When thinking of a website redesign, most people focus on glam, glitz and look-wise factors rather than effectiveness. The features that are appealing for the eyes unfortunately can win conversions. So, while visual elements are likely grab attention, a great website redesign needs to convert users into business leads.
Building a attention grabbing flashy website can be easy, but building a website with great conversion rate is much harder. Many websites redesign simply because of their need to perfect things that are making users suffer. Let us offer below 7 of the most important website redesign tips.
1. Keep goals and audience in mind
What kind of audience you are going to cater to? What individual personas are most important for your lead generation and business conversion? What kind of short time and long time goals you have for making your website garner business? All these questions are important considerations as they will guide your redesign project for the most part. Secondly, you can address custom aspects in your redesign project to be appealing to each individual.
2. Think SEO from the beginning of the redesign
How the new redesigned website will serve the target audience is crucial to your popularity. In this respect a consistent focus on SEO from the day one is important. Involving SEO team early in the redesign process is must if you want to reap the SEO advantages throughout. When a website is being coded or the development process is complete, the SEO demands need to address the design aspects from the scratch. Having SEO in mind from the very beginning of the strategy session will lead to faster results without widening gap between SEO and design elements.
Secondly, finding the right balance between UX and SEO is crucial for measuring the success of website redesign. A liberal and unaccounted for focus on UX may lead to a poor SEO performance and on the other hand, exclusive SEO focus can actually make user engagement suffer and in the long run can prove to be detrimental to retain users. Many websites experience that the new site going live after a redesign is having a steady drop in traffic. On the other side, redesign of website carried out with SEO objective sees a sharp decline in conversion rates. While both can be detrimental on the economic side, a right balance between the two is recommended to address the issues.
3. Convey your brand
Why a business needs a brand? It is simply because it works as the bridge of trust between users and the business and trust is what makes loyal customers who play the most valuable role in your growth. Because besides continuing to buy from you they rope in new customers. Secondly, on the exterior side it helps your business garner a identity based on your product and service which separates your business from many others catering to similar market and users. Naturally, creating a brand statement is an impelling force behind decisions of site redesign.
Creating a brand identity for your new redesigned website consider the following design elements before all.
The color and contrast creating the right thematic variation can make a sense of coherence and refer to a brand. The tone used in the website copy, whether professional, conversational, funny, snarky, is important to tell about your brand. Lastly, a coherent typography across the business along with the website can help making the brand stronger.
4. Audit and evaluate your content
When doing website redesign an evaluation of content is must. You must have some idea about the expectations and needs of the users. In accordance to that you can review and reorganize the website content. With evaluation of your web content, you can easily assess the requirements and gaps corresponding to contents.
5. Ensure faster loading speed
Faster loading speed is must if you want people to stay on your website and do not decide to leave it. As per various studies, 40% of visitors just leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds loading time.
A caching plugin like W3 Total Cache can save you from poor loading speed. Thanks to caching the browsers on the visitors end to load many web elements like the HTML and CSS faster than usual. Optimizing the images is also important to boost loading time. Often by reducing the image size with image editing apps can lead to fast load speed. A Content Delivery Network or CDN allows loading the website faster by serving a website version from a server closest to the audience. A CDN network thus minimizes the loading time to a great extent.
6. Make all your forms simple
Users detest long forms and forms that ask too many questions or make users fill up too many fields are straightforward avoided by users in most cases. So, while redesigning a site optimizing the form in respect of length, relevance and engagement is important. Keeping the form simple and relevant is the first requirement to make it more engaging. The two bare minimum required form fields are name and email. When offering a redesigned website make sure your existing users do not need to fill up the form again, instead you can save their time through social login or similar procedure. Remember, filling forms inversely affect conversion rate. So the bottom line is, the less number of fields you offer to fill up, the higher conversion rate you can enjoy.
7. Don't forget to test as you redesign
Lastly, it is the testing of the redesigned website by actual users and team members that will ensure how far you have addressed the issues and made it more user-friendly. Taking quick feedback from some of your existing users is an important step to identify usability issues and address them further. It is advisable to launch the redesigned home page in beta version before making the final version live. Getting feedback and addressing the issues quickly is critical to your redesign success.
Author Bio - Keval Padia is a Founder and CEO of Nimblechapps. He is an iPhone Game Developer, with acute knowledge of Mobile App Design and Web Design. His vision is to become the best mobile development company, which can transform people's idea into fully functional application at a very affordable price.