7 Critical Web Redesign Considerations You Can’t Overlook

Planning a website redesign can be an extremely exciting process. While having a great looking website is awesome, technical SEO, content, and functionality can't be an afterthought. Here are some key considerations to avoid a redesign disaster.

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Date published
July 17, 2013 Categories

redesign-traffic

Planning a website redesign can be an extremely exciting process. You have a blank canvas to which you can easily add your own creativity and flair. It’s tempting to get carried away.

Unfortunately, most designers and creative teams will use this opportunity to focus entirely on the visual design of the site, and overlook SEO, content, and functionality.

Sites with a history of good search traffic can see most or even all of that traffic vanish after a redesign. That new site may look great, but that won’t be much consolation to their owners!

Yes, it’s important to have a great looking website. It needs to look great if it’s going to convert your visitors into paying customers, but traffic, conversions, and functionality are what will ultimately govern its success or failure.

So, what are the key considerations when implementing a site re-design?

1. Have You Done Your Research?

To design a website that’s going to deliver results, you need to know who you’re targeting. The design, functionality, and SEO focus should all be dictated by informed research. That means market research, keyword research, and community mapping.

This should be your first port of call, not an afterthought. If you have this information from the very beginning you can then use in in every aspect of your redesign.

Benchmarking your existing data will allow you to identify what is currently working, and what has worked in the past. Be sure to evaluate which pages are the most popular, convert the best, rank and deliver the most leads/sales. Doing so will fuel the new site with proven techniques and allow you to gauge the site’s success post-launch.

2. Website Structure

A redesign isn’t simply a chance to give your website a fresh look. It also gives you the opportunity to reorganize the way your site is structured.

To make sure your information architecture is set up for optimal visibility and conversions, your priority should be analyzing the effectiveness of your current site:

Use all of this information to improve the architecture of your new site.

Mobile phones, tablets and alternative devices must also be considered. There are a few primary approaches:

Each approach has their advantages. You’ll want to consider factors like site goals, personalization, site complexity, timeframe, and budgets.

3. Redirects – 301 & Canonicals

Inventory all pages, incoming links, and pages that rank well from the very beginning. Don’t forget about subdomains.

As the URL structure is changed, a redirect strategy will be incredibly important to retaining any SEO rankings and rerouting referral traffic to the new pages/URLs.

Audit and analyze where all incoming links are coming from, and going to. This can be done using tools like Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, among others.

Once you have an inventory of backward links, you’ll want to map them along with all pages to their new location using 301 redirects. This is also a great time to establish your canonical strategy for “www”, index files, and other forms of duplicate content.

Tip: The redirect strategy will likely change based on design, navigation, and content, among other factors. Knowing this in advance will help alleviate future frustrations.

4. Navigation

How easily your site can be navigated, by both human visitors and search engine spiders, will have a significant effect on the visibility and success of your new website. You need to look at site structure from two different standpoints:

5. Where Does the Content Fit In?

We all know that content is the most important aspect of any digital campaign. So why is it still so often an afterthought when sites are designed?

The quality, visibility, and relevance of your content will be the most influential factor in determining the success or failure of your new site. Shouldn’t it be given some attention during the design process?

One primary consideration is what type of content will be published on-site.

These questions should always be answered before you start designing the site. This gives you the opportunity to effectively integrate the blog into the overall design of your new website. It will also give you a chance to make sure that visitors can always find the most relevant content for them – and that they can find your blog, no matter what page they’re on.

Another consideration is whether you’ll be offering any other content through your site.

As with each of the previous points, considering your content before you finalize the site design will make it far more functional, profitable, and effective.

6. Technical SEO

Your site’s position in the SERPs depends on many different factors (more than 200, according to Google). This means that your redesign gives you more than 200 different areas that you can look to improve, condense, and build on to increase your search visibility, site authority, and trust.

Three key areas you should pay close attention to during the redesign process are:

7. Testing

In an ideal situation, budgets and time would be unlimited. If we had the budget and time, every single component of the site would be pitted in a death match fight to the death based on analytical data. This would include all wireframes, mock-ups, images, color, content and the list goes on.

Obviously, we can’t do this. But don’t forget about the advantages gained if we could, and remember to incorporate testing into your process.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is quickly evolving into an entirely integrated discipline. A website redesign is a major event in any digital marketing campaign, so it makes sense that this process should also be as integrated as possible.

If a site is going to deliver real value, it shouldn’t be left to just designers and aesthetic considerations. Your SEO team, copywriters, sales team and social media managers should all be heavily involved, right from the start.

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