The main purpose of your website is to attract visitors and convert them into customers. However, if your site is failing to do this, the best way to sort out your problems would be to consider a website redesign. To achieve this, it is important to first understand what’s working on your old site and what needs to be fixed. This way, you can come up with clear goals that will guide your website redesign process. Here are some website redesign best practices for you to follow.
Website Redesign: What Are The Best Practices?
Take Time to Optimize Your Site for Mobile
The majority of internet users nowadays are accessing websites using mobile devices. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly. As you are doing your website redesign, you must check to ensure that everything fits perfectly on smaller screen sizes. Go over the site, and find out whether the text is easily readable, and the navigation and buttons are easy to click.
Consider CTA Placement and Design
The purpose of a website is to guide visitors through the buying process. It is, therefore, crucial to ensure that your buying process is as seamless as possible. You can do this by strategically positioning your call-to-action buttons. For optimal results, the first CTA must be placed above the fold. This is where most of your visitors are going to spend their time.
It is also important to take the time to design CTAs that drive conversion. To achieve this, there must be a sharp contrast between the CTA and the surrounding content. This means you must take the time to choose the right colors. Research shows that orange and red buttons generally get the most responses.
Improve Page Speed
Page speed is a very important factor to consider when doing your website redesign. Unfortunately, your visitors will not stay on your website if the features and graphics take forever to load. This means a lot of time must be devoted to ensuring that your pages load as quickly as possible. That way, you can give your visitors the most pleasing experience as they interact with your site. Here are some tips for improving the speed of your site:
- Compress large files
- Avoid 404 and 405 errors by fixing broken links
- Reduce the size of images
- Setup browser caching
- Minimize the number of redirects
- Make use of a Content Delivery Network
These small tweaks will go a long way in improving the speed of your site.
Design with the User in Mind
One of the best ways to get your website redesign right is to design with the user in mind. This means you must take time to research the expectations of your users and their behaviour when they visit your website. As you are doing your research, you will also find out what questions they need answers to. That way, you can come up with the best way to provide answers to their queries. Most importantly, it is also crucial to maintain current design trends that your users are familiar with. Research done by Google indicates that users prefer designs that look familiar. This means you must have a design that’s too divorced from others in your industry.
Test Your Website for Usability
Once you are done with your website redesign, it is crucial that you run some usability tests. Usability tests assess how easy it is for users to navigate and interact with your website. Apart from that, you must also investigate whether the content can be easily interpreted by the average user. Lastly, you should evaluate how quickly the site loads and whether all your links work as they should. Testing your website before you launch it is a step that you must never skip. Statistics show that once users have a bad experience with a website, they will rarely return to it. Therefore, you must capture all issues before the site goes live.
These are some of the website redesign best practices that you should stick to. If you take the time to consider these tips, you can rest assured your site will do its job. If you are not familiar with some of the concepts listed above, the best way to get things right would be to hire a professional website designer to redesign your site for you.
