In a case study they did for Botanica, the web design company Forge and Smith spoke about the website redesign they did for this nutrition and wellness brand.
The old website was outdated and hard to navigate, not very user-friendly at all. After the redesign, the website’s SEO performance improved significantly, the bounce rate was decreased to a healthy number, and the website got updated to be responsive. The quality of the content got improved and the website got organized better.
Find out more about: How not to ruin your SEO after a website redesign?
The results speak for themselves: the session length got increased by 78%, pageviews by 102%, and organic search traffic by 55%.
VF Corporation’s outdated websites
In a case study published by WebFX, they spoke about a website redesign they did for the VF Corporation, a clothing company. WebFx redesigned two of their websites, VF Outlet and VF Outlet Center, the first one being an online store and the latter being a website where people come to get their coupons and look at the store’s working hours.
Their old websites were outdated and didn’t have a modern look, so WebFX completely redesigned them both, giving them a fresh new look that appealed to the younger audience.
The redesign was effective since it increased their sales and decreased the bounce rate of the visitors to the second website by 29%. Since the website design got simplified, more people stayed on the important pages, where all the information was stored.
As you can see, a website redesign isn’t only for looks. It can greatly contribute to your bounce rate, improve your SEO ranking, as well as increase your sales, website traffic, the time people spend on your website and return visits.
But how do you know when it is time for a website redesign?
Here are a few ways you can check.
1. Can people tell what your website is about?
This is a highly important question to ask during the process of website development and is crucial for the success of a website.
It doesn’t matter that you, as the owner of the business and website, know what your website is about and what you’re offering. What’s important is that other people do. A website looking stunning means nothing if people don’t know what the purpose of the website is. And if you’re selling products or offering a service, you want people to know what you’re all about in 5 seconds after they open your website.
The way you can check this is simply by showing your website to a few unbiased and objective people, giving them 5 seconds to look, and then asking them to tell you what they think you’re selling. If they tell you that they have no idea, it might be time to redesign the front page so people will immediately know what your business is and what it offers.
2. Is the bounce rate of your website high?
I mentioned the bounce rate earlier, so let’s look at what it is now. Simply put, it is the percentage of people who visit your website and leave after looking at only one page.
If you have pages on your website where your products are showcased, a high bounce rate means that people are visiting your homepage and immediately closing your website, never even looking at your products.
The best bounce rate is from 26% – 40% and everything higher than that is bad. There are a few things that can affect bounce rate negatively:
Slow-loading pages
If your homepage takes a while to load, which is longer than 5 seconds, people won’t have the patience to keep waiting and will just close your website and look for another one. Polls show that 40% of users close a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and 47% of them expect websites to load in 2 seconds. This can result in a high bounce rate.
Badly designed website
When I say badly designed website, I’m not talking only about clashing colors, but about all bad design choices. This includes misplaced or navigations that are hard to find, websites that look artistic but are actually just confusing, text that is the same or similar color as the background, bad order of elements resulting in confusion, no search box, no responsiveness, no SEO, and many many more.
If people want to find a product of yours and want to make their life easier by just searching for it instead of browsing pages and pages of products, they will be annoyed if there’s no search box. The same goes if they’re unable to read a description and the text is hard to see or the background is too flashy.
The good user experience should be your number 1 priority and there are millions of good websites that you can use for inspiration when doing your website redesign. Similarly, there’s also a ton of bad website design examples that you can look up so you can avoid making the same mistakes.
3. Does your website contain all the necessary elements?
Speaking of search boxes, there’s a number of elements that every website should have, and if your website is missing a majority of them, it is probably time for a website redesign. So, let’s look at them.
We already mentioned the importance of good navigation. It consists of a simple layout that anyone would know how to navigate, is located on top of the website and contains all the important links, which are products, about, and contact.
Next up, responsiveness. People are using their smartphones more than ever, and mobile browsing is rapidly overtaking desktop browsing. Make sure your website is responsive, so people can access it on all their devices. Because if it isn’t, people will have issues opening it on devices that aren’t desktop, if they can even access it, that is.
Content and CTA
It may sound silly that I’m listing these two elements, but trust me, their importance is often overlooked.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been on websites that had really poor descriptions of products and businesses. Additionally, their call-to-action buttons were either inexistent or hard to see. Make sure that all your content is top-notch quality, there are no grammatical mistakes, and that the descriptions tell your customers everything they need to know about the products.
Regarding CTA buttons, make sure they’re placed in visible places. The usual strategy is to surround them with whitespace or make them colors that contrast the backgrounds. They can be placed above the fold or at the bottom of the page, it depends on personal taste and page designs. What’s important is that they exist and are visible.
Other useful website elements
Other important elements a website should have and you can include in your website redesign are contact information forms, testimonials (to increase your credibility), FAQ sections, portfolio, blog, and micro-interactions and videos (to interest the users).
Finishing up
New trends appear every few months in the world of web design, so it is necessary that we keep pace and maintain a fresh and modern appearance of our websites. Also, technology is rapidly improving, and it is important for websites to keep up with it. Both looks and performance matter when it comes to websites and being on top of both is crucial if you want your website to succeed.
Make sure that people know what your website is about in the first few seconds of visiting it, and that it is easy to navigate and user-friendly. A website redesign should also make sure that the new website contains all the important elements that the previous version was missing, such as responsiveness, different forms, and pages.
Hopefully, this article has helped you learn something about when it is time for a website redesign. Thank you for reading!
