redesigning is often goal-oriented. You must refine the goal of the redesign for the agency that you’re working with, and we recommend outlining primary and secondary goals.
A few objectives that you may have are:
If you’re adding new features, such as a chatbot to reduce customer service calls, you may have an objective to take a certain percentage of live chat service requests each month.
You want your site’s user experience to be exceptional. Work with a design team who will focus heavily on user experience and feedback. It may be worth implementing a feedback loop, such as:
You can run tests to monitor user experience and continue tweaking the design to maximize conversions.
Website redesigning may also come with a content overhaul. You’ll want to:
Your website redesign checklist should include custom:
Working with a web design firm that offers custom websites will allow you to leverage an entire team of developers and designers. You want your site to be on brand, unique and welcoming to your users, and you need to convey this to your design team.
On top of a design refresh, the site also needs to be responsive. A responsive site is a must-have. Let’s see why.
Every website redesigning project should also focus on responsiveness. An estimated 45.59% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, so your website must be mobile-friendly if you hope to stay competitive.
Ensure that your new site design is responsive, so it will look and function properly on any sized screen.
One of the most overlooked aspects of the website redesign process is SEO. Your site’s new design, structure, navigation and layout should all be created with search engine optimization in mind to help improve your rankings in the search results.
On-page optimization is just one aspect of SEO, but it’s an important one and should be included in your redesign checklist.
Every website redesign strategy should focus on technical issues that may be affecting the site. Performance and accessibility issues can affect search engine rankings as well as the user experience.
According to Google, the probability of bounce increases by 32% when page load speed increases from 1 to 3 seconds.
Implementing strategies to boost page load speed and make your site more accessible will future-proof your site and provide an overall more positive user experience.
Before launching your new site, it’s important to ensure that it meets all of your website redesign requirements and is working as intended.
Because if users have a poor experience when visiting your site, they’re not likely to return.
For this reason, testing and quality assurance is one of the most important steps in the site redesign process.
If you’re working with a web design agency, they will handle this process for you. There are several types of testing that may be performed, depending on your site and its functionality. These include:
You may have other types of tests that you want to perform, but these are the most important ones.
When planning a website redesign, it’s important to consider how and when you will launch the new site.
Many businesses choose to do this in stages by teasing their new site design to their target audience across channels. Making your audience aware of the change will build anticipation and help them prepare for launch day when your site may be unavailable for some time.
It’s also important for everyone to be prepared internally for potential hiccups and downtime. Having plans to address these issues can help make launch day go as smoothly as possible.
Consider visualizing your launch day. How do you want it to go? Will you make an event of it, or just make a simple announcement? Your customer preferences can help you make this decision.
Ideally, you’ll plan your launch strategy well in advance and during the initial stages of the planning process.
Most brands will eventually reach a point where they want or need a site redesign, whether it’s because they’re rebranding, want to expand their functionality or just update the look of their site. Following this checklist will help ensure that your site’s redesign goes well, but a project of this size isn’t something to tackle on your own.
At BMG Media Co, we simplify site redesign by guiding you through the process from start to finish.
Contact us today for a free quote and to learn more about our website design and development services.
