How To Decide If You Need A Website Redesign

Why do you think you need a website redesign?

A website redesign isn’t always the right path that small business owners should take and it’s often misunderstood.

A redesign is not a one-time solution that fixes all your problems and propels your small business forward. While it does improve the performance, appearance, and functionality of your website, it rarely brings in any significant additional traffic.

In general, most small business owners consider a redesign for the following two reasons:

1. Their first website was never reflective of their business

• A generic template was used for their first website because of initial budget constraints.
• The website had limited functionality and too little content.
• There was miscommunication between the business owner and the web designer in terms of the design, audience, and messaging of the website

2. Their business has gone through significant changes over a period of time

• Additional products and services are now offered by the business.
• The market and audience have changed, and the business had to adapt.
• The business finally found its brand and voice and now needs it reflected on the website.

Ask yourself the following questions:

To help you identify your reasons, here are a few basic questions you can ask yourself:

Technical

1. Is your website error-free, secure, and loading fast?
2. Is your website built responsively so that it displays correctly on different devices and browsers?
3. Is your website’s structure, navigation, and layout following industry best practices?

Business

1. Is your website aligned with your business goals and objectives?
2. Does your website complement or improve your business’s internal processes?
3. Does your website make it easy for customers to find more information and contact points?

Branding

1. Is your brand identity, values, voice, vision, and mission reflected on your website?
2. Does your website differentiate you from your competitors?
3. Does your website communicate your unique value proposition (USP)?

Victron Energy as a website redesign example

If you’ve read about solar energy, chances are you’ve heard of Victron Energy.

If you look at their website back in 2014, you can see they were in dire need of a website redesign:

Around 2015, they decided to redesign their website and as you can see below the difference is night and day:

Interestingly, if you compare their website today (2023) with the 2015 version, you’ll see it’s 90% similar. That’s an 8 year difference.

Does Victron’s current website need a redesign? Yes. Is it absolutely necessary? No.

Here’s why:

1. The design is still reflective of their brand and products.
2. The website doesn’t have any major technical issues.
3. The website’s design is still clean, minimal, and easy to navigate.
4. They’ve continued creating content and kept their website up to date.

As you can see, Victron Energy’s website shows that a successful redesign can be valid and still good for years to come. But remember, what works for one business may not work for yours.

Before you decide on a website redesign, try the following:

A redesign can be a very time-consuming and expensive process. If possible, we always advise our clients to refresh their website, optimise it, and then create content for it.

Afterwards, we look at the improvements over the next 6 months and then see if a redesign is necessary.

Try a website refresh first

A website refresh involves making a bunch of small visual changes and improvements, and it’s generally cheaper than a full-blown redesign

Most small business websites are built on some form of CMS and/or page builder, which makes a refresh easy to do.

Here’s a couple of things you can do:

1. Adjust your website’s design using a grid system and make sure you are utilising white space.
2. Refine your website’s colour scheme and limit its palette to three primary colours and two different shades or tints.
3. Add social proof to your website in the form of testimonials, ratings, or partner logos.
4. Use correct heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) on your pages and adjust your typography to achieve a consistent font weight, style, and size.
5. Expand your website’s content, such as:
   • Add additional service pages, product pages, and company-centric pages.
   • Add a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section below each service page.
   • Replace stock images with original high-quality images related to your business.
   • Ensure your website has a unique selling proposition.
   • Implement Call to Actions (CTAs) where it makes sense to lead the client to take action.
6. Implement additional functionality, such as
   • Contact forms
   • Live chat
   • WhatsApp
   • Newsletters
   • Google map
   • Social media integration

These steps can easily help enhance the look and functionality of your website.

Afterwards, optimise your website

Once your website refresh is done, you need to optimise it.

There are various forms of website optimisation, but start with these basics:

1. On-page Search Engine Optimisation
   • Make sure your website is using relevant keywords and phrases that match the search intent of your website visitors.
   • Implement meta descriptions for each page.
   • Link relevant pages to one another via internal linking and link to relevant external sources.
   • Make use of Schema (structured data markup) to help search engines understand the purpose of your pages.
2. Technical Optimisation
   • Compress and resize all of your images and implement lazy loading functionality to reduce page loading times.
   • Implement and configure a caching solution to reduce strain on your website’s database.
   • If you have a WordPress website, clean your database by removing old post revisions.
   • Remove plugins and scripts that aren’t essential to your website’s functionality and if possible replace them with faster ones that contain less bloat.
   • Fix broken links and implement 301 (permanent) redirects and implement friendly URLs. For example, for a contact page, instead of /?p108 you would rather make it /contact-us.
   • If necessary, change your website’s hosting provider. If you have a WordPress website, you could look into a managed WordPress hosting provider.

Some of these steps above can be quite advanced so it’s best to contact a professional if you are struggling with them.

Continue creating content

Last but not least, create content and publish it on a regular basis. The easiest way to get started is with a dedicated blog on your website.

One of the main purposes of content is to retain and attract website visitors.

We like to view blog content as having two types of reach: broad and exact.

Using fishing as an analogy, you can view broad content as using a fishing net to catch bait fish in bulk, and exact content as using a fishing pole to reel in one single specific big fish. And, if you don’t have any type of content, you won’t catch any fish.

For example, broad content is content that will appeal to a large audience and is usually short-form. Its function is to increase brand awareness, traffic, and social shares.

Exact content is used when you have a hyper-focused article with a specific audience in mind. It is usually much more detailed and longer, and its purpose is for conversions.

You usually spend at least a month working on exact type content.

If you’ve decided on a website redesign

Below is a breakdown of what you can expect when redesigning your website:

Scope of work

The scope of work can be broken down into five parts:

1. Design
   • Do you have an existing design in mind, or should the service provider conceptualise it?
2. Functionality
   • Do you need bare minimum functionality that everyone else has, or do you require advanced and bespoke features?
3. Content
   • Do you need content created for you?
   • Do you need a copywriter to go over the content?
   • Do you need a graphic designer?
4. Technical
   • Depending on the complexity of your website, you might need to change hosting providers or even platforms.
5. SEO
   • Do you need your website’s redesign to be optimised in advance for search engines?
   • Which types of SEO do you need?

Budget

Your budget is dependent on the scope of work above. For a basic scope of work, you can expect to pay at least R13,500 and sometimes upwards of R25,000 for advanced functionality, designs, and expertise.

Timeline

The timeline also depends on the scope of work, but in general, a redesign can be done in 3 months. If there are any 3rd party service providers involved, it can take up to 6 months.

It also depends on how efficient the website design agency is.