Do you often compare your website with contemporaries & feel “God! My Website is nothing”? If you do, surely you are not alone and it is okay to feel that way.
If you are dreading over the un-updated look of your website, it’s time to revisit and redesign your website. Redesigning a website can be a nightmare for many, as they do not know what exactly they need to plan and implement, without breaking their audience’s user experience. If you are up to redesigning your website, in this quick guide, you will get a short and crisp checklist for the website redesigning. Just look up to it and you are good to go.
2020 Checklist to Redesigning a Website
1. Re-evaluate your audience
If you have already assessed your audience, it’s okay, do it again. Know who your real audience is, maybe your audience’s demographics have changed over time. Know who is your least to most likely to buy or potential audience, as this will help to redesign your website specifically for those audiences.
- Knowing the target audience is important as it consists of the users who are likely to purchase from you. If you sell baby products, then your closely targeted audience has to be the babies & their parents who will shop for them.
- While considering redesigning, knowing your would-be customers is important as it will help your brand direct all its product offerings, marketing campaigns in the favor of the users who are your real customers.
- You can evaluate your target audience by your close competitors, current user interactions, conducting surveys, communicating with users over social media, and via effective analytics tools.
2. Build an updated site map
Remake your new website site map to understand the structure of your to-be-redesigned site. A sitemap is a skeleton that defines how your website structure is going to look. This will help the team who is redesigning your website to understand the website’s hierarchy and what specific content and where it is supposed to be added.
- Today’s CMS allows the generation of XML sitemaps with ease – and these sitemaps get automatically updated whenever the pages are updated and modified. While some CMS allows you to create a sitemap via additional plugins. WordPress leverages an SEO plugin called Yoast to build the sitemaps.
- Ensure all the new pages/files or sections you are wanting to add are well-carved in the sitemap.
- While redesigning a website, you need a new build sitemap with newly created or added pages. Sitemaps are important as they help search engines with crawling and indexing a website.
3. Decide over the theme/template/layout you would like to renew
Sit with your designing team to identify the new layouts, themes that you would like to splash over your website. Keep the selection simplified and subtle. Choose very soothing colors. Keep designs and graphics that give a balanced look. And choose the designs according to the target audience you have bifurcated above.
- Select a theme/design that’s simple, has more white space, smart and light colors, photographs, or images that draw attention, optimized and easy to read typography, easy to read content, intuitive and usable navigation experience.
- Keep the design hierarchy as streamlined and intuitive, in a way your users could process the design and use it to their best advantage.
- Use data-driven analytics to add the target user’s personalized design, features, or elements to the website.
4. Have neat and simplified development & designing
Decide with your team that will be redesigning your website, on how they are going to take ahead the designing & development process. Discuss the design principles and web technologies you would like to have implemented for your website.
- Ensure to develop and design your website responsive to mobile users’ needs, multiple channels, browsers, or platforms where users are active, design for intuitive navigation, ensure every element of the website is designed in terms of user’s usability and utility.
- Select the best technology stack, web programming tools, methodologies, processes, security patches to build a robust and fail-proof website.
5. Update and optimize the content
- If you were lacking the SEO-friendly content earlier, now it is time to write one. See who your target audience is from the first point and prepare content that matches their taste. Supposedly, if your audience is somewhere between 18-24, your audience is millennials who like edgy, raw, and young content, don’t do conventional copywriting for them.
- And if your audience is middle age, write content that is more mature and sensible. Get your web-copies re-written in context to SEO friendly by inserting keywords – to gain rankings. Your team who will redesign your website would have a better idea of copywriting in accordance to different audiences.
- Ask your redesigning services team to deliver a compelling and optimized content around keywords that your target audience is searching for, as this will help to uplift your website from the beginning and do the better in the ranking game.
6. Treat all the technical Issues
You need to have your website completely free from technical disruptions that are could mess with your website’s performance.
- Make sure your website isn’t heavily loaded and has lightweight elements to it.
- Get your website to revive its fast loading speed over search queries.
- Make your website mobile responsive, as 90% people buy or transact from mobile these days + search engines prefer to rank a website that is mobile-friendly.
- Navigation and connecting between the web pages should be easy, keep easy & smooth interlinking between the pages.
7. Get your website rigorously tested
Before launching your website for final, make sure to have its rigorous testing to ensure its smooth functioning and performance. If you feel, there are any errors or possible setbacks that could disrupt the user experience, you have time to improve it. Your redesigning services team should know of the powerful testing methods that could help with the website’s 100% performance. While testing, include:
- Assess your website over different devices to see if it is compatible with all different device users or not.
- Check the loading time, it should not be more than 3 seconds.
- Make sure every element on the website is working as expected, think, and test it as the user to identify whether the user-experience is intact or not. Check widgets, buttons, CTAs, links, everything.
Conclusion!
Redesigning a website is only a hassle if you do not know where to start and stop at. Here are the 6 things to put in your website redesigning checklist. If you will plan and implement your redesigning tasks according to the above checklist, it will be easy & quick for you to redesign any website into a masterpiece.
