
For some organizations, making minor changes to a site page may be the quick fix your team needs to meet the mark on a business goal. However, at certain inflection points, a redesign may be the best option. It’s an undertaking that requires way more than a fresh coat of paint — it’s a major project designed to solve key problems and requires ample planning, time, people, and resources. Let’s dive into a few of the most common reasons today’s organizations decide to take on a website redesign project.
Your team may want to consider a redesign if:
1. You’re planning a rebrand
Your visual identity is how your brand comes to life — what your audience sees. The purpose of your visual identity is to convey the values and principles of your brand in a clear, digestible way. Branding, meanwhile, seeps into every part of your organization’s marketing efforts and is present on every channel you activate on — ads, social, events, and more. It’s the product of the tangible (colors, fonts, logo) and the intangible (attributes, values), which come together to speak to your target audience. And once this audience changes, it’s probably time to put some heads together.
Rebranding is an entirely separate project from redesigning a website, but organizations tackling one need to consider how it will take form on the website and when. Rapidly growing companies also often aim to tie a rebrand to a major milestone — a public offering, a new fundraising round, a new product offering — in order to drum up additional momentum and execute a rollout that aligns with a natural next step toward growth. So if your company is expecting an influx in web traffic or updating its look, feel, and tone, it might also be an opportunity to assess how you can better cater to your users’ needs on the website.
2. You want to improve the onsite user experience
Often, teams embark on a website redesign either because their target audience has changed, or their target audience is unable to find the information they’re seeking out on your site. The user experience is an essential part of the website — one that requires research, testing, customer journey mapping, and more. While UX teams usually implement small updates and optimizations regularly, organizations need to think more holistically about function, navigation, accessibility, and layouts that help direct users to what they’re looking for and results in a more pleasant overall experience for site visitors.
3. You want to increase site engagement
The objective of any website redesign should be the ability to solve a key business problem, and one of the most common objectives marketing teams establish is to improve a business metric that the website is responsible for. These metrics may look at the big picture, such as improving the website to generate more leads — but some teams may choose to focus on more granular goals first, like increasing the time users spend on-site or the number of pages they visit. Consider the following data-driven objectives for your own website:
- To increase the number of site visits and site visitors
- To reduce your bounce rate
- To increase time spent on site
- To improve your domain authority
- To increase conversions and/or leads generated
- To increase total sales generated
- To enhance current SEO rankings for core keywords
4. You want to increase site performance
Similar to increasing site engagement, the problem at hand might begin with how your website is operating in the first place. A website redesign may be the solution for teams looking to incorporate design best practices that improve site speed or optimize the mobile experience. For others, site performance may be rooted in a deeper issue, such as the tools used to manage content or plugins and trackers that slow down load times. If this is where your problems with site speed and function stem from, migrating your website may also become part of your website redesign plans.
5. You want more control over your website
The ability to control the site and how it functions is one of the most common reasons businesses redesign their websites. Often, the tools or platforms growing organizations use to build and host their websites restrict who can make changes or add content — slowing people down and creating bottlenecks between teams. Companies looking to bring power and autonomy to marketing and design teams may explore replatforming to a visual development tool that can accelerate production timelines and make it easier to make small updates and edits on the fly. This creates an ideal window of opportunity to tackle a much-needed site redesign, which will also lay the groundwork teams need to improve the overall website user and management experience as they scale the business.
Redesign your website to solve a core business problem
A website redesign is ultimately an opportunity to start fresh and address a business problem or need. It’s not just about how your site looks — but rather how it works, who your audience is, how your team manages the site, and how easy it is to make changes. It’s also an opportunity to introduce necessary change to how your website functions — change that the entire organization can then shift toward and align around.
And it’s especially important to remember that a website redesign is no small task — it’s one that requires ample planning, resources, and alignment. So before you dive in, be sure to give yourself the space you need to consider the why and the what — why you should take one on, and what your business will accomplish by effectively doing so.
For some organizations, making minor changes to a site page may be the quick fix your team needs to meet the mark on a business goal. However, at certain inflection points, a redesign may be the best option. It’s an undertaking that requires way more than a fresh coat of paint — it’s a major project designed to solve key problems and requires ample planning, time, people, and resources. Let’s dive into a few of the most common reasons today’s organizations decide to take on a website redesign project.
Your team may want to consider a redesign if:
1. You’re planning a rebrand
Your visual identity is how your brand comes to life — what your audience sees. The purpose of your visual identity is to convey the values and principles of your brand in a clear, digestible way. Branding, meanwhile, seeps into every part of your organization’s marketing efforts and is present on every channel you activate on — ads, social, events, and more. It’s the product of the tangible (colors, fonts, logo) and the intangible (attributes, values), which come together to speak to your target audience. And once this audience changes, it’s probably time to put some heads together.
Rebranding is an entirely separate project from redesigning a website, but organizations tackling one need to consider how it will take form on the website and when. Rapidly growing companies also often aim to tie a rebrand to a major milestone — a public offering, a new fundraising round, a new product offering — in order to drum up additional momentum and execute a rollout that aligns with a natural next step toward growth. So if your company is expecting an influx in web traffic or updating its look, feel, and tone, it might also be an opportunity to assess how you can better cater to your users’ needs on the website.
2. You want to improve the onsite user experience
Often, teams embark on a website redesign either because their target audience has changed, or their target audience is unable to find the information they’re seeking out on your site. The user experience is an essential part of the website — one that requires research, testing, customer journey mapping, and more. While UX teams usually implement small updates and optimizations regularly, organizations need to think more holistically about function, navigation, accessibility, and layouts that help direct users to what they’re looking for and results in a more pleasant overall experience for site visitors.
3. You want to increase site engagement
The objective of any website redesign should be the ability to solve a key business problem, and one of the most common objectives marketing teams establish is to improve a business metric that the website is responsible for. These metrics may look at the big picture, such as improving the website to generate more leads — but some teams may choose to focus on more granular goals first, like increasing the time users spend on-site or the number of pages they visit. Consider the following data-driven objectives for your own website:
- To increase the number of site visits and site visitors
- To reduce your bounce rate
- To increase time spent on site
- To improve your domain authority
- To increase conversions and/or leads generated
- To increase total sales generated
- To enhance current SEO rankings for core keywords
4. You want to increase site performance
Similar to increasing site engagement, the problem at hand might begin with how your website is operating in the first place. A website redesign may be the solution for teams looking to incorporate design best practices that improve site speed or optimize the mobile experience. For others, site performance may be rooted in a deeper issue, such as the tools used to manage content or plugins and trackers that slow down load times. If this is where your problems with site speed and function stem from, migrating your website may also become part of your website redesign plans.
5. You want more control over your website
The ability to control the site and how it functions is one of the most common reasons businesses redesign their websites. Often, the tools or platforms growing organizations use to build and host their websites restrict who can make changes or add content — slowing people down and creating bottlenecks between teams. Companies looking to bring power and autonomy to marketing and design teams may explore replatforming to a visual development tool that can accelerate production timelines and make it easier to make small updates and edits on the fly. This creates an ideal window of opportunity to tackle a much-needed site redesign, which will also lay the groundwork teams need to improve the overall website user and management experience as they scale the business.
Redesign your website to solve a core business problem
A website redesign is ultimately an opportunity to start fresh and address a business problem or need. It’s not just about how your site looks — but rather how it works, who your audience is, how your team manages the site, and how easy it is to make changes. It’s also an opportunity to introduce necessary change to how your website functions — change that the entire organization can then shift toward and align around.
And it’s especially important to remember that a website redesign is no small task — it’s one that requires ample planning, resources, and alignment. So before you dive in, be sure to give yourself the space you need to consider the why and the what — why you should take one on, and what your business will accomplish by effectively doing so.
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