Maintaining a website is essential to level up your business. A competitive and successful website doesn’t only work properly but also conforms to current standards. We’ve covered some of the reasons why it’s necessary to do a website revamp and how to do it.
What Is a Website Revamp
A website revamp is a total makeover to give your site a fresh look and feel to perform more effectively than before. It takes a lot of time to revamp a website depending on the changes to be made. Careful planning is key, and it may require the help of website design experts.
Why You Should Consider a Website Revamp
It’s important to stay current with industry and technological good practices to keep your business relevant. Your website is probably the first thing potential clients find or want to see when they shop for services and products. If most of the following is true about your website, it means revamp time.
Your Website Looks Outdated
A website calls for a revamp when its design is getting dated. A well-designed and appealing website will earn the trust of users and keep them engaged. When they like what they’re seeing and experiencing, they tend to stay on your website, which improves the bounce rate. In other words, effective aesthetics can result in increased traffic.
Outdated design elements and inconsistent branding are key indicators that your website needs a revamp. If your site looks like it belongs in a past decade, visitors will question your business’s relevance and reliability. Similarly, inconsistent use of logos, colors, and fonts can confuse visitors and weaken your brand identity. These issues not only affect aesthetics but can also impact user engagement and conversion rates.
Laia Quintana of TeamUp
Your Website is Broken
Dead links and slow loading time or going offline frequently, are some of the clear hints your website is due for a revamp. Whatever reason your site is crashing, revamping will provide the solutions. So if your website starts to have missing pages and gets laggy, consider a revamp soon to avoid low conversion rates.
The CMS Has Limited Features
Content Management System or CMS is the platform websites are built on. It handles the backend as well as the part where you manage content. If you want your website to function or appear a certain way, but the CMS lacks features that allow you to do so, it’s time to revamp your site with a more suitable CMS to address your business needs.
Perhaps your CMS platform has over reliance on custom code or web developers and it hinders your marketing like publishing an article.
Not easily customisable – You can’t make changes to your website easily or your website is only customisable by developers. Any updates or changes to any part of your site’s content, you would need to consult your devs. This can reduce your response time, e.g. how quickly you can launch a campaign or publish a blog post, which can impact your competitive advantage.
David Stellini of All Front
User Experience Could Use Some Improvements
There’s probably nothing more frustrating for a user than to navigate a website that’s not working properly and loads too slowly. High bounce and low conversion rates are just two things that spell an awful user experience. A website revamp is desired if you want your website to be user-friendly and fast so it to encourage them to stay.
If your site doesn’t load quickly, your users will go somewhere else and the opportunity will be lost. Common site speed solutions can include image optimization/compression, browser caching improvement, server response time improvement, and JavaScript minifying. If you waste time and money with a site that makes these rookie mistakes the time is lost forever and you will spend a lot more trying to win them back.
Paige Arnof-Fenn of Mavens & Moguls
Your Website Is Not Mobile-Friendly
Mobile-first websites tend to perform better than those that aren’t mobile-friendly. You’ll know if the mobile version of your website is working even without the assistance of analytics tools. When you approach the revamp project, be aware of the mobile version of the site to create a streamlined experience for your users.
Mobile optimization is critical. More than half of your web traffic comes from mobile devices. Make sure your content is up-to-date and follows current SEO best practices.
Priyanka Swamy of Perfect Locks
Published Content Is Not Helpful
Websites and content get old so quickly. Publishing new and relatable content constantly is a must. It’s one way to inform your audience that you’re paying attention to their needs. Also, content is invaluable to search engine optimization. If your site doesn’t rank well, perhaps it requires revamping your SEO content to improve visibility.
It Has Poor Marketing Performance
When you notice your website isn’t generating leads or its conversion is going down, there’s a high chance that only a revamp can solve the underperformance. The website must have all the possible sales or marketing features available. SEO is the most important, so make it a priority. Also, consider how sales or marketing strategies affect other facets like the navigation structure.
We identify the need for a website revamp when we notice a decline in user engagement metrics, such as increased bounce rates and decreased session durations. Additionally, our client’s feedback about navigation difficulties or outdated content signals that it’s time for an update.
Vaibhav Kakkar of Digital Web Solutions
How To Revamp Your Website
It’s important to check your website’s performance metrics to know what’s functioning and what’s not. You can be proactive and take the necessary steps before your site gets plagued with errors and negative feedback. These are some of the things to study when you consider a revamp soon.
Evaluate Your Current Website
A detailed audit will help you find out the problems on your website. You can do usability tests and use tools that analyze your site. Google Analytics is your friend, and it’s free to use. This tool shows how your site and marketing perform. There are other useful tools you can maximize to measure website performance.
First, you need to understand how much needs to change. Do you just need to change in the design, or do you need to completely change the structure of the website or start everything from scratch?
After that, you need to figure out what the stakeholders expect from the revamp, what their needs are, and what problems they face with the current website. Keep in mind, that all of the changes need to be made based on customer data and relevant metrics. Be sure that the changes you make are flexible and easy to edit in case it’s needed in the future.
Finally, make sure your new website is in line with the brand book and your brand’s tone of voice.
Ignas Paskauskas of Omnisend
The following are some major points you have to look at when evaluating your website.
Loading time – Site speed is indispensable for SEO and user experience. Backend errors and clunky platforms are reasons why websites have slow loading times. Identifying the issues that cause your website to lag is vital because you will know what changes or improvements to include in the website revamp.
Mobile responsiveness – Using mobile devices is already so common and preferred by many because of accessibility that websites are rewarded when they’re mobile-friendly. Testing if your site functions and looks nice on mobile devices should always be a part of your regular maintenance checks.
Engagement – Getting information like where your visitors are from will help you know what channels are best for your business and that you should focus on. Also, lead generation can give you a clue about which pages are attractive and why they draw people to your website. You can benchmark these for your website revamp.
Begin with a thorough audit of your current website to identify what works and what doesn’t. Make a complete backup of your existing site. Develop a detailed brief including wireframes, color schemes, and design elements, and discuss it extensively with stakeholders. Collect feedback from everyone involved, especially those who will approve the final designs.
Kateryna Reshetilo of Greenice
Overhaul Your Brand Message
An important thing to remember when you plan for a website revamp is that the design elements and messaging must reflect your brand. This will aid in attracting the right users to your site. If you’ve made significant changes to your business, the revamp is a great chance to introduce these upgrades to your customers.
Incorporate modern design elements that reflect the brand’s identity. Content should be updated and optimized for SEO to improve visibility and ranking. It’s also essential to integrate analytics tools to track performance post-revamp.
Sahil Kakkar of RankWatch
See if you need to replace your logo or images to make them relatable and consistent with your branding. You may also have to remove unnecessary content and pages to highlight the website’s beneficial portions. Linking analytics to your newly revamped site is a must to evaluate its performance.
See What Your Competitors Are Doing (Within Reason)
Visit your major rivals’ websites and study how they look and work. Doing this will give you ideas about what to include in your website. Web scrapers and parsing tools can make this exercise easier for you than only doing manual research. These tools produce data that show pages that perform well, keywords commonly used in your industry, etc.
Collect Feedback From Your Customers
Learning from your customers about their experience in navigating your website can help you decide what features need to be improved. After all, they are the target audience. Customer data is one of the first things that will tell you if you have to do a website revamp. Here are some ways to collect website feedback:
User analytics – These tools help you see what your website visitors are doing. For example, heatmaps show what users click the most and what they ignore. Analytics tools provide real-time data on your website’s performance, and you can use this information to strategize feedback collection opportunities.
Do surveys – You can choose from various types of feedback forms to collect data. One is website questionnaires. The questions differ based on the questionnaire’s length. Another type is customer satisfaction or CSAT surveys, which can be sent through email post-purchase or embedded on the website to pop up at a determined time.
Give incentives – Most customers are reluctant to leave feedback. Answering questionnaires or filling out survey forms takes time and effort, so incentivize customers to provide helpful feedback to you. It can be free coffee, a complimentary product, or a service.
User research is crucial in the website revamping process because it informs you of the issues that need to be addressed. The research’s outcome will also help you decide on the improvements.
Choose a New CMS That Works for You
Upgrading the CMS will resolve a host of website problems such as lagging. If you’re DIY and don’t want to deal with coding when building the site, there are CMS platforms that allow you to design without coding. Some platforms let you build from scratch and are preferred by those who need more flexibility.
Create a New Site Structure
A website structure is the connection and organization of pages on a site. If a structure and navigation are logical, search engines and users can comprehend your website, which impacts optimization and search visibility. Before revamping your website, spend time and resources on building an SEO-friendly structure. It will improve your rankings and user experience.
When considering a revamp, prioritize responsive design and an intuitive navigation structure. A clear and logical navigation structure helps users find what they need quickly, enhancing their overall experience and increasing the likelihood of conversions.
Laia Quintana of TeamUp
Prototype Your Designs
It’s critical to create a prototype to test different features like the layout and function because a website revamp entails a lot of considerations. Prototyping is the experiment phase of the development process that will help determine and solve potential problems before the website revamp.
You can start the prototyping process with pen and paper. However, do the final prototyping by using professional apps or online tools to save time. With the mobile-first design in mind, it will be beneficial to do prototyping on a mobile device.
Consider SEO Performance
Assess your site from an SEO perspective. If people are finding your website but no conversion when they’re visiting, it’s probably an SEO issue. Attracting the wrong kind of users happens when the metadata isn’t clear. When you detect this problem, find the weaknesses and implement updated SEO practices.
Follow SEO best practices when migrating your website content to the new version. This involves ensuring proper redirects, maintaining URL structures, and preserving meta tags to avoid losing search engine rankings. An SEO checklist can be invaluable during this process to cover all bases and mitigate risks.
Kateryna Reshetilo of Greenice
Start the Revamp
Once you’ve fine-tuned the layout and design, you can now begin the revamp. First, create a schedule so you can track your goals. Then plan your resources to maximize them. Finally, assemble your team. A dedicated digital team is ideal as website revamping may involve complex processes.
Mistakes to Avoid
A website revamp requires careful consideration. The project should involve the stakeholders concerned, particularly the decision-makers. Here are some challenges that you have to steer clear of to make your website revamp successful.
Not Listening to Users
Failing to perform user research is a risk you don’t want to take. Aside from making your customers feel seen and heard because you ask for their opinions on your website, getting customer feedback is pertinent to developing a site that fosters healthy buyer-seller relationships. Your website works perfectly, so your customers will continue working with you.
One of the most common mistakes to avoid when redesigning a website is failing to conduct user research. This is because it is critical to obtain direct feedback from our audience via surveys, interviews, and usability testing. This helps us understand their needs, preferences, and pain points, which informs our redesign decisions.
Gabrielle Marie Yap of Carnivore Style
Adding Unnecessary Features
If your website is pretty but not user-friendly, it won’t generate leads or sales for your company no matter how attractive it is. Avoid overcomplicating the web design and overloading the site with media. Declutter your website when you do the revamp and build instead a simple site structure and navigation to improve user experience.
Avoid overloading pages with heavy media and neglecting accessibility standards. Large images and videos can slow down your site, frustrating users and negatively impacting your SEO rankings.
Moreover, accessibility standards ensure that your website is usable by people with disabilities, expanding your potential audience and demonstrating your commitment to inclusivity. Neglecting these aspects can alienate users and damage your reputation.
Laia Quintana of TeamUp
One major mistake is overcomplicating the design. A complex design (fancy effects, too many colours and animations) can not only overwhelm visitors and hurt the user experience, but it can also be a pain for developers to implement. Simplicity often leads to better usability. Another common mistake is rushing through testing. This can result in unnoticed bugs and a poor user experience at launch.
David Stellini of All Front
Go Through It Without Planning
The lack of planning when revamping a website is a recipe for disaster. Don’t waste your time and resources by rushing the revamp. A comprehensive checklist will help you remember to back-up your current site and categorize the pages among other nitty-gritty details you don’t want to miss.
Don’t forget that communication is key. The revamp plan should be decided before the implementation and all the stakeholders should be on the same page before the launch. Prioritize business needs. If you want the website to load quickly – make sure the code you create is effective for that.
Ignas Paskauskas of Omnisend
Neglect Website Testing
Take time to test every page and review all the elements on your website. It will guide you in designing your site with users in mind. Split testing where you compare two or more versions of a webpage to see what works better is a good methodology to implement. Testing the site after the revamp is crucial to assess what needs keeping.
Ignoring SEO
A website revamp can affect your SEO. Make sure to save your search engine rankings before making any changes to your site. Don’t hesitate to contact a consultant to help you with your SEO migration. It will be worthwhile since a healthy SEO strategy will make your site visible and profitable.
Conclusion: Take Website Revamps Seriously
Great content and how efficiently the content is presented will make for an effective website. If users can find your content fast and visit important pages without leaving quickly, it means that your site is functional.
With a website revamp, you need to determine and decide what to retain, remove, or update to improve your site, which can be daunting. There’s no use worrying if you have correct data and a team that understands the revamp process.
