How to Work Towards a Successful Website Redesign

A website redesign is an important decision for a business and, like with all website improvements, the website redesign is ultimately aimed at improving site performance, customer experiences, and conversions. However, a website redesign isn’t necessarily restricted to changing visuals but also involves revamping the website structure, website navigation, and the different functionalities of the website. Thereby, often including both the front end and the back end of your website.

Given its detailed nature, it would be safe to state that website redesign is like a house renovation — you invest time, money, talent and bear the risk of changing things for the worse. You have to avoid pitfalls at all costs because, after all, your website is your organization’s digital real estate and it represents your identity on the web. That’s why we have compiled a 5 point how-to-guide for ensuring a successful website redesign. Let’s see what they are:

1. Estimate the ROI of redesign to ascertain its eligibility

Before investing in a website redesign, it’s recommended to predict its ROI. Similarly, it’s necessary to ascertain the cost of not redesigning, which means calculating what you would miss out on if you don’t redesign.

Let’s say, a company’s eCommerce store receives 10,000 visitors in a month on one of its products, out of which 4%(400) add the product to the cart. The company averages a shopping cart abandonment rate of 70%, meaning 120 people checkout that product. Assuming $45 as the average cart value, the company generates $5400 per month in revenues from that product.

It’s predicted that a redesign of the store’s product pages and checkout pages will increase the ATC rate to 6% and reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate to 60%. These improved figures will result in 200 more people adding to carts, and a total of 240 people checking out. At the same average cart value, the company estimates a doubled revenue of $10,800 from that product after the redesign.

Although sometimes confusing, these calculations are very crucial going into the redesign process — or not going into it at all! Also, these figures will act as standards for comparison once the website redesign is complete.

2. Generate actionable data with A/B Testing before complete website overhaul

You know how you want your new website to look like. You have even factored in necessary changes to improve conversion rates. But what you lack is hard data — you can’t back how customers might react, or how your other stakeholders might perceive it. It’s true nobody can tell for sure how successful the redesign may become, but you can remove a great deal of uncertainty using A/B testing.

A/B testing generates real-time data by diverting traffic to two versions of a webpage. This allows you to compare the performance of the old design with the updated one, and avoid suboptimal redesign results. Not only that, but A/B testing UI and content on each page ensures that every webpage receives its due focus on its optimization and eventually results in a much-improved website.

3. Solve technical mistakes that may have crept into the redesign

A website redesign is a comprehensive piece of work. It’s normal for some technical mistakes to have found their way into the redesigned website, but these should be dealt with as soon as they are detected. Dead links, wrongly triggered 301 redirects, unintended 404 pages, improper responsiveness and JavaScript errors are all examples of mistakes that you should look out for.

Ensure that you have solved all errors before the redesign goes live. Doing this is essential to avoid any break in the user experience.

4. Ask what your would-be audience thinks of the redesign

Data is undoubtedly an essential pre-requisite to successful website redesign. However, you cannot expect to improve numbers without aligning redesign efforts with your brand’s identity. This is because your website is a crucial part of your brand and it portrays what your business stands for. A website redesign that disregards your brand’s perception in the customers’ eyes might hamper your brand more than helping it.

To ensure the redesign resonates with your customers, it makes sense to employ some qualitative measures. Testing user experience with a target group representing your typical customer is one of them. You can ask the group to navigate your redesigned webpage(s)/website and see if they find anything confusing or challenging. This UX data will be void of any personal bias to the redesign and offer constructive feedback to improve website redesign.

5. More testing and more changes

The idea behind website redesign is to improve the website for the customers. And the best way to do that is through continuously testing the redesign and working on its optimization with the view to better the quantified performance of the old website.

However, along with A/B testing, there are other ways to measure the performance of your redesigned website. These measurements make way for a robust and reliable comparison of the old and the new website, thereby allowing for an accurate measure of website redesign success. Read How to Measure Successful Website Redesign next to determine how well you achieved your website redesign objectives.

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