Employ A Website Redesign Checklist To Improve The Usability Of Your Site

• Amelia Sabestine
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A website redesign is a major undertaking that must be carefully planned and implemented. Whether you’re beginning from scratch or updating an existing site, using a website redesign checklist may keep you on track and make sure no details are overlooked. Yet, revamping a website is a complicated process that calls for extensive preparation, thought, and execution. In this article, you will get a detailed website redesign checklist your website, including all the necessary procedures and factors.

How To Tell Whether Your Website Needs a Redesign

Redesign website process takes time, money, and a lot of work. Thus, deciding to redesign a company’s website can be challenging.
Here are some warning signals that it might be time to rebuild your website:

Outdated Layout

If your website looks old and unappealing, it might be time for a makeover. Your website’s credibility and professionalism will suffer if it has an out-of-date design.

Poor User Experience

If people have trouble finding what they need on your website or getting around it, it might be time for a makeover. A high bounce rate and low conversion rate are both indicators of a poor user experience.

Slow Processing Time

Users may become dissatisfied and abandon your website if it takes too long to load. Improving website speed through a redesign is possible.

Is Not Mobile-Friendly

With more and more people using mobile devices to access the web, it can be disastrous to have a website that is not optimized for mobile viewing. A mobile-friendly website redesign considerations can help your site become user-friendly.

Low Search Engine Rankings

It could be time to redesign your website if it is not performing well in search engine rankings. With SEO and a redesign, you can make your site more visible in search results.

Not Aligned With Your Brand

There may be a need for a makeover of your website if it is no longer representative of your brand. Branding and messaging on your website should be consistent.

Outdated Technology

If your website was built with old technology, it might be time for a change. By using more modern technology, you can make your website faster and safer.

These indicators should serve as a loud and obvious signal to take action on a website redesign strategy.

14 Points On How To Start a Website Redesign Plan For The Year 2024 

You may be wondering what steps to take once you’ve decided a redesign is required. Here, you will get a simple website redesign guide;

1. Set Some Clear Goals 

Before you start to change your website, you should make sure you have clear goals and objectives. This will help you focus your efforts and make sure that your redesign fits with your business goals. Some examples of goals are to increase traffic, get users more involved, or improve the look of your brand.

Set your goals and objectives before you start the phases of website redesign.

• What do you want to get out of your new website?
• Do you want to increase traffic, improve the user experience, boost conversions, or do all of the above?

Once you know what your goals are, you can make a plan for redesigning your website that fits them.

2. Set Up Your Dedicated Team 

Having a committed team makes it easier to avoid problems. This team should be made up of at most five people from different departments who have different skills and backgrounds and also have strong knowledge about modern web design ideas.

This helps make sure that you get feedback from people who see things from different angles. A good team for planning a website redesign will have: 

• Designer
• Developer
• Content writer
• Strategist
• Final decision reviewer from the C-Suite

You also need to choose the person in this team who will be in charge of this project.

This person will have the last word when it comes to approving and making decisions in the group, and their job is to make sure the project keeps moving forward.

3. Analyze The Condition Of Your Website

The next step is to look at your current website and figure out what needs to be changed.

• What are the good things about your site, and what are the bad things?
• Which pages and features get a lot of traffic and which ones don’t?
• What problems do your users have? 

This analysis will help you decide how to change things and make sure you fix the most important problems.

4. Research On User Experience

To make a website that is focused on the user, you need to know what their needs, preferences, and habits are. User research will help you learn about your users’ needs and expectations, which you can then use to make decisions about how to redesign a website.

You can use different methods, such as 

• Surveys
• Interviews
• usability testing
• Analytics to learn about users

It is very important to figure out how to improve the experience of your users.

To make your website easy for people to use, keep things simple, easy to navigate, and easy to get to. This could mean making pages load faster, having a clear visual hierarchy, or getting feedback from customers through surveys.

The most important thing is to listen to your target audience and make changes to the design based on what they say.

5. Establishing a Timetable

It takes time to make a great website. You don’t want to make a website redesign timeline that is too short and forces your team to rush through important steps or that gives them too much time and doesn’t make them feel like they need to move quickly.

Think about when you will want to use your new website. Are there any upcoming events? What are they? 

If something is coming up, start as soon as you can so you have enough time to make the high-quality website you want.

Once you’ve decided on a deadline, break it up into smaller parts and set milestones. These checkpoints will help you see if a project is on or off track.

As you work on the project, keep track of how far along you are and how close you are to the deadline. If you need to, change the deadline.

6. Find Ideas And Learn About The Competitors

Taking a look at your competitors online is a great way to find things you can do better or differently than them. It can help you see where your website can grow based on what your competitors are doing.

• Start by figuring out who your top three competitors are in your market who regularly rank for the same keywords that describe your business.
• Look at their websites and write down what you like and don’t like.
• Don’t try to do exactly what they do; instead, use this information to find things you can do better.

7. Plan Out Your Strategy

After you’ve set your goals, looked at your current website, and done user research. Then you can make a website redesign project plan. 

• The next step is to formulate a plan of action to get the job done. Concrete strategies based on metrics could involve working with your SEO team to improve your rankings or with your sales team to get more leads.
• Look at your strategy for branding. What do you want customers to know about your business when they visit your website?
• Customers often find out about your business for the first time on your website. How would you make your website if you knew you only had a few seconds to catch a visitor’s eye? 

8. Review And Upgrade Your Brand’s Visuals

One of the most useful tools at your disposal is the brand style guide you’ve developed.
When consumers think of your firm, what comes to mind is your brand. It’s the essence of your brand and the people behind it.
A brand style guide maintains consistency between intended and actual brand messaging. It’s a set of rules that ensures everyone in your organization is on the same page when it comes to representing your brand.
So, it’s important to make sure these files are correct before moving on with research and planning.
Your brand’s visual identity can be expressed in documents called “visual style guides.” Some examples of such components are:

• Typography
• Image treatments
• Color palettes
• Iconography
• Logo usage

9. Create Your Content

Always keep your audience’s education in mind as you develop new pieces of content.
Calls to action and other practical requirements can make your website more interesting to visitors and boost sales even if the design isn’t perfect. Your website shouldn’t just sit there; it should actively encourage people to interact with your company in some way. When planning a redesign, it’s important to think about all the ways things could change. Here are some examples of calls to action:

• eBooks and whitepapers
• Promotions and contests 
• Product purchases
• Email newsletter subscription
• Free trial
• Contact us

These are powerful tools that can be used to teach and engage potential customers, keeping them interested and moving them through the sales funnel.

10. Optimize Your Search Engine Rankings

If you want to attract the correct audience and turn them into paying clients, then search engine optimization (SEO) must play a central role in your website redesign check list. Your newly updated site will be able to immediately attract its intended audience.
The way your website is set up is very important if you want people and search engine spiders to be able to find it.
Keyword research is one of the important aspects of any site’s SEO, therefore start researching keywords early. Plan your sitemap around your target keywords.

Make sure to optimize a video or photo before you upload it by putting keywords in the file name.
Carefully examine your page names and meta descriptions. How successful they have been in luring searchers to click over to your site can be deduced from the data in Google Console.

During a redesign website checklist, you can take care of SEO technical issues that may have been missed before.

• Improving the speed of your page
• Compressing file sizes 
• Addressing 404 redirects and 301 redirects properly
• Optimizing your internal linking strategy
• Shifting to secure HTTPS
• Making sure you have an XML sitemap and robots.txt file
• Checking for any broken links

11. Improve Your Website

Here, your team (internal or external) will convert the flat design mockups into code such as HTML and CSS.
If you want users everywhere to have the same great experience, you need to test your sites in as many browsers as possible as you build them. You can rest assured that your site will look great in any browser by testing it in as many as possible. 

• This also guarantees that your users will have the best possible experience.
  This also applies to mobile gadgets. To switch between many screen options.

12. Perform User Testing

User testing is one of the best ways to figure out how well a new website design works.
There are a variety of approaches. 

• It can be done by comparing two versions of a page’s design (the old and the new) 
• Or by changing or adding content to the current version of the page.

Before releasing a brand-new website design, you should put it through a round of user testing. You can make your new design even friendlier to users after collecting enough data and getting feedback on how they are using it.

13. Adjust For Mobile Use

Including mobile in the redesign process is essential for successful website redesign steps. Since mobile phone usage has surpassed computer usage, your website must be mobile-friendly.
If you want your website to look good on all devices, it needs to be responsive. Even if your website is responsive, you should still optimize it for mobile use.
To reach this goal, you should follow the best website redesign tips for mobile website design, like using large, easy-to-read fonts and a mobile menu that goes off the screen. For mobile, you can ditch the extraneous stuff. 

In addition, check the site’s speed on mobile devices; it should load in under two seconds.

14. Watch And Evaluate How Your Website Is Doing

It’s crucial to keep an eye on how well your new website is doing even after it goes live. Metrics like these must be monitored.

• Traffic 
• Engagement
• Conversions 
• Bounce rates

You can use this information to find problems on your site and make changes that will make it work better. 

Concluding Remarks On Redesigning Websites

In today’s digital world, you need to redesign your website if you want to stay ahead of the competition and meet the changing needs of your customers. A successful website redesign requires careful attention to the items on this website redesign task list. 

It is important to remember to define your goals and objectives, examine your current website, conduct user research, plan your website architecture, select a design that is consistent with your brand, optimize for search engines, conduct usability testing, launch your website, and track its success. The website redesign process can be a game-changer for your company if you approach it with strategic thinking and solid execution.

Amelia Sabestine

administrator