Redesigning your website can be an overwhelming task. You might not know exactly what you want to do with your redesign or even what is important in web design. I put together 5 tips to help you redesign your website and hopefully take some stress out of the process for you.
- Think about user experience
When creating or redesigning a website, user experience needs to be the focus. There is no reason to have a website if your visitors are having a poor experience on your site.
The goal of a website is to bring users to your site to either learn more about your company or take an action on your site, such as making a purchase or signing up for an account. A good way to determine if your site is providing a good user experience is by putting yourself in the users’ shoes.
Go through the process of landing on the website and navigating around to see if there is anything on your site that could be adjusted. It can be even more helpful to ask people around you to do this, since you are familiar with your site and know how to navigate it. It is important that users are not getting distracted, because that can quickly turn a valuable website visitor into a bounce that moves on to another website.
Another reason to optimize the user experience on your site is because it is a ranking factor for search engine optimization. Search engines can easily tell if users are having a good or bad experience with your site. Once search engines find a pattern, this can affect where your pages rank in the search results.
- Less is more
When redesigning your website, it doesn’t mean that you should try to go over the top with your design. Having a simple web design is the best way to build a user-friendly website.
When you have a clean and simple web design layout, it allows your users to access everything they need to access and easily navigate your site. When there is too much going on, this will create distractions for your visitors that will result in less conversions.
When you look at some of the more popular websites, you can see that they have a visually pleasing design, while keeping it straight to the point.
- Observe how users interact with your website
Observing how users interact with your website is a great way to be sure that your redesign is effective and successful. This goes hand in hand with creating a good user experience.
I would recommend having as many people as you can test out your website to see how they interact with the website and also find out if there are any problems they experienced with your site. It is always a good idea to be testing your site to determine if there are any changes that could be made to provide a better experience for your users.
If you are getting consistent website visitors and have a Google Analytics account, you can also see how real website visitors are interacting with your site. This is going to be the most valuable data you can find, because you are able to see exactly how these users behave on your site by how they interact with different pages.
Some important metrics to consider are bounce rate, time on site, and the behavior flow. I really like looking at the behavior flow on my Google Analytics account, because this allows you to se a chart of where you users navigate on your website. You can see which pages most visitors navigate to after a specific page, which can help you see how users navigate your site.
Another important metric to look at with Google Analytics is exit pages. This shows you which pages users are leaving your website from. This can mean a few different things and is not always a bad thing.
The first, most obvious thing it could mean is they lost interest with your site and decided to move on. The other thing it could mean is that they found the information they needed, which means you helped them with their problem or question.
It will differ depending on the users and the page as to whether exists are a good thing. If the page is a blog post answering a question, you probably helped those users and answered their questions. If the page is your pricing page, then maybe your prices are scaring off users.
- Think about SEO
SEO is the process of making adjustments to your site to rank higher in the organic search results. When redesigning your website, taking SEO into consideration can make a big difference for your site. If you ignore SEO, you are missing out on a lot of potential traffic.
Having a good SEO strategy in place can get you a lot of free traffic that you would otherwise need to pay for. If you are putting together a blog, taking advantage of SEO will help your rank your blog posts and receive a lot of traffic to your site.
For example, on this blog post about chiropractic SEO. If I am able to get that ranked on the first page of Google, any chiropractors trying to improve their SEO will land on my website.
One of the biggest SEO mistakes I have seen with website designs is having most of the content on the website be made up of images. Search engines cannot read images like they can read text, which makes it nearly impossible to rank with little to no text.
If you are a local business, I would recommend looking into local SEO to improve your rankings.
- Call-to-actions
Call-to-actions are often overlooked and can make a big difference in your conversions and overall revenue. Users need to have clear call-to-actions to know what they are supposed to do on your website.
Website visitors might not completely know what action they are supposed to take next on your site. If you are providing them value on “how to make money online”, they might not necessarily be looking to buy something, so you need to guide them in the right direction. For example, you could present them with the option to sign up to your newsletter to receive emails from you. You could also be selling an eBook on your website that might benefit them.
You need to be sure to include buttons and links on your site that will take them where you want them to go. Without providing these call-to-actions, users will likely get some value out of your content and then leave. You are leaving a lot on the table in this scenario, because there is a good chance they really enjoyed your content and would love what you have to offer.
It’s important to be smart about your call to actions as well. I wouldn’t recommend throwing call-to-action buttons all over your site but make them clear and easy to find so that users know what you have to offer.
