5 Metrics That Affect the Success of Your Website Redesign

When you’re undertaking a website redesign it can be tempting to rush in with the excitement of new possibilities, but it’s important to consider the key aspects of a redesign, both aesthetically and from a business perspective.

In order for the process to be successful, these two must be aligned if the new website is to provide a high return on investment.

Undertaking a thorough review of your existing website is essential, along with evaluating your content, analytics and calls-to-action, to see how well each is currently performing.

If you haven’t redesigned in some time, the online social landscape has changed dramatically, and if you want your business to thrive, you need to embrace both social media and technology to efficiently deliver your product or service to a wide audience.

Once the redesign is finished, don’t leave it to gather dust. Aim for constant measurement and enhancement. Analysing your redesign efforts with these five key areas will help you develop a cohesive plan and ensure your website redesign is a success.

1. Content

If your website content isn’t making it immediately clear what you do and offer, and why your visitors should care, then your website may never meet your business expectations.

If you’re planning a website redesign, then your content should be one of your first considerations.

Preparing a content audit is an excellent place to start, which means taking stock of current assets, such as web pages, articles, videos, images, files, FAQ’s and so on.

Once you have this done, look for what information is missing and also what needs to be reworked. It’s also important to analyse which pages most visitors are landing on and ensuring that these are updated to convert and drive revenue.

Creating content by first understanding what works and what doesn’t on your current website ensures you make informed decisions. The primary purpose of your website is to deliver valuable content. So while aesthetics are important, taking a clear calls-to-action to turn visitors into customers is one of the most important undertakings when redesigning and developing your new website.

By designing content first, you strip everything away and focus on what’s important, with a more efficient project process, fewer design iterations and a website that more accurately meets your business goals.

2. Customer-driven design

Visitors often judge how a website looks before evaluating its content. If they immediately don’t like your design or are confused by it, they will leave. So design plays a huge role in people’s perception of your business and it’s credibility.

In order for your redesign to be successful, you first need to look at your current website and investigate thoroughly what’s working, what isn’t, what goals it’s fulfilling and where significant improvements can be made.

Clearly defining your audience will also help you make grounded design decisions. A redesign is a chance to really involve your customers and get feedback from users, finding out what is most important to them.

This can also help manage expectations as to what to expect from the new design. During the design phase you can incorporate some of the new elements you’re planning into your existing website. This can be incredibly valuable in seeing what effect it has on existing traffic, testing small changes can validate your future design decisions.

Of course, care should be taken with the basic design itself, as investing in a modern, uncluttered, unique design with a consistent layout and style can increase engagement significantly.

The UI should be usable, clear and easy to use and understand, with a defined content hierarchy. Positioning of critical website elements should be predictable, and imagery should be high quality, avoiding using stock, overused images, which is often seen as “cheesy”.

Your colour scheme should complement your content, as annoying, super bright colour schemes can quickly annoy your users. Choose legible fonts, which can be read quickly and easily, with proper letter and line spacing, using size and font weight to differentiate between headlines, sub-headings and paragraphs.

Ultimately, your redesign should not only improve the aesthetics of your website, but also increase conversions and achieve your business goals.

3. Responsiveness

With mobile device usage continuing to rise, it is more important than ever to optimise your website for all platforms, in order to attract the largest number of visitors possible.

If you make it a pain for your visitors to browse or checkout on your website on their mobile devices, then you are losing potential customers.

Responsive design means a website is built to ensure it’s content and structure scale well on all devices, providing a better user experience. Taking a responsive approach to your redesign has long-term benefits, as it negates the need for a separate mobile website and makes managing content quicker and easier.

While taking a completely device-agnostic approach to the design can be too strict and impractical, it’s beneficial to let the website respond to it’s environment and adapt fluidly, rather than trying to target every individual screen and device.

Google has also taken a clear stance on responsive design, recommending the use of CSS3 media queries, so all devices are served using the same URL and HTML across devices. This method enables Google’s algorithms to assign the indexing properties to crawl your content.

Using responsive front-end frameworks that are designed and built with responsive design from the start could speed up your development time.

4. Social media integration

Incorporating social media into the very core of your website will allow you to reach potential customers and increase the reach of your brand. Your website and social media platforms should work seamlessly together, providing consumers with fresh, relevant and consistent updates.

Make it easy for your users to connect from your website to all your social media platforms, providing social share and like buttons on your landing pages, blog posts and product and service pages, along with installing plugins for the major platforms such as Facebook, X, Instagram or Pinterest.

However just don’t place and forget about them, include a call-to-action with each one and direct your users to use them.

Allow social logins, so users don’t have to go through a lengthy registration process and can simply login using one of their social media accounts. This also creates the opportunity to create and share specialised content and targeted promotions, which reduces bounce rates and increases customer acquisition.

Highlight user-generated content on your website, as sharing images, videos and reviews from your customers will create trust and encourage engagement. Showcasing user-generated content creates a more personal buying experience, allowing potential customers to feel connected to your brand.

5. Speed and performance

Speed is no longer an afterthought when it comes to designing a website, it’s now a feature. Simply reusing your current structure isn’t enough. Performance should be factored in from the start of the planning phase. A slow loading website means your losing visitors on a regular basis, turning away potential clients and negatively affecting your search engine ranking.

A Google study reported that every additional 100 milliseconds of load time can decrease sales by one per cent. Asking each visitor to spend more than a few seconds waiting to view a web page while all the assets load, is a sure fire way to ensure they don’t return or explore deeper into your website.

It’s worth taking the time to review each asset and object on your current website and asking if they are absolutely necessary, and if so, how can they be optimised.

A redesign means brand new code, possibly a new platform and an opportunity to implement a structure that will provide flexibility as you grow. Instead of simply shoe horning in tools, assets and plugins from your existing website, investigate new solutions in a bid to serve a more streamlined experience to your users.

Building for performance means using optimised, clean CSS and focusing on repurposable code, which results in smaller CSS and HTML files and also saves loading time. Minimising JavaScript requests, by only loading it when absolutely necessary, and optimising images using sprites and icon fonts when possible, will provide a significant speed boost.

SOURCE: Mashable