26 Good Reasons for a Website Redesign
In Part 1 of this series I reviewed reasons to protect your current website assets and listed bad reasons to pursue a website redesign.
I also categorized good reasons for a redesign into the following list:
- Website Visitor Experience
- Brand Management
- Traffic Optimization
- Lead Generation
- Modern Website Design
Now lets take a closer look at really good reasons for a website redesign starting with the website visitor experience.
Website Visitor Experience:
The term “user friendly” has been around for decades now, and still exists today as a catch all for visitor experience. One of your top goals for website redesign should include making your new website easier for your visitors and current customers to do more business with you. Examples of ways to enhance the website visitor experience includes:
- Improve Your Navigation
Poor navigation creates frustration for new visitors when they can't find what they are looking for. Use navigation that guides visitors to solutions to their problems.
- Add Fresh Content
Use easy to find fresh content that answers your visitors' questions and solves their problems
- Improve Your Functionality
Every web browser works a little differently and may create flaws in your "perfect" website, especially if your visitors are using older browsers. iPads and smart phones are consistantly viewing websites more often each month, and many websites are not yet optimized to be viewed on these devices. Be certain that your website looks and functions as well as possible on all browsers and mobile media
- Improve Speed!
Large graphic images & Flash elements look great on newer desktop computers, but drastically increase loading time on mobile devices and older computers. Avoiding Flash & large graphics will improve overall user experience
- Lower Your Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate is a key performance indicator that your website visitor experience needs to be improved. This is more of a symptom than a solution, but is a great place to measure improvement over time.
- Reduce Useless Content
Remove or update old content that is no longer relavant. Also reduce dense body text content to improve readability.
- Improve Your Server
If your website can't be reached or is slow due to an inferior server, don't expect your visitors to stay long. Be certain that your website is hosted by a reliable server
- Improve Internal Linking
As visitors move from page to page within your website, be sure they have clear logical options that zero in solutions to their problems. Using a strong internal linking structure also helps crawlability and idexation of your website
Brand Management:
Managing your brand on and offline can be challenging with so many options to use these days. Your website can help improve and differentiate your brand from the competition. Here are some examples of brand related reasons for a website redesign:
- Increase Marketing Presence
Marketing campaigns take multiple impressions for ultimate success. Expanding your online marketing presence and utilizing your website as a hub for all marketing efforts helps drive brand awareness and emphasize current campaigns
- Upcoming Launch
Aligning your new website redesign with new product launch or major marketing campaign provides a unique opportunity that drives traffic
- Improve Integration
Integrating your website with other marketing activities like email and social media can help cross promote brand messaging
- Competitive Differentiation
Your website provides an opportunity to thoroughly differenciate your business from your competition. Rather than copy your competitors, show your visitors how your products or services are different and will solve their current problem
Search Engine Optimization:
If your current website has not been optimized for the search engines, now is a good time to make some SEO improvements. If your current site was optimized, SEO can almost always be improved upon to achieve better search results. Past SEO efforts should at minimum be matched in order to maintain current traffic success. Here are some SEO examples for website redesign:
- Organic Opportunity
By improving SEO keyword phrase rankings for all pages, you will likely increase organic traffic to your site from search engines (once optimized)
- Improve On-Page SEO
If any of your current title pages say “insert title here” or missing the meta description or H1 tags – spend time fixing these problems for increase web-traffic.
Lead Generation:
Website traffic takes time to develop and some businesses are content knowing that they have lots of visitors checking out their website. The problem with this reasoning is that if you’re in business to make a profit, you should be using your best efforts to convert as many visitors into leads, even if they are already customers. Lead generation is the most important reason of any since your efforts can be easily measured, providing information about your visitors as well as a way to personally contact them again in the future. Here are some lead generation examples for website redesign:
- Create Killer CTAs
Adding new Calls-To-Action that are useful for your website visitors improves their experience by clearly showing how you can solve their problems
- Add Better Landing Pages
Adding and improving on landing pages that encourage visitor response provides an opportunity to know who your visitors are
- Improve Conversion Rates
Conversion rates can always be improved upon and a website redesign provides a new opportunity for A/B testing within your new page designs
Modern Website Design:
There are millions of websites utilizing outdated technology that negatively impacts visitor experience, brand image, organic search traffic and lead generation. Examples of outdated designs include sites built using frames and tables instead of current html and CSS, or websites built on Flash rather than current javascript techniques. Old websites are easy to spot these days since website design trends have substantially changed in the last few years. Good reasons for a website redesign to utilize current design trends include:
- Change Web Platform
Lots of businesses are switching to a new or different content management systoem platform to allow freedom to customize the website by more users.
- Update Web Technology
Improving your website appearance by building it with HTML5, CSS3 and JQUERY along with other design techniques may be a good reason for a redesign if you haven't updated your site in five or more years. Website design has dramatically changed over the past five years and although this isn't a great single reason to redesign, it is a good time to update the technology available for your website
- Mobile Optimize!
Mobile website optimization is a good idea if you know that your website attracts visitors using mobile devices. Google analytics clearly shows how many mobile visitors you have, and by measuring it each month you will likely see this number growing. Without optimizing for mobile, other analytics like bounce rate and pageviews are likely to decrease due to poor visitor experience. Updating your website with responsive layouts and mobile compatibility provides an overall better web experience for all visitors
- Integrate Social Media
Integrating social media with your website can improve your visitor experience since each channel provides a different engagement experience that can further enhance brand awareness
- Modern Design Layouts
Using modern layout trends such as larger background images, typographic or grid designs may not be a sole reason for web redesign, but updating your look with these new options can't hurt as long as you have other good goals for your website change
- Improving on Web Elements
Including more illustrative art and icons can provide a great new look, but again not a good sole reason for a web redesign
Even if your website redesign doesn’t require the latest design technology, your website redesign goals should also include some of these reasons:
- Structure for search engine crawlers
- Navigation using CSS instead of Flash or Javascript
- Descriptive URL structure that incorporates relative keyword phrases
Key Takeaway
There are a lot of really good reasons to redesign a website and hopefully this list will inspire you to make your next website much better by setting realistic goals that include many of these suggested reasons. Did I miss any? Let me know why you are redesigning your website.
If you’ve had a website for a few years, you may now be wondering if it is time for a website redesign. If you have been successful creating website traffic, a cautious and well planned approach with solid goals are necessary for your next website redesign project. If your website is not generating traffic, you have even more good reason
s for a redesign.
Regardless of your reasons to redesign your website, your first goal should be protecting the website assets you have already created. Website traffic is expensive to buy, so taking the time to inventory and transfer your current website assets will help preserve the traffic you’ve already created. These assets include the most popular pages of your website, ranking keyword phrases that are generating the most organic traffic, your inbound links and the page URLs these links are connected to.
There are many good and bad reasons to pursue a website redesign, so it is important to establish redesign goals that will provide a high enough ROI so your redesign becomes a good business decision as quickly as possible. If you are pursuing your redesign for the wrong reasons, your new design cost and time will be wasted and if the original website assets are also lost, your website redesign will be a complete failure regardless of how great you think the new version looks.
Examples of bad reasons to redesign your website include:
- Everyone is tired of our current website. We need something new.
- It’s time for a redesign since we usually create a new site every year
- The business owner wants a new website
- It’s in our marketing budget plus we want to impress the boss
- Our competitor just redesigned their site, so we should too
- We created a sweet new logo and we want a new website to match it
- We want to use the latest technology for a cutting edge website
If your reason for a website redesign includes one or more of these bad reasons, you might as well save your money and time for something else. However, if you also have some good reasons for a site redesign, you can satisfy most of these bad reasons plus have a successful website that creates traffic, generates leads and new customers.
Key takeaway is to always establish some solid goals for your website redesign that include protecting the assets of your current website. Make the most of your website redesign by focusing on good reasons to do so, and rethink your need for a redesign if your reason is included in the “bad reasons” list above.
So what are the good reasons for a website redesign? I have broken up a large list of good reasons to redesign a website into the following categories:
Part two of this two part series will dive deeper into the right reasons for a website redesign.
The overall importance of search engine rankings has been known for years by website developers and managers. If you want more targeted traffic on your website, you need to achieve higher search engine rankings. To achieve higher search engine rankings, your website pages need to contain unique interesting content that is optimized for search engines. This article explains basic SEO service strategy tips that will increase your search engine rankings.
Why should website owners be concerned about SEO? Some businesses are not concerned about SEO since they are willing to pay to have their website advertised. Others are confused by the website coding and believe that people should rank websites, eliminating the need for SEO. This solution is not only impractical, but would only create another type of SEO criteria based on visual rather than functional website features. In reality, computers are responsible for website rankings. Search engine optimization allows you some human influence on your website's search engine rank in an attempt to draw more traffic.
A variety of factors influence your search engine rankings. Keywords influence where your site will show up in a search. Active traffic volume on your site is another factor, as is the number of links that lead to your website.
ON-PAGE SEO: High search ranks do not come quickly. That means you need to fine-tune your site design to get this long process in motion and achieve results. Using keywords efficiently in headers, titles and content will also boost website traffic. These "on-page" seo techniques are important, but are only 25% of what the search engines use to rank your website.
OFF-PAGE SEO: When it comes to site optimization, you are not limited to only using strategically placed keywords and error free code. Linking is another SEO method in which other sites link to yours, your site links to others, and pages on your own site link to each other. Increasing your inbound links tell the search engines that your website contains content that others view as important. It demonstrates that your website is an authority on topics that other websites want to link to. Additionally, authority websites that link to yours are way more valuable (increase rankings) than links from websites without authority. Search engines consider "off-page" SEO much more important, up to 75% of a website's overall ranking.
PAID SEARCH: At the top of most search engine result pages, you will find featured or sponsored entries, which are paid advertisements by businesses willing to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars to display their message above all others. Many small business websites do not have the financial resources to pay for these placements. Utilizing proven organic SEO techniques can help your website description appear just under those top paid advertisements, but without the high cost associated with paid search advertising.
If your website is new, paid search advertising will draw traffic faster than your organic SEO service efforts since it takes time for search engines to discover or rank you highly. If you go this route, you should advertise on sites where your target customer is likely to surf. It is important to find the right people to direct back to your website if you expect to gain new customers. Be certain to show your paid visitors arriving at your site that you have taken the time to find out about their interests by sending them to a relevent page on your website, or better yet a new landing page prepared specifically for your paid visitors.
A well-done website is needed to succeed in business these days. If your business is sustained through sales, a well designed website is not just a nice thing to have, it's a requirement! The site optimization tips in this article will point you in the right direction for increased traffic and higher search engine rankings. Good Luck!!