It’s a widely known fact that a bad website leads to a lower conversion rate and fewer sales in general. A quick redesign of your website can often be a far more efficient method of overcoming many problems your online business encounters, even more than any digital marketing strategy.
The best example of redesign certainly involves implementing modern trends and technologies while maintaining the already built brand identity.
Cosmetic changes or real redesign?
Lately, accidentally or not, we have managed to unnecessarily complicate the concept of user experience. The difference between a great user experience and one that your users would characterize as rubbish comes down to a few essential items, so read on. First of all, a great design will allow the visitor to find the information that interests him quickly. From this, it can be concluded that the user experience is practically composed of the three principal parts, the look, the feeling it provides, and the functionality.
In that sense, the redesign will undoubtedly affect the strengthening of organic search. It will reduce the so-called bounce rate (cases of almost instant abandonment of the site by users without any significant retention) and significantly improve the user experience globally.
A redesign is not just a cosmetic change. Even though small changes can be beneficial, if your website looks outdated, lacks fresh content, hasn’t been properly SEO optimized… No cosmetic changes will solve your problems and that time for a proper redesign has come. We can help you with that.
Where do you start from?
As a website building and maintaining agency, when conducting this often delicate process, we ask our clients few crucial questions:
- What is your target audience?
- Why do they visit your website?
- What are your most visited pages?
- What is your bounce rate percentage?
- What pages provide the most considerable conversion rate?
- Do you often get a bad review?
Once we obtain answers to these and few more critical questions, we then continue the process by thoroughly inspect visual aspects and elements, content, and so on. Are the links broken, what is the page loading time, is navigation easy or not. These are all dominant information.
Functionality as a priority
New graphic elements, fonts, and colors, are usually the most exciting elements to which the most attention is paid. However, there are far more critical things. First of all, you need to determine the functionality of the site. It is vital to study analytics, site navigation as well as the content itself. Both appearance and feeling play precisely the same role and have absolutely the same meaning.
The home page plays the most prominent role. This is the page that your users visit most often, and almost always, all problems are related to it. The most common mistakes and shortcomings are related to overbooked content and the attempt to present everything you offer to users as complex and extensive as possible. This approach is in most cases counterproductive and leads to a relatively quick departure from the site. The content must be simple, concise, with calls to further research (Call to action links).
SEO
SEO optimization plays a significant role in redesign. An SEO “friendly” site will allow search engines to examine each page, analyze it, interpret it and finally adequately index it in their database. Indexing will enable users to find your page when searching for a specific topic. In this regard, the better and more relevant the content on the site, the more likely your site will be on the first pages of the search. And the benefits of such a position are immeasurable!
Of course, by no means don’t forget to use tags, header tags, alternate image descriptions, and meta descriptions on each page!
Mobile-friendly experience
It’s no secret that an increasing number of users today browse the sites on their mobile phones. Those websites that do not have mobile phone versions can hardly survive in today’s internet world. Mobile versions have become a simple necessity. However, the design for different types of devices undoubtedly brings the need to be adapted to these devices. The design for mobile devices must be cleaner, less cluttered than the version for, let’s say, desktop computers. You will need to reduce the number of elements on the pages and scale them appropriately to preserve the user experience.
Speed matters
The website’s speed not only attracts visitors but also serves as a signal for Google ranking. Visitors will almost certainly leave a slow website, which will increase your bounce rate and lower your browser rankings. Several ways to improve page speed are optimizing images, removing unnecessary add-ons, and enabling browser caching.
Is that all?
Of course not! It is a wrong presumption that the moment the site becomes “alive,” – i.e., all work on it stops when it becomes active. Namely, no matter how many stages of testing the site goes through, only with its activation on the Internet can possible shortcomings and flaws are noticed. This requires permanent control of work and the elimination of potential problems quickly and efficiently.
On the other hand, many other factors require constant monitoring of the functioning of your sites, such as changes in user habits, updating browser versions, new SEO quarks, and the like.
Therefore, if you are still in a dilemma about improving your site, contact us. Our team of experts will help you gain an advantage over your competition.
