What Is a Website Redesign?

The reality is that website design is a major undertaking that no company with an online presence should take lightly. The decision to build a new website needs to be a strategic action that utilizes available data to put the company in a better position to meet future revenue goals.

Businesses may often confuse a website redesign with a website refresh. A company’s redesigned website should bear little resemblance to the former website once the process is complete. With a website refresh, the coding and functionality of the site remain the same, but some of its features change. Updating the company logo and outdated content are two examples of a website refresh. Businesses desiring to overhaul a website and commit to a redesign typically do so for several of the reasons indicated below.

• Adding new products or services
• Adding SSL certification
• Branding updates
• Improving mobile responsiveness
• Integration with the company’s social media platforms
• Server updates
• Technology upgrades
• UX design
• Website template changes

The reasons for undertaking website redesign vary from one business to the next, but the desire for higher conversion rates and a better user experience are typically the main reasons.

What Are the Benefits of Website Redesign?

Creating a new website is an ideal way to ensure that customers see the same branding across all verticals. Other benefits of creating a new website include:

• The opportunity to create a more effective content management strategy.
• Creating a new website is an ideal time to consider new keywords and phrases for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
• Users expect your company website to perform consistently regardless of the type of device they used to access it. Companies overhauling a website need to prioritize mobile responsiveness to gain a maximum share of traffic. To achieve this, programmers need to be mindful of screen size and resolution when implementing the upgrades.
• Successful website redesign gives users a better overall experience.
• Google considers site speed when ranking what to return on the search engine results page (SERP). The faster your company website displays pages, the higher it is likely to rank.
• Customers lose trust in a company fast when its website is not secure enough to prevent hackers from accessing it and obtaining their personal information. Creating a new website presents an opportunity to increase security and inform customers of the new security measures in place. Don’t forget the SSL certificate!

10 Signs It’s Time for a New Website or Website Redesign

At Virtual Image, we recommend that your business seriously consider a new website redesign if it has experienced one or more of the pain points described below.

Leads and Sales Are Dropping

This one should be obvious since the entire purpose of having a business website is to attract potential buyers that follow through with a purchase. A consistent decline in leads and sales is a symptom of larger issues. Although your company should take the time to determine the specific reasons for the decline, such as slow page loads or outdated content, the fact that leads and sales are going down can be enough of a reason in itself to create a new website.

Visitors Aren’t Engaging

Creating blog posts, videos, and graphs and then people not reading or viewing them is disappointing. However, it may be the website rather than the quality of the content that fails to inspire visitors to interact.

Slow Page Loads

People go to a website expecting to find the information they need right away. Clicking away from the website and going to a competitor is the natural result of having to wait more than a few seconds for website pages to load.

Outdated Web Design

When people provide feedback about business websites, complaints about design rank higher than anything else. You need to consider that people judge the aesthetics of a website within seconds of navigating to it. If the site is too busy or the design looks like it is more than a couple of years old, a lot of people may not give it a second chance.

Inconsistent Branding

We discussed above how website redesign gives businesses the chance to make brand images and messages more consistent. If your website logo and design differ considerably from print collateral and in-person displays, customers can become confused. Aligning all branding ensures that people know symbols and messages that represent your company when they see them.

Little to No SERP Rankings

When you understand that 93 percent of people begin their online experience using a search engine and that three-quarters of them do not look beyond the first page of results, you are right to feel concerned about your company’s ranking. The launch of a new website is a good opportunity to create new paid and organic SEO strategies that move your company website to a higher position on SERPs.

Broken Site Elements

People feel frustrated when they navigate to a website only to find broken links, missing images, and buttons that do not connect them to anything. Not only can broken website elements harm your company’s reputation, but they can also decrease SEO. Although all businesses should prioritize fixing broken website elements, some websites do not have the infrastructure to support the upgrades. That is a sure sign that the time for website redesign has come.

Different Experiences on Different Devices

The tide has shifted in the past few years to the point that more people search for what they need online using a mobile device than they do with a laptop or desktop computer. Users will understandably feel frustrated if they cannot connect to your business website on a mobile device or the website is hard to navigate and read. Adding or improving mobile responsiveness is a must for any business with a website today.

You’re Growing

A business that outgrows its website has a good problem, but the problem still requires a resolution. The pursuit of company growth should accompany website redesign to ensure that the new website can keep pace with customer demands.

Outdated or Nonexistent CMS

A content management system enables businesses to easily add, delete, or edit content from a single interface. Without it, businesses must change codes manually or hire a website developer to make the edits. A content management system also makes it possible to move content around to display what is most relevant at the moment. For example, your company may be running a time-limited offer that it would like to promote. This tool makes it simple to do that and then delete the information when it is no longer relevant.

Next Steps

It’s important that you and your team review the above list to get a handle on if a redesign or new website is necessary. By utilizing data such as Google Analytics, you’ll develop ideas to create a better overall user experience from the start, and may even save yourself the investment of a redesign or new site. Contact the experts at Virtual Image today to get started!