How To Create A Perfect Website Redesign Project Plan In 8 Steps?

A unique and compelling website is the backbone of all your digital marketing efforts. You have to keep your website updated and optimized regularly to keep it engaging and user-friendly. Why do you need a website redesign? With technology and trends changing fast, websites get old too. The website that you created for your business five years back might not be doing a very good job today. It will not be serving the intended objectives unless you were constantly updating and optimizing it to match the user trends. The Search engine algorithms are getting better at understanding user search intent with every update and users are looking for more engaging content every day.

When Should You Revamp Your Website?

If you are someone who is meticulously taking care of your website, you will not need a complete redesign of your business. Here are some instances where you need to completely redesign your website:

• If your website is more than 5 years old and you have not updated or maintained it correctly. You might need a complete design to change layouts, remove irrelevant pages, spammy links, and codes that affect your SEO goals.
• Your website is not responsive, scalable, or mobile-friendly.
• If the bounce rate is over 70 percent on every page of your site and your website is drowning your digital marketing efforts. This means you need to change your website design.
• If your website is no longer aligning with your business goals, you need a complete redesign.

Creating The Perfect Website Redesign Project Plan

We have compiled an easy way for you to redesign your website to meet your business goals and help you grow online:

Step 1: Identify Goals And Audience There might be various reasons for you to revamp your website. It is important to identify your long-term and short-term business goals. You need to identify who your audience is and what are you telling them to do on your website. It helps you decide what exactly you should do to make your website user-friendly, engaging and create more conversions. Your business goals can be

• Rebranding your site
• Increasing your Website Traffic,
• Generating more Leads
• Additional functionalities to improve on-page user experience

Step 2: Conduct A Website Audit Once you have identified what you need from the website, you can audit your website to find out what exactly is it lacking. You can find technical errors, identify UI/UX issues, SEO problems, and assess the content on-page. Once you have done an audit, you can identify the exact issues with your website and try to fix them during the redesigning project.

Step 3: Create A Plan You need to create an exact plan with a budget and deadlines. How long do you have? Are you going to hire a web designer to revamp your website? If you are outsourcing the project to a web designer or a full-service digital marketing company, they will take care of revamping your website completely and provide you with the plan. You can discuss your business goals, ideas, preferences, needs, budget, deadline, and other requirements with them.

Step 4: Design the Layout Once the plan and roadmaps are created, it is time to decide how your website should look and feel like. In this stage, designers will create wireframes to show the structure of the website. You have to decide on the color schemes, typography, elements on pageant the layout. Now the designer can create Mockups and multiple prototypes and you can choose the one that best represents you.

Step 5: Redesign And Recreate Content There are different ways to get users to your page. But, to ensure that they stay and engage you need to give them compelling content. For this, you can add a blog section, add podcasts or create videos, or even a YouTube Channel for video podcasts, etc. You can also optimize your existing blog pages if they have thin or irrelevant content.

Step 6: Design And Develop Once you have decided on the layout and content, it is time to build the actual website and integrate all the elements. In the design and development stage, coding and optimization of your website are done based on whether you chose a custom-built or template-based website.

Technical optimizations are also done in this stage. These include adding ‘robot. txt’ files to direct crawlers and ‘rel= noindex’ tags for pages that are not to be indexed. You can remove pages that are affecting your website’s performance and fix broken links.

Step 7: Test And Launch You have to perform testing throughout the redesigning stage to ensure functionality and to fix bugs. Once system testing and functional testing are done, you can ask some of your super users to do user acceptance testing. After testing, finally, you can go live again with your redesigned website. You can use 301 redirects if you are changing the URL or domain address permanently so that your users don’t go to a dead end.

Step 8: Analyze And Optimize Once you launch your website, you can analyze its performance regularly and see if your strategies are working out. There are many analytics tools like Google Analytics that can give you a complete report on your website’s performance. You have to maintain, improve and update your website regularly to keep it relevant and engaging. You can also use other off-page SEO tactics like link building to increase your domain authority and credibility. Next, it is time for using different digital marketing tactics to generate more leads to your website.

Conclusion: Points To Consider

The common question asked when it comes to a website redesign is that ‘Does it hurt SEO?’ Though website redesign is done to accelerate your SEO efforts, it will alter the code and content layout of your website. So, website redesign has to be done with care. You also need to consider whether you want to design a new website instead of redesigning the existing one.

The scale of your website redesign depends on your business goals and budget. Changes in search algorithms can also affect SEO rankings. So, discuss with SEO experts to audit and determine if you need a new SEO strategy or a complete website redesign.