Website redesign: why, when and how to update your site

Remember when this was the bleeding edge of web design? The digital world moves fast. Dial up gave way to wifi. MS Paint gave way to Photoshop CC. Yahoo! gave way to Google. What’s sleek and shiny one minute is clunky and dated the next. It’s a conundrum that leaves every business owner with a website asking, “when should I start thinking about website redesign?”

If you’re asking that question, the most likely answer is right now.

But redesigning your website seems like such a hassle, like when you got your first ethernet cable and you had to figure out which port it went into. All that effort leaves you wondering, why update your website at all? However, you can only excuse your site’s shortcomings for so long before you realize that, by clinging to the past, you’re only hurting yourself.

The good news is website redesign doesn’t have to be all that difficult. Below, we explain how to do it quickly and easily. You’ll find everything you need to know about redesigning your website from beginning to end, starting with a couple good answers to why update your website in the first place.

Why redesign your website?
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There are two very good reasons to redesign your website: traffic and conversions, the lifeblood of online business.

For business people, it’s not always evident how much web design matters on the bottom line. In person, a vender’s sales tactics improve their chances for selling. In the same way, your site’s design can increase your chances of a conversion. The same principles of business psychology are still valid online—you just have to translate them visually.

For example, the right placement and color of your call-to-action button can increase how many people use it. Just look at what Levon Resources did with their CTA button in the redesign compared to their original.

Redesigning your website can even help before visitors go to your page by enhancing your search engine optimization. SEO tactics change every few years, especially when Google updates its algorithm or a new tech is introduced. The latest example is Alexa and other voice-controlled smart speakers. The words used when people type are different than the ones used when they speak, so companies are now including more speech-specific keywords in their SEO strategies. Tech disturbances like these are why companies should continually update their site designs.

Does design really make a difference? Let’s look at an example.
At 99designs, we rely on the advantages of a website redesign just as much as anyone. We periodically redesign our own home page, not because it doesn’t perform well, but because maybe it can perform even better.

Some time back, we considered whether adding a video might increase conversions. Instead of just blindly going forward with an experimental redesign, we wanted to test our theory to see how effective it was. User testing is essential for redesigns, as it reveals in no uncertain terms which designs can improve traffic and conversions.

We recommend A/B tests, where two versions of the same screen are given to different test groups and their behavior is recorded. It’s best to only test one variable at a time so you don’t misinterpret the data. If one test group responds better to one version than the other, clearly that’s the version you should use in your website redesign.

We tested a new version of our homepage, adding a video and copy about one of our clients, and compared it to our original version (the control). We found that the version with video redirected more traffic to our featured category page, but away from our launch page, one of our key conversion pages. Back to the drawing board.

We continued testing different versions, fine-tuning our results based on the previous test’s data. Slowly but surely, the testing revealed the optimal home page that maximized conversions, one with a smaller video in the corner and less copy.

Human behavior is surprisingly predictable, so definitive tactics have emerged and proved themselves throughout the last twenty years of the internet development. Knowing how long to make text, when to insert graphics, how to structure your navigation and thousands more nuanced design choices are all part of this science that grows every day.

We don’t expect you to know all these tiny details yourself. But a good designer will. That’s why we recommend hiring a professional; they know how to handle these areas so you don’t have to.