Why redesign your website?
To begin with, it is necessary to understand what your motivations are, but above all your goals. For what purpose do you want to do the redesign of your website ? What do you want to remove or add to your new site?
This will greatly help you determine the design of your new website, but also in setting a set of goals that are both functional (e.g., adding a livechat on landing pages) and visual (e.g., a new graphic identity with brighter colors).
This is how you will be able to increase your site traffic, reduce the bounce rate, and more. increase the conversion rate overall of the site.
1 - Do an audit of the existing
The first step is to identify strengths as well as the weak points of the current site. You will then need to identify what works best, and the elements that you consider to be positive on your website.
What works the least well must also be taken into account, in particular, deep pages, outdated articles or pages whose charging time exceeds 5 seconds.
Once this work is done, you will have visibility on all the elements that are likely to help, or on the contrary, harm your new website. It should also allow you to improve the user experience so that your final goals are achieved.
2 - Define your goals
After examining the strengths and weaknesses of your website, you need to set clear goals. Why decide to Do a redesign now? What is the business objective behind such a change?
Exchanging with your teams will be essential to determine the information necessary for the Rebuilding your website. Indeed, not all sites define their objectives in the same way, some exist to inform the public, others ensure notoriety, while another part will be the main vector of business (e-commerce).
We talk about it regularly on the web, and it is not the result of chance. SMART goals help you achieve goals that are often overridden by your management. Your objective should be simple and specific, there should be no ambiguities to ensure that all actors can understand.
A good objective for your blog redesign would be for example: Increase blog site traffic by 25% in 3 months thanks to a new editorial line.
3 - Conduct a competition analysis
It is highly recommended to examine the competition, to analyze the way in which they present their content, the visual elements to boost the display, and all the other elements used to facilitate their navigation, for example. This will allow you to differentiate yourself from the competition while drawing inspiration from their strengths by adapting them to your own way.
Tools such as Google Analytics will allow you to analyze the audience of your website. And other tools like SEMrush and SpyFu will help you carry out further studies on your competitors, your environment and the techniques they use to reach such positions on Google for example.
They allow you to search for all the keywords of a domain, a sub-domain and vice versa (depending on a keyword, you will find all the sites positioned on it). SEMrush is one of the most used software by SEO agencies since it is a complete suite that gives visibility on 80% of topics related to SEO.
The complexity with these tools, which remain affordable, is that they are very comprehensive, and that you can very easily get lost. In the same way as on Google Analytics, you will obtain lots of data that you will have to assimilate and accumulate in order to derive insights. This ability to analyze and synthesize is very often the reason why companies use web agencies.
4 - Develop a message and build an identity
Building a good brand identity is a crucial step in a process of website redesign. You'll need to highlight your business, what makes you unique, and how you're going to help your customers solve their problems.
Talking about yourself, and the services you offer will not succeed Convince your customers 100%, they need to identify themselves with the organization that will meet their needs. You will have to be able to link the content of your website with the needs of your customers.
5 - Create navigation scenarios
Create navigation scenarios allows you to be in the shoes of your visitors. This is how you will be able to know if the information is hidden or if it is not visible enough.
These scenarios should not be completely different from the previous one so as not to disturb users who visit your site regularly. Also, avoid giving too simple names to pages, use titles to place relevant keywords for your referencing.
6 - Define your buyer persona
The definition of a Buyer Persona always starts with researching your target audience. If you don't have a persona, you can start by doing research, interviews, and interviews with your current prospects or customers.
To find your buyer persona, you need to better understand how your customers behave in the face of what you offer them. Then, you will have to assign certain criteria to it such as:
- Sex
- The age group
- The post
- Its location
It is also recommended to humanize your character by giving him a name, and why not even a photo to go further in the exercise.
However, if you had already defined your buyer persona before, it would be best to modify it in order to adapt it to the design, and to best match your new content.
7 - Measure your results
The last step is probably the one that will justify the good or bad choices you may have made. Like any action or marketing approach If you perform, you should measure the results X weeks and months later.
The return on investment of redesign of a website is evaluated in different ways, some sites will judge the number of visits while others will measure the evolution of turnover. So here are a few questions to ask yourself 3 months after a redesign:
- What is the evolution of the number of visits? And where do they come from in relation to the past months?
- What is the overall conversion rate of the site? Are they new visitors?
- How many prospects from the site have they become customers?
Finally, if the results are not yet conclusive, you can also try to do tests using tools such as Optimizely that will do some experiments on your website in real time.
To develop your business in the sense of the web, the redesign of your website is an important step. The seven steps in this article give you some details about both targeting and browsing. A site is never perfect, it evolves in the same way as the needs of your customers. Take into account the opinions of your users to always have a coherent design, and a strong message.