A website is one of the most important elements in a business owner’s arsenal. When used well, it can help them grow their business to new heights efficiently. And one of the prerequisites for using it well is designing it smartly in the first place. When you design a website well, the first thing it does is convey your brand voice and message more clearly to the audience.
And that is the entire purpose, isn’t it? The exact reason why most businesses require a website in the first place. So let’s say that you have discovered that your current website isn’t fulfilling its purpose now, and you’ve decided to revamp it.
What are the factors that will help you build a better website? And how can you monitor your new website to ensure that this doesn’t happen again in the future? Let’s dive in and discover what it takes to redesign your website to help you connect better with your audience.
Define Your Marketing Goals
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The first, and arguably the most important thing you have to do, is identify your marketing needs. That is because they are the driving force that is dictating why you need to revamp your website. So, start out by identifying and recording your marketing requirements.
Doing so will help you design the strategy for what to revamp, and how to do it. Moreover, it would also allow you to set the KPIs or metrics according to which you will be able to judge the success of your new website.
Generally, your marketing goals will need to reflect your brand’s nature and personality. To put it simply, you cannot have the same revamp strategy for an eCommerce website, as you would for a personal website for a life coach. Therefore, you will have unique KPIs for your website in question, as well as goals that are based on those KPIs.
So now that you have identified your goals and KPIs, you will be able to identify the type of user actions to focus on and promote, such as:
- Signing up
- Filling out a contact form
- Purchasing a product or service
- Downloading a piece of content exclusive to your brand
Using these actions, you will be able to track how well your revamped site is progressing, depending on the KPIs that it is fulfilling.
Perform a Website Audit
It is rare that when you revamp a site, you change everything about it. Most of the time, a few elements need to be changed for the website to gain new life. However, the question is; how can you know what needs changing?
One thing we can all agree on is the fact that your website revamps should be based on hard, data-driven facts, and not your gut feelings. And in order to get those necessary data-driven insights, you need to conduct an audit of your website. That will help you recommend the necessary changes and justify them too.
Tools like Google Analytics are a great source of information on this subject and can help you monitor and review various aspects of your website easily and quickly, such as design audit, SEO & URL audit, and more. Some of the most common elements and items that pop up in website audits include:
- Pages visited frequently
- Pages with very little or no traffic
- Performance of primary keywords on SERPs
- Performance of different CTAs on your website
- CTAs with little to no interaction
- Ease of navigation on your website
- How effective is your user journey in keeping a user on your site engaged
These factors and more are what dictate the changes that need to be made to your website. And if you manage to answer these questions properly, then you will be able to come up with some interesting and actionable change suggestions.
Set Up Google Analytics on Your Website
Continuing from the last point, you need analytics tools to monitor and assess your website’s performance, current, and post-revamp. Therefore, if your website has no analytics tool set up, the first thing you have to do is to integrate one for your website.
We highly recommend Google Analytics’ latest version, called the GA4, as the preferred option for your web analytics tool. The reason we recommend adding an analytics tool is that it would allow you to identify potential issues long before they become full-fledged problems, such as page load speeds and more. Moreover, it would also help you achieve your goals by aiding you in making the right changes based on the results of your successes and failures.
Now, if you’ve outsourced your website’s SEO to a marketing agency, the addition of web analytics tools and website monitoring will often be included in the project. However, no matter whether you are building the site on your own, or have outsourced it to an agency, you need to understand the analytics tools and study the data and insights generated each month.
Plan the User Experience for Your Website’s New Design
Whenever we create a website’s design or revamp it, one of the most important aspects we need to consider from the consumer’s end is the user experience. Frankly, one of the biggest factors that affect the likelihood of a user returning to your website is whether they enjoyed going through it the first time.
We often see businesses with great offerings failing to generate traffic to your websites. That is because they do not offer the kind of experience that a user expects. And when there are other options to choose from in the market, why would a user choose one that doesn’t have an experience they enjoy?
One of the simplest ways to keep your design user-friendly is to keep it simple and minimalist. Cluttered screens tend to get confusing, for both you and your customers. Moreover, it is also helpful in making your website friendlier in terms of search engine optimization. That means that the better the UX of your website, the better the chances of your website ranking higher in the SERPs.
Adopt a Phased Rollout Approach To Your Revamp at a Time
This is one of the most important aspects to focus on when revamping your website, especially if it is a big revamp. Often, websites behave differently during the testing they do when deployed live. Now, if that happens to your revamped website, it might result in some users experiencing issues, which could lead to a bad user experience.
One of the hallmarks of a well-planned project that sets it apart from bad website examples is that it is deployed in phases to ensure that there are no problems site-wide. Using a rolling deployment instead of a one-shot deployment would help you weed out any potential issues while reducing the chances of negatively affecting the user experience.
Summing Up
There are many elements you need to tweak when reworking an outdated website. And based on your site’s specific shortcomings, you might work on different elements to get it back up to the level of impact desired.
However, there are some key areas that most websites being revamped need to focus on. And if you consider those within your revamp strategy, there is a higher chance that your new website will be a resounding success.
