Your website is your business tool.
It is a sales pitch, a display for products/services, a business card, a listing, and an advertisement. All these functions are essential to your brand and your success both online and offline.
If you think this way, the design becomes more important than ever. You may even start rethinking your entire look, or maybe you have been for some time.
At this stage, there are some essentials you must keep in mind for the best outcome. These will help you design the best website possible for a powerful home base on the web.
Following are few things to review while re-designing your website:
1. Make a note of what’s working and what isn’t
Before you move ahead, it is important to know which aspects and features to change. You should use analytics to see what your visitors find valuable, and what they don’t. The stuff that’s not working is unessential – you can and should either get rid of it or improve it. It is your call.
Your website design directly affects your online marketing performance, so using analytics to make smart decisions is a must.
Bits of information like, what CTAs (Click to Actions) are not working or what pages aren’t being visited should be gathered to make important decisions about your new site’s design.
2. Aim for Smart Working
You need to set goals for how well your site works for Marketing as well as SEO, not just how flashy it is or how nice it looks. Website with flashy visuals or a fancy code will eventually have higher chances of slow loading times or confusing page links.
How to set goals for your new site:
- Aim to double your website visitors or leads, or at least increase them by a certain percentage.
- Always have a clean, modern look and avoid unnecessary real-estate space wherever you can.
- You should have easy CTAs, more quick and easy forms for users to fill, preferably on the Homepage of your website.
- Following security points should be considered while redesigning the website – Secure online checkouts, Limit user permissions and Automate website backups.
- A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is one way to improve your website speed, image optimization, session optimization, scalability & security
3. Choose your CMS wisely
The CMS you choose will define what you can do with your site’s re-design and build. The goals that you are trying to meet should be directly in coordination with the platform of your website.
Few CMSs that you can opt are WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Kentico CMS, to name some.
4. Hit SEO Checkpoints
Since your website redesign is going to uplift your marketing, you need to be more discoverable than ever. SEO is very important at this stage.
Few are some checkpoints for a site with a successful SEO:
- Optimize your existing content with well-written page titles, permalinks, and Meta description for the content.
- Check Search Console Errors.
- Check If Your Server Supports the New Design
- Check PageSpeed Insights -The site loading time should be as minimal as possible, preferably under 2 seconds. You can use Tools like Gtmetrix and Pingdom to check that.
- Update your XML sitemap & Robots File
- Set Up the 301 Redirects (with Domain Change)
- Make sure your new website is not being indexed and check for broken links.
- Also, see that your live URLs are optimized.
- Coordinate and match up the old and the new pages with respect to SEO when redesigning a website.
5. Last but not the least – Responsive
It is a fact now that mobile browsing has bypassed desktop browsing. Users on their phones or tabs check out your site, so you need to make sure that it is responsive.
Website has to be able to reconfigure itself with respect to user’s device and screen size. The browsing experience for the user should be satisfying to not have them look elsewhere and visit your site frequently.
Summing it up
Our Web Development and Design team at PECS not just focuses on looks of a website, but try to incorporate functionality for the best marketing results also keeping in mind speed and security.
We set goals, understand the user, rethink their content, look at their competition, and make the site fully responsive and SEO-friendly.
Through this way, we help our clients meet their business goals!