A new website redesign can make all the difference in your marketing efforts. Your website is one of the first things a customer will see and, even though you may be attached to your website, several things could be holding it back. There are many reasons why you should consider a new website redesign.
Why You Should Consider a New Website Redesign
User Experience
The user experience is crucial to your website’s success. Not only will a better user experience help convert visitors once they get to your site, but a good user experience is one of the things that Google looks for when it comes to search visibility. During a new site design, you should be aware of what you want users to do once they get to the site and design a site that makes it easy to get there.
When you do a quick scan of your site, can you sum up your services, and can you tell where you are supposed to go next on the site? Is there a clear call to action on the product and service pages? Remember, according to a study performed by Microsoft, the average attention span is 8 seconds. If you don’t see these things, and see them quickly, then it’s time to do a website redesign.
Mobile Responsiveness
More people are searching on their phones, so having a mobile-friendly site should be a no brainer. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, once again, you will be missing out on people converting on your website and miss out on valuable Google visibility.
Functionality of Site
If you are on a platform that is no longer functioning right, it may be time to upgrade. While you are at it, redesign the site to fit your marketing goals. If you have pop-ups, embedded social media feeds, or different e-commerce plug-ins, make sure they are up to date and are functioning properly.
WordPress core typically upgrades 2-3 times per year in addition to security patches, and plugins (like WooCommerce) can upgrade more frequently. It is important to keep up with security patches and functionality upgrades to ensure that your online business continues to operate smoothly. Turnkey website development and managed WordPress hosting from LOCALSYNC can take care of this for you, so you can concentrate on your business.
Line Up with Marketing Goals
It would be best to evaluate your marketing goals every quarter and make sure your site measures up. If your site is not matching up with your goals, it’s time for a site redesign. You may also want to add additional efforts during your website redesign, like a blog for better content marketing.
Optimize Buyer Journey
Your website should be a key part of your sales funnel. Your website should be tailored to your buyer’s journey. While it’s important to have content on your website for SEO purposes, you are hurting yourself if the content and the information on your site doesn’t help the buyer journey.
Increase Speed
Websites that don’t load fast enough will make people leave your site before they do anything. Use Google’s developer tools to test your speed and, if it’s too slow, consider a site redesign to fix the issues so you can keep people on your site and go through your buyer journey.
Optimize for Local SEO
If you are a locally focused business, make sure that your new website changes are reflected in your local SEO efforts. That means ensuring that all links back to your website are correct, content on local directories are correct, and business information is correct.
Doing Research for a New Website Redesign
Before you jump into a redesign, it’s important to have a plan. The best thing to do is look at competitor websites to understand better what users expect in the industry. You can use tools that monitor conversion patterns, so you know what areas need improvement. Look at your top traffic pages on Google Analytics or in your LOCALSYNC Online Business Center Dashboard to see which pages need better conversion elements. Then you can form a plan.
How to Maintain Your SEO with a New Website Redesign
One of the things that you will need to consider when doing a new website redesign is maintaining your current SEO efforts. To do this, you should know about SEO or be working with someone with SEO experience.
- You should know what is currently working so that you can translate that over to the new site.
- You should be aware of common issues that happen to SEO efforts when you launch a new site so that you can be aware and stop any problems before they become costly to fix.
- You should know what would change with the redesign to make sure the new site will line up with your SEO goals.
There are a few best practices when launching a new site:
- Keep the old site live and save crawl data to refer back to it if there is an issue.
- Make sure you have 301 redirects in place for any URL changes.
- Don’t fix what isn’t broken. If your URL structure is already working for the site, then you are better off keeping it as is.
- Keep current content that is doing well. It’s better to tweak content after it’s already established on the new website.
- Make sure to do a technical audit once the new site is launched to ensure there aren’t any issues and nothing got missed.
Want to Learn More About Creating a New Website Design?
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