The Ultimate Guide to Planning a Website Redesign in 2024

If your website looks dated, customers might be less likely to trust your brand. In today’s digital world, you need a modern and user-friendly website to attract new customers or even keep existing ones engaged on your website. After all, first impressions are everything!

Check out the screenshots below. We worked with our client, McBride’s Water Advantage, to redesign the look and feel of their website. The first screenshot is what their homepage looked like before the redesign. The second screenshot is the refreshed homepage that our designers developed. The new homepage is a vibrant showcase of the company’s services and expertise. Water-themed visuals in the animated banner and across the homepage emphasize the website’s clean and refreshing aesthetic. The new homepage also features customer testimonials, news, and FAQs – providing site visitors with a comprehensive overview of their company and services.

Design and website navigation go hand in hand. Your website should consist of a clear sitemap that makes it easy for users to navigate from one page to another, find relevant information, and take action. If customers cannot find content they are searching for within a few minutes, or sometimes seconds, they will exit your website and move on to the next one, which is not great for your business.

At GraVoc, we’ve assisted businesses in revamping and reimagining the navigation of their website. Below are examples of menu structures that we’ve implemented for our clients to better streamline their services or products.

Today, most users view websites on their mobile devices. In fact, “Mobile phones generated over 60% of website traffic in 2022, with desktops and tablets only generating about 39%.” It has also been said that Google is now basing its website rankings on mobile rather than desktop. So, if your website cannot deliver a frictionless browsing experience for mobile users, it’s time to consider a redesign.

If you’ve recently checked your website’s performance and see high bounce rates and low conversation rates, then you have a problem. A high bounce rate typically occurs when a user exits your website after visiting one page. Meanwhile, a low conversation rate means users are not taking the desired action on your website, such as purchasing a product, reading a blog post, or filling out a web form. These metrics are important indictors of your website’s performance and ability to generate leads. So, if these numbers are low, it’s time to reevaluate your website design.

If your website has poor search visibility, then you need to pay more attention to your SEO practices. Having an SEO-friendly website is key to ensure your business ranks well in search engines and can be discovered by new customers online. If your website lacks good content or does not load quickly, then it may be time to rethink your on-page and technical SEO strategy.

Below is an example of an SEO-friendly service area webpage tailored for our client, Socci & Nieves Family Law Group. Creating and optimizing location pages presents service-oriented businesses with an excellent opportunity to precisely target and connect with their intended audiences.

Is your website tough to manage in the backend? If yes, it’s time to revamp and redesign your website, especially if you want to keep your website content fresh and save your team both time and money.

Take a good, hard look at your website’s performance metrics, including page speed, bounce rates, user engagement, top-performing webpages, search engine rankings, conversion rates, and more. You can use tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush to easily access this information. Reviewing this data will help you isolate underperforming areas of your website and define metrics for improvement for the redesigned site.

There are many factors to consider when choosing to opt for a DIY approach or working with a website design company. While the DIY route might be less expensive, it’s going to be more time consuming. And, if your team does not have the right skill set for a website redesign, the final site will not deliver on your vision.

On the other hand, hiring a website design company like GraVoc, will ensure your new site has a responsive design that can meet your goals, whether it’s improving the user experience, SEO, or lead generation. If you need a more advanced website, such as an eCommerce store or fundraising website, then it’s even more important to work with professional web designers that have the right training and expertise to handle a complex redesign project.

Analyzing your competitors’ websites can provide a great starting point for your redesign. By browsing these websites, you can determine what works for your competitors as well as what you can do better. This can help you find areas for improvement on your own website and plan for any new additions to the site.

Along with a competitor analysis, you should also look at what’s working well on your website. Review your analytics and create a list of your high-performing webpages that rank high in search and bring in the most traffic or conversions. Take special care to protect these pages during the redesign process and ensure any planned changes do not compromise the effectiveness of your high-performing content pieces.

Consider whether your existing CMS has the functionality to support your redesigned website and goals. If your CMS is not scalable and user-friendly, then you should shop around for a new platform to build and host your redesigned website.

GraVoc has experience in most website design platforms, but we often choose WordPress. The CMS is best known for its advantages as a blogging platform, but it also has a solid reputation for being easy to use. WordPress comes with many customization options, plugins, and user-friendly themes and templates. If your end goal is to take control of your website and manage content edits on your own, then WordPress may be the right choice for you.

Prepare your brand guidelines, including colors, fonts, and messaging, and ensure these elements are properly used across your redesigned website.

Look at content that’s already on your website and see what needs to be updated. Thin and duplicate content are not good for SEO or user engagement. So, create a thoughtful strategy to clean up existing content and add new informational content to thin webpages to better engage your audience.

Ensure you are using engaging pictures and videos throughout your website. Adding pictures and videos to your website will help enhance the overall user experience. Visual elements capture user attention more effectively than text alone, making your website more appealing and memorable to visitors. Images and videos can convey information quickly and succinctly, improving the efficiency of communication.

Also, multimedia content helps to break up text, making the browsing experience more dynamic and enjoyable. By showcasing your products or services through visuals, you can create a more immersive and persuasive narrative, ultimately increasing user satisfaction and driving engagement on your website.

GraVoc works with customers to either find the right pictures for their website, or create custom photos and videos that are tailored to their brand. Check out our photography services, video production services, or drone services webpages to learn more about how GraVoc can enhance your website through photos and videos!

During the website redesign process, if you change the URLs of any webpages, make sure to implement 301 redirects. A 301 redirect ensures that users requesting an old URL are automatically guided to the new one. This also signals to search engines that the URL has been permanently replaced. Implementing a 301 redirect is important to ensure that you do not lose any traffic or search rankings associated with the original webpage.