There are several reasons websites and business owners decide to redesign their website completely. It might not be generating enough leads or conversions, the design might not be in line with branding, or it might only be outdated. For whatever reason, the time for a total makeover always comes.

Redesigning your website is not a small project. It takes a ton of research, precise planning, testing, and foresight. The process must be thorough and comprehensive, covering every aspect of a website.

To save you from overlooking important details, we’ve put together a checklist to guide your website redesign process. It covers everything from identifying goals and competitor analysis to content planning and designing.

• Review your current website
• Check out the Competition
• Set your goals
• Inform your service provider of your SEO concerns
• Re-establish your branding
• Determine your user’s journey
• Come up with a realistic timeline
  Read more about each of them below.

7 Things To Do Before You Start A Website Redesign

1. Review your current website

Review your current website
The first and most obvious step is a full review of your existing website. Redesigning is aimed at making significant improvements, and that can’t be done without identifying and understanding the problems and weaknesses of your website.

Analyse which pages generate the most traffic and ask questions like what’s missing and what can you do better. Then, find out why. Why are these pages attracting the most traffic? Is it the content that sells? The design? Is it the interlinking and calls-to-action?

Reviewing your current website and asking these essential questions allow you to understand what you must improve and how.

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2. Check out the competition

Check out the competition
Similar to the first step, the second thing you need to do is also a review, not of your website, but your competitors’. Taking a look at what other companies in your industry are doing gives you an idea of the best practices you should adopt.

Scout the competition and draw inspiration, not to duplicate what they have done, but to do it better. Find out what’s trendy and what works, because although thinking outside the box is excellent and innovative, there are patterns of success and efficacy to follow.

Check out the kind of content and design of your competitors. What is the tone of their content? Their ways to design inclusive websites? What is the feel of their design? What kind of images are the best to use?

This gives you the advantage of learning from your competitors and seeing the strategies that work, informing your redesign and giving you an edge in creating a better user experience in your way.

3. Set your goals

Set your goals
Once you’ve done a complete audit of your current and competitors’ website, it’s time to set goals. Redesigning your website would be pointless without goals. They are both the whole reason behind a redesign in the first place and measures by which you can track your progress.

As the reason for a redesign, it’s common sense to know where you want to go with the process. It gives the project focus, giving you an idea of what exactly needs the majority of your attention.

What is it that you want to accomplish in your redesign? How to improve website’s conversion rates? Is it to increase conversion rates? Is it to completely update the design and content?

As a measure, goals allow you to know where you stand in the process. It lets you see what you’ve done and what more you need to do, giving your redesign direction and purpose.

Keep in mind that you won’t hit some of these goals as soon as you launch your website. For example, if your goal is to gather more visitors, then you would have to track and analyse usage statistics and data to see the results.

4. Inform your service provider of your SEO concerns

Inform your service provider of your SEO concerns
This step includes bringing up all your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) concerns with your programmers. If your existing website already has a good search engine ranking, then your web developers or programmers must copy existing links into the new site to ensure that your SEO accomplishments won’t be put into waste.

It’s crucial that all existing links on your website are gathered and reprogrammed so that these links stay functional on the new site. If one link isn’t reprogrammed, it will redirect users to the old website and completely ruin the fluidity of their experience.

Apart from making sure all your links are in sync, this is also an opportunity to enhance your SEO even more. Do some research and find out if there are more keywords that you can make use of to improve your ranking in search engine results.

As an established web design and web development company in Singapore, we’ve always said that SEO makes it easier for your audience and prospects to find you on the web, so it’s essential that you go the extra mile in making your content spot-on.

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5. Re-establish your branding

Re-establish your branding
This next step is all about realignment with your branding and style guidelines. In this part of the process, you discuss with your team and review your brand.

Remember who you are as a brand. Cement it to the core of the project to ensure that all contents and designs turn out cohesive, consistent, and complementary. Everything that results from redesigning your website must be indeed your own.

This is also an opportunity for those who need to get rid of their outdated branding and start fresh. Brainstorm and ideate until you can finally express a particular brand that is genuine and relatable.

If you have difficulty rebranding, we are also well-versed in branding and offers branding packages that can be tailored to your needs. Remember, branding and style is the core of your company. From it comes everything that you produce, so it’s necessary to always be in line with it.

6. Determine your user’s journey

Determine your user's journey
One of the most critical steps before redesigning your website is to know and understand your user and their usual journey. If you can’t see things from their perspective, your website will have a high chance of not being able to cater to their needs, rendering the redesign useless and a waste of resources.

So, it’s highly relevant to place yourself in your users’ shoes. What are the most common things they would look for? What do they need? How are they going to look for it on your website? An excellent way to find out is to check on your existing site’s analytics. Know which pages generate the highest number of clicks and visits so that you’ll know which pages should hold more importance in the redesign.

Understanding what your user needs and what their problems are the key to creating a new and improved experience for them. It allows you to create a path they can easily navigate, the engaging content they can easily understand, and designs that keep them glued to your website.

Our UX Research & Consulting Services can give your business the advantage it needs when planning for a website redesign. We provide user research, testing and analysis so that your newly redesigned website delivers a top-notch user experience.

7. Come up with a realistic timeline

Come up with a realistic timeline
As mentioned, redesigning your website is not a small project. It takes a lot of research and planning, so expect this process to be a lengthy one. Trying to cram everything in a short amount of time leaves you prone to skipping out on crucial details.

Making mistakes because of trying to do everything quickly only makes the process longer because of the adjustments that you’ll eventually have to make when you realise that you skipped some crucial steps. So, be sure to have a realistic timeline; take note of some factors such as the difficulty of your requirements, emergencies and more.

However, it’s natural to want to finish redesigning your website in the shortest amount of time possible. To ensure this, ask yourself what is essential. There might be some pages or some content that aren’t value-adding to your website, so spending time on these would be a waste. This will also help the site to be more concise because you eliminate non-essentials.

It’s also important to ask the date when you need the work to be done. Is there a momentous event on which you can capitalise your web presence? Questions like this allow you to determine just how soon you need to double down on your project.

We are here to help you on your website redesign

This list is meant to guide you through every step of redesigning your website, and following it will undoubtedly make you redesign a successful one, but if you want to take your site to another level, put it in the hands of ours.

As a professional web development agency, we have over ten years of experience, knowledge and expertise not only in creating websites but in giving old ones new life as well.

You can trust that we have more than what it takes to make a website and transform it into an engaging, smooth and efficient 24/7 salesperson.