The excitement of a website redesign may feel good, but going in without taking into account many elements can damage your search rankings and confuse customers.
Audit Your Current Performance
Write down what you are doing right before everything fades away. Identify your best traffic and conversions using Google Analytics. Track when your visitors engage with certain content and what makes them exit pages quickly. These are the data which help us make decisions about redesign and avoid accidentally removing things that work.
Define Clear Objectives
Why are you redesigning? Purpose may involve improved mobile experience, increased conversions or refreshed dated branding. Concrete goals such as ‘lower bounce rate by 20%’ or ‘faster mobile load’ allow a quantifiable success target. For help with Web Design Cheltenham, contact absolutecreativemarketing.co.uk/web-design/cheltenham/
Content Strategy Planning
List your current content to determine what remains, leaves or is in need of a refresh. Lots of redesigns fail because content isn’t prepared when the new site gets launched.
SEO Preservation
Maintain search rankings by mapping old URLs to new ones. SEO Pages – Find your most valuable SEO pages and ensure that their content and structure transfers over correctly. Implement 301 redirects for changes in URLs to preserve link equity.
Budget and Timeline Reality
Add in time for content creation, photo shoots and copywriting on top of design, but the killer is going through different designs or ideas. On average, a new design takes about 2-3 x more than originally planned.
User Experience Research
Ask current customers to confirm website problems as is and offer suggestions towards remedy. You can always get new insights from them, as they see things that you would normally overlook.
Without proper planning, you can make costly mistakes and actually decrease business performance on the new website.