# 16 steps to a website redesign

> Is your website outdated and struggling to keep up? Thinking about a redesign but not sure where to start? Here is our 16-step website redesign plan.

Step 01

### Define the site's business goals

How will you know whether your website redesign was a success? You need measurable goals. Before you start the redesign, set clear expectations and establish what everyone involved needs.

#### I'd recommend asking these people:

- Designer
- Developer
- Content creator and editor
- Marketer
- The final decision will rest with the owner or the business manager.

Step 02

### Brand and message

You need to be clear about what your brand looks like, what message it sends and what its unique added value is. This should run through the whole website.

A visitor should understand straight away, the first time they open the site, what you do and how you can help them. Above all, why they should buy from you rather than run off to a competitor.

Step 03

### Analyse current performance

First we analyse the current state, then set the expected outcome, and after the redesign we compare it with the real numbers.

**What you can look at:**

- Number of website visitors, both unique and returning
- How long they stay on the site
- Bounce rate
- The best-performing keywords that bring in potential customers
- Domain authority
- Number of links pointing to your site
- Total conversions through the site, whether direct purchases or enquiries
- Number of successful pages

**How do I identify the most important pages?**

- **High conversion and high traffic:** Be wary of big changes, especially if there is a risk they may not work. Changes to these pages can have disastrous consequences, so tread carefully. These pages do exactly what you expect of them.
- **High conversion and low traffic:** Much the same applies here, and a successful redesign of the rest of the site may bring them even more visitors.
- **Low conversion and high traffic:** These pages are made for experimenting and testing techniques to improve conversion. You have the audience, but very little business.
- **Low conversion and low traffic:** Here you can afford to do practically anything, or perhaps even consider whether these pages deserve any of your attention and time at all.

![Website redesign plan](https://webikon.sk/cdn-cgi/image/width=2560,format=auto,fit=scale-down/https://media.webikon.sk/originals/56/04/5604a64a20918537.jpg)

**What else can I look at?**

- The content shared most often on social media.
- The pages with the most visits from organic search.
- The pages shared most often on other websites and portals.
- The best-ranking tracked keywords.

**What else can I find out about my current site?**

- Ask your customers how they find using the site.
- What do customers like and dislike about the way your products and services are presented?
- Is there a significant difference in performance between the desktop and mobile versions of the site?
- Do visitors struggle to complete the actions you want them to take? (For example, call-to-action buttons that don't work as expected)
- What causes the fear, uncertainty and doubt that stop potential customers from converting?

Where can you see analytics data? The standard tools for measuring traffic certainly include Google Analytics and alternatives such as Mixpanel. To see how visitors behave on the site, you can use Hotjar, Crazy Egg or Microsoft Clarity.

Test the parts of the site you want to change before you overhaul the structure and design as a whole. Use A/B testing to see how they work and how they perform compared with the current version.

#### What can you test this way?

- Logo, colours and fonts
- Design and content of product pages
- Homepage banners
- Images, icons and infographics
- Contact and other forms (checkout, for example)
- Button design and links

Step 04

### Document and archive the current site

Once you have gathered all the current analytics metrics, make sure you record and archive them properly, so you know what your statistics looked like before the redesigned site went live.

In the same way, be sure to back up the current site, if only in case you need to look something up later.

Step 05

### Set the redesign goals

**How do you set the right goals for a website redesign, and what should you track?**

- **A fresh look and a better impression:** A website has to look stylish too and, above all, keep up with current trends, otherwise it will look dated and neglected.
- **Better usability:** Don't build the website for yourself, build it for your customers. A high bounce rate, low conversion and short time on site all point to problems. It is more effective to carry out a UX audit before the redesign itself, to uncover these shortcomings.
- **More traffic:** The number of visitors to your site depends largely on organic traffic, which you earn through a good SEO strategy and quality content. A company blog full of relevant, up-to-date content attracts readers. Well-chosen keywords make you even easier to find.
- **Higher conversion:** If visitors don't do what you expect of them (they don't contact you, don't sign up for the newsletter or don't buy) and simply leave, they clearly have some problem with your website or your product. Find out what they are missing.

#### Measurable goals to consider:

- Increase the number of visits and visitors (both matter, because one visitor can come to the site more than once)
- Reduce the bounce rate
- Increase the time visitors spend on the site
- Improve your domain authority in your field
- Increase the total number of new customers and form submissions
- Increase the revenue coming through the site
- Improve your current rankings for important keywords and SEO

![Measurement and analysis](https://webikon.sk/cdn-cgi/image/width=2560,format=auto,fit=scale-down/https://media.webikon.sk/originals/44/70/44702b609bfaf4f4.jpg)

Step 06

### Set a redesign budget

Most managers and marketers have no idea how much a redesign costs. What does that lead to? Budget overruns and frustration over extra payments. It is hard to arrive at a specific figure for the whole redesign project, but it is a good idea to draw a line you don't want to go over and, above all, one your business can afford.

Whether it comes to a few thousand or tens of thousands depends on the specific needs of the business and the goals you want the website to serve. You will never set the budget with complete precision, but the better you understand everything the site needs, the more control you have over the budget and the lower the risk of unrealistic expectations.

A simple website with good content and marketing is often a better start than a complex solution with everything you have dreamed up.

#### Keeping the budget in check and maximising results

- Define clear goals and priorities for the redesign.
- Allocate your resources efficiently, based on facts rather than feelings.
- Do your research and get advice. How much do your competitors invest in their websites, and what does a website typically cost in your industry and location?
- Set a realistic budget. I wouldn't recommend counting on it turning out better; build in a generous contingency instead.
- Look at several alternatives. Give [open-source](/en/blog/open-source/) solutions a chance; they make an excellent foundation to build on.
- Remember that good content and design matter more than technology and all the features and gadgets you imagine the site could offer.

Your budget also needs to allow for regular [website maintenance](/en/services/support-and-maintenance/), monitoring and additional support to keep the site running smoothly. How much of these services you need depends on your business, in other words on how much every second offline costs you.

Step 07

### Define your customer personas

Understanding who your customers are and what they are looking for matters for your business, and for the website itself, so that it can provide relevant information. It is also important not to offer your customers things they don't want right now and aren't interested in. On the other hand, if you look after them well on their first visit and purchase, and the site doesn't pester them, they are likely to come back.

In its [research, Google found](https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/4-new-moments-every-marketer-should-know/) that people have four main intentions when browsing the internet:

- “I want to know”
- “I want to go”
- “I want to do”
- “I want to buy”

Focus on which of these you can offer best, and build the design and content of your new site around it so that it is genuinely appealing to them.

If you build a landing page where customers just read your product specifications, they will probably leave quickly. But if you know what they are looking for, you can focus on that. It might be reviews from other customers, or video demonstrations of how your products or services work.

Step 08

### See what your competitors do

I wouldn't recommend fixating on everything someone else does, especially in business, because everyone has their own style and their own way of reaching the goal. But don't shy away from inspiration either: look at what you could improve by studying someone in your field whose website is really well done. It speeds up the redesign and gives you good ideas. You can also learn from their mistakes and decide how you don't want to do things.

Step 09

### Prepare content before the redesign

Content is king. Stick to that, and make everything else on the site serve it. The worst thing that can happen is that you bring your target audience to the site, wow them with a slick design, and then they can't find, say, a relevant case study about your product to convince them you are the right choice.

**Write content for your readers, not for search engines**. Of course, it is also worth looking at currently recommended SEO strategies and an analysis of relevant keywords, which you then work into the website content as naturally as possible.

**Using keywords:** Do a keyword analysis and choose two or three keywords that best describe your business. These can be short phrases and terms that people type into search engines to find a business like yours. Use these keywords naturally in the website copy, including headings, subheadings and meta tags. Don't try to use them a lot, or on every page. Google's current algorithms can already tell when text doesn't feel authentic and is forcibly stuffed with keywords.

**Alternative text (alt tag):** These extra texts for images make your content clearer to search engines, but above all they make it accessible to people with visual impairments or other disabilities. Describing an image in a sentence or a few words is quite enough. The text isn't directly visible on the site, but search engine bots and browsers' assistive technologies can read it.

**Meta tags:** They add information about your website and help it display correctly in search engines and on social networks. I recommend filling them in as thoroughly as possible and using clear descriptions. They are also a good place for keywords.

**Domain:** The address where the site appears doesn't have to match your business name, but it is important that people can easily connect it with your brand or product. You can change it during a redesign, but you need to factor that into your marketing strategy and communicate it properly.

Step 10

### New content and redirects

By this step you already know which of your pages matter most. So don't forget to set up “301” redirects correctly if you have changed the URL structure. The easiest way is to make a simple spreadsheet listing the old and new URLs.

Based on your keyword analysis, you may find that you need to cover a completely new topic that was missing from the old site. The same rule applies here: never force these keywords into the text.

Step 11

### The user journey

Understanding how visitors move around the site is key: where they land first and how they go on to browse other sections. Where do they have to click before they can buy or contact you? Think about the actions they have to take and whether anything might slow them down or frustrate them.

What do you want to tell your visitors? What story are you trying to tell on your website? What path do they have to take to reach your product and enjoy it or benefit from it? What problems and challenges do you help them overcome?

Think through all these questions, make things as simple as possible for your visitors and guide them through your site as naturally as possible.

Of course, the faster you can get them to their goal, whether that is writing to you, buying or subscribing to your newsletter, the better.

Step 12

### Site hierarchy

It is important to have a worked-out sitemap and what is known as an information architecture, so that you can picture how visitors get to individual content pages. Relying on visitors' patience to find what they need somehow is a bad idea.

Step 13

### Sketch the site layout

Once you know what the content structure will look like, you can have a sketch of the site made, known as a wireframe. It is then up to the designer whether they sketch it by hand or create an interactive mock-up. Either way, it should be clear where each element of the page will go, such as the various shapes, cards, text, images and forms.

Step 14

### Plan the look of the site

Find the right balance between usability and beauty. The website should shout that it belongs to your brand, and every visitor should feel it from the moment they arrive. Think about typography, colour scheme, textures and other design details. Together with your brand identity, they create an experience the customer will associate with you. By the way, did you know that, according to [this study](https://www.quicksprout.com/how-colors-affect-conversion-rate/), colour is responsible for up to 85% of conversions?

Step 15

### Design and development

A large part of the work is now behind you, so you can dive into the design itself and the technical implementation. These are the technical parts of the project, with their own process and pitfalls, so we won't go into them in detail here and will leave them for another article. What I would watch out for is thorough testing during development, speed optimisation and a thorough security audit.

Step 16

### Launch and after launch

After months of analysis, planning, design and development, you want it out as soon as possible, but don't forget a final check:

- Check for broken links
- Make sure all your 301 redirects are set up
- Verify the meta descriptions and titles for every page
- Check for broken or missing images
- Check twice rather than once, because fixing things later can take much longer and, above all, can leave a bad impression.

Every website needs maintenance, monitoring and updates after launch, and possibly technical support. Some sites more often, others only now and then. Sometimes a business needs monitoring 24/7, seven days a week, because every minute can cost you serious money. If you neglect these activities, your website can easily end up unusable, behaving unpredictably or, worse still, an easy target for hackers. It is a good idea to include these costs in your budget for the coming years.

### Keep experimenting and innovating

Run A/B tests and think about new looks and functionality. Think everything through, get advice and measure the real results. When you are happy enough with it, you can release it. Preparation is key, but you don't always have to wait for a full redesign. Some changes are very easy to make and have a big impact. And sometimes things that work don't need changing at all; it is enough to back them up with good marketing, for example.

#### Tips for improving your website's usability (UX):

- Use sufficient contrast between text and background.
- Optimise the site for SEO and keywords, in other words its content.
- Add visuals and distinctive brand elements so your site is easy to recognise.
- Make sure all pages work well on mobile devices.

A well-executed redesign is hard work and often takes a lot of courage to start. But it is often something you have to do if you want your business to grow. I believe that with us you will get it done quickly and without unnecessary risk. Write to us if you get stuck and need advice, or if you are looking for an agency to manage the whole thing for you.

---

Source: https://webikon.sk/en/blog/website-redesign/