Your website can’t stay static. As technology evolves and customer expectations shift, you need a site that delivers both relevant content and a compelling experience for visitors.
In this piece, we’ll look at some common signs that your site needs a redesign, what to consider when revamping a website, and some website redesign tips to get you started.
When Is it Time to Invest in a Website Redesign?
There’s no hard-and-fast rule for redesigning a website. Your site might offer significant returns for years before visitor interest starts to decline, or it might need a refresh after just a few months of use.
The challenge is knowing when it’s time to update and when your site is experiencing the normal fluctuations that come with delivering a digital experience. While every site is different, there are a few indicators that it may be time to invest in a redesign.
Your Website Is Outdated
How long has your current site gone without a refresh or update? The longer it’s been, the more likely it is that your site could use a boost. Consider ongoing changes to search engine optimization (SEO). From efforts to reduce keyword stuffing to prioritizing sites with fast load times and easy-to-find content, search engines such as Google are constantly updating their algorithms to enhance results.
If your site is outdated — for example, if you rely on long-form content that includes many keywords but little actionable value, or if your product pages are text-heavy and unclear — you could see a significant drop-off in visitor numbers even as your bounce rate rises.
Put simply, the older your site, the more likely you’ll need an update.
Your Key Metrics Are Continually Declining
Even if your site looks great, it’s only as good as its performance. As a result, it’s critical to consider key metrics such as how many new visitors your site generates each day, week, or month, along with the length of time these visitors stay, what features they’re interacting with, and what actions they take, such as putting items in their digital cart or reading product reviews.
If you’re seeing a consistent decline in these metrics that persists over time, it’s time for a refresh.
Your Site Has Recurring Technical or UX Issues
As technology evolves, older sites can encounter technical issues. These could take the form of pages taking too long to load, not loading correctly, or having problems with the user experience (UX) if your site doesn’t deliver the same experience across both desktop and mobile device types.
If problems are persistent, it’s time for improvement.
What to Consider When Redesigning a Website
If it’s clear that your website needs a redesign, it may be tempting to jump right in and start making significant changes. The challenge? Without an effective roadmap, you could end up doing more harm than good. Here are six things to consider when redesigning a website.
1. What’s working and what isn’t?
First, take stock of what’s working and what isn’t on your site.
For example, you might have informational blog posts or product views that continue to garner significant user interest, even as your site performance and sales conversion drop. By collecting current performance data, you can pinpoint where it makes sense to make changes and where you’re better off leaving well enough alone.
2. What are your goals for the new site?
Next up is determining what metrics you want to improve. Here’s why: While a ground-up site design might get the results you’re looking for, you’ll only know efforts were successful if you can collect current metrics, and compare them to previous benchmarks.
As a result, it’s worth picking a few top-priority goals and metrics to match. Consider a site with reliable visitor traffic but declining sales conversions. This suggests that brand recognition and SEO are solid, but something has gone wrong between visitor arrival on-site, and product purchasing. To address this issue, one primary goal of site redesign should be boosting conversions. Equipped with a clear goal, you can prioritize the parts of your site that aren’t performing.
3. Where is your competition doing well?
Don’t be afraid of looking at the competition. While you want to stand out from the crowd, you also want to do what works, which means looking at competitors that are performing well in your shared market niche.
First, see how they rank for common keywords. Where does their site rank in search engine results? Next, explore their site as a visitor. What does their layout look like? How is navigation handled? What details are on their product pages? The more you know about the competition, the better.
4. What style/theme suits your new site?
Once you have an idea of what’s missing and where you want to go, consider what style and theme suit your new site. Are you going for simple and minimalist? Do your customers prefer text-heavy or interactive features? What about font, colors, and other UX features?
5. Where can you keep content, and where does it need a refresh?
Before committing to a website redesign, look for any content you can keep. This might include a top-performing blog post or video that’s frequently linked to on social media sites or performs well in organic searches.
6. What SEO value do you need to protect?
Finally, make sure you’re protecting your SEO value as much as possible. In practice, this requires these steps:
Keep high-traffic pages intact. Don’t give up your high-traffic pages. If you have content that’s performing well, either keep the URL the same when you redesign the site, or make sure you point search engines in the right direction. Here’s why: If search engines discover that your top-performing pages are no longer linked to your site, your SEO could suffer.
Determine if you’re going to eliminate or change URLs. If pages aren’t performing, it may be worth eliminating the URL. If they’re still bringing in traffic, it’s worth changing the URLs. In either case, you want to redirect users to your new site using what’s known as a 301 or 302 redirect. Both send visitors to another page, the difference being that 302 redirects are temporary since they keep both old and new pages indexed, whereas 301 redirects are permanent.
If you’re eliminating a URL, you may want to send users from the old URL to your new home page. If you’re changing the URL, send them to the new version of the page on your new site.
Perform keyword research. It’s also worth performing keyword research to make sure the keywords you’re using are the ones users are looking for. Solutions such as Google Trends can help, and many website builders now include SEO optimization tools that can help you pinpoint ideal keywords.
Redesigning Your Site With the Wix Website Builder
If it’s time for a website redesign, the Wix website builder can help.
Wix lets you select from more than 500 free and fully customizable websites, or you can build your own site from the ground up. Get started ASAP with Wix’s smart drag-and-drop editor, or use AI technology to quickly get your site up and running. Need to go even more in-depth? Full-stack web development tools let your team dive in and build your best site from the ground up.
Plus, Wix is designed for site performance, offers in-depth SEO capabilities, and provides 24/7 enterprise-grade security to keep your site safe.
Time for a Redesign? Do it All With Name.com
If it’s time to revamp your website, Name.com has you covered. Looking for a rebuild? We offer Wix. Need better hosting? We’ve got cloud, web, and WordPress options. Want to expand your brand impact? We’ve got the domain names that can make all the difference.
Get started on your new website today!
