Website Revamp: A Total Checklist for Redesigning Your Site

Revamping your company’s website is an enormous task. For many businesses—especially those without significant reach online—a website redesign can be an overwhelming project to execute. It might be time for your company to give a fresh new look to its online presence— or perhaps you’ve built your business through local clients and now need a modern site to reach new markets.

Whatever is driving your redesign, knowing where to start—and who to ask for help—is half the battle.

We’re happy to walk you through important questions as you set out to redesign—or work with an agency like Trajectory to revamp—your company’s site.

How do you know when your website needs to be revamped?

Reason #1: Your industry or market has changed

Your company’s website needs to serve the needs of your business. A company’s site should be an effective tool to reach potential customers online and should help to transform these users into active consumers.

But potential customers won’t stumble on your company’s website by accident. Well-designed websites are tuned to attract and communicate directly to your company’s target audience.

These concerns have become particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many small and regional businesses were forced to use digital means to reach their customers.

While the pandemic has rocked every industry, a recent report by Google stated that the rapid pace of digital adoption for small businesses over the past year has been unprecedented, providing a lifeline for many companies. Needing to embrace digital transformation, many businesses have used a new digital presence to recover from the pandemic and find ways to grow.

Reason #2: Your website is slow or facing technical issues

A slow or laggy website—a common, pervasive problem on the internet—is a more serious issue than you might expect. Often, aging websites or sites built on clunky platforms like Wordpress face these issues.

Visit your company’s website. How long does it take for pages to load? Does it take a few seconds for the entire page to materialize? Does it lag when scrolling? If so, it’s time for an agency like Trajectory to help declutter and streamline your existing site.

According to recent studies, 39% of users will stop engaging with your website if images won’t load or pages take too long to load. You only have a few seconds to retain users before they become impatient, and a slow-loading website can drastically diminish the amount of users who actually access your site.

Slow loading speeds present such an obstacle that, according to Google, lagging websites cost businesses hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, every year.

Reason #3: Your website is visually outdated

If your company’s website was designed a handful of years ago—or if you worked with a less experienced web designer when you first built your site—it’s likely that your website is behind the times on appealing web design.

You don’t have to be a designer to recognize that your company’s site no longer fits the sleek, modern stylings of contemporary websites. And for many managers and owners, an outdated looking site—and limited design knowledge to make it better—can prove frustrating, especially when bad design begins to affect your company’s credibility.

In fact, effective design can directly impact how users on the internet assess your company’s validity and effectiveness. 46% of consumers base their decisions on the credibility of your company based on the visual appeal and aesthetics of your website. Moreover, 38% of people will stop engaging with your website if its content or layout are unattractive.

Most users today are highly literate in recognizing good web design. Whether or not they’re designers themselves, most users know when a website is poorly constructed.

Reason #4: Your company’s digital language needs to be revamped

Maybe the design of your existing website works fine. But what about the language on your website? How well does the written component of your site communicate your company, services, and mission?

If you’re not a writer or, like most people, you struggle with finding the best way to string words together, writing content for a website that’s clear, concise and contemporary can prove challenging and frustrating.

When you partner with a web design agency like Trajectory to revamp your company’s site, we bring content experts and writers to the table, staffing your project with strategists who are skilled at translating your company into clear written copy.

Why is this so important? According to a recent study, users spend an average of 5.59 seconds looking at a website’s written content. That’s not a lot of time to communicate exactly who you are, what services you provide, and how you’ll solve customers’ problems. If your web copy is clunky or imprecise, chances are you’ll never communicate what you want to say.

Reason #5: Your digital goals and conversion needs have changed

Companies often redesign their sites because they have changing needs for finding customers and reaching new markets. In other words, their conversion goals have changed.

In digital marketing, a website conversion happens when someone completes a pre-determined and desired action on your website, like signing up for a newsletter, sharing a blog post to social media, or buying a product. For almost all our clients, conversion actions entail a user purchasing a service or filling out a contact form to learn more about the company.

An agency like Trajectory, for example, can work with you to tweak how your website approaches sales, customer acquisition, and retention, as well as how your website’s design and copy work to bring users through the buyer’s cycle.

Reason #6: Your company has expanded or gone through a period of growth

Websites should grow with your company, and the scope of your business’ site should match the size and reach of your organization. Frequently, businesses undergo a period of growth—an uptick in sales, a new period of investment, or a marketing transformation—and come out on the other side with a website that fails to meet the needs of its customers.

This is a common reason why a company might engage an agency like Trajectory to revamp its site. In fact, industry experts suggest that most companies should consider redesigning their website every 1.5 to 2.5 years in order to keep up with trends in design and keep a website current with a company’s progress.

Reason #7: Your bounce rate is high

Sometimes all that’s clear is that your website isn’t working as it should. Users aren’t staying on your website, and they aren’t converting into customers.

Your website’s bounce rate refers to the rate at which people view and then quickly leave your website. If your bounce rate is high and you’re not sure why, it’s time to revamp your site.

Bounce rates can be affected by tons of factors, and it’s likely that a mix of variables are contributing to your ineffective website. Working with a web design agency to revamp your site can help to identify and rectify those errors.

If you’re not sure why your website isn’t working—or you don’t know how to use your website as a tool to understand your customers—redesigning your website is an easy way to arm and analyze key data about your audience, customers, and website performance.

For example, when we work with clients to revamp their website we always engage Google Analytics on their new site.

Google Analytics, a free service provided by Google, provides a comprehensive dashboard of user data, engagement, and analysis that allows millions of businesses and site owners to understand their consumers’ preferences and behavior. With a new site redesign, Analytics can help your company better understand your website’s effectiveness, who it reaches, how it reaches them, and how potential customers behave on your site.

Reason #8: Your company is wasting time and money with an outdated site

Remember that a faulty website can cost your business tons of money and lead to distrustful customers.

Designing a website on your own, without a dedicated digital marketing team, can also be costly, inefficient and—most of all— ineffective.

For most small and medium-sized businesses—or even large companies without an experienced web design team—working with an agency like Trajectory is the best solution to setting your company on the way toward digital success while saving valuable time and money.

Why should you revamp your website, and is hiring an agency the right choice for your company?

Even if you’ve identified that your existing website is lacking and could use a redesign, you might still be on the fence about whether a website revamp—however comprehensive—is right for your web design needs.

To help, it’s important to consider a website’s essential functions, how an effective and optimized website can transform your business, and whether you’re in need of a web design agency’s expertise to achieve these goals.

A well-designed website is essential for building trust with your customers.

A website serves as a window into the way your company operates, how it wants to present itself, and how it communicates itself to its customers. A modern, updated design shows that your company cares about its digital presence.

In fact, 75% of consumers admit to making judgements on a company’s credibility based on the company’s web design.

Redesigning your website to boost trust with your customers should top the list of reasons to revamp your site.

Users will stop engaging with your website if your content and design is unattractive.

88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience. For most users, first impressions of your website and company are 94% design-related, and most users will read, absorb and understand only 20% of your written content.

Taken together, what does all this mean? The visual branding and written cohesiveness of your website is an integral factor in attracting customers to your business, and the stakes are too high to get it wrong.

If your copy isn’t laser-focused to communicate who you are as a company—and if your site design isn’t carefully thought out—you’ll lose visitors, users, and customers. As you engage the redesign process, working with an agency like Trajectory can ensure you fine tune all of these factors.

A mobile-responsive website is required for any company to succeed online.

This is a major point, and it’s a factor many companies unfamiliar with the demands of web design might overlook.

In recent years, mobile usage online has skyrocketed, and designing a website that’s as usable and effective on a mobile device as on desktop is a cardinal rule. In 2020, for example, mobile ecommerce accounted for 67% of total U.S. e-commerce revenue.

In other words, ensuring that your digital assets are usable on a smartphone is a necessary decision-factor in pursuing a redesign. Take a look at your existing site. What does it look like when you visit from a mobile browser? Is it as accessible on your mobile device as it is on a desktop computer?

The answer could greatly affect the success of your existing website. According to recent data, nearly 8 in 10 customers would stop engaging with content that doesn’t display well on their device.

Effective SEO will redefine your small business’ digital success.

SEO is a fairly common buzzword that you may have heard. In general, search engine optimization refers to the techniques that increase your website’s likelihood of ranking on a search engine page for a given query.

For example, if you were an industrial contractor in the Atlanta area, effective SEO would increase your website’s likelihood of appearing on the top of Google’s search results page for a search like “contractor in Atlanta” or “Atlanta industrial construction.”

When you work with an agency like Trajectory to redesign your website, we optimize your entire site to rank, and we dig into the nuts and bolts of your company’s visibility online.

Useful digital content will increase conversions and grow your brand awareness.

Web content can refer to the copy and brand language featured on your website, as well as the writing you might publish on a company blog. Often, working with a web design agency to revamp your website involves installing top-notch content and using contemporary marketing techniques to serve the goals you’ve laid out for your revamp.

Beginning a content marketing blog is a common reason for pursuing a website revamp and a key benefit of deciding to move forward with a redesign.

In short, creating useful content for your website can increase user conversion by providing meaningful assets to your customers, helping to grow your brand and increase your own authority. When deciding to revamp your website, working with an agency is an efficient way to access content marketing and custom writing services.

Engaged analytics will help you better understand your audiences and customer behavior.

If you’re not sure why your website isn’t working—or you don’t know how to use your website as a tool to understand your customers—redesigning your website is an easy way to arm and analyze key data about your audience, customers, and website performance.

For example, when we work with clients to revamp their website we always engage Google Analytics on their new site.

Google Analytics, a free service provided by Google, provides a comprehensive dashboard of user data, engagement, and analysis that allows millions of businesses and site owners to understand their consumers’ preferences and behavior. With a new site redesign, Analytics can help your company better understand your website’s effectiveness, who it reaches, how it reaches them, and how potential customers behave on your site.

Your company is wasting time and money with an outdated site.

Remember that a faulty website can cost your business tons of money and lead to distrustful customers.

Designing a website on your own, without a dedicated digital marketing team, can also be costly, inefficient and—most of all— ineffective.

For most small and medium-sized businesses—or even large companies without an experienced web design team—working with an agency like Trajectory is the best solution to setting your company on the way toward digital success while saving valuable time and money.

What can you do to begin the website revamp process efficiently and effectively?

Once your company has decided that a website revamp is right for your business, taking a deeper look at your current digital assets, goals for the redesign process, and desired targets for a new site is the next logical step.

As you revamp your website and work with a digital agency like Trajectory, going into redesign with a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your current website will be key.

There are several things you should do and questions you should ask to set yourself up for a successful workflow.

Examine your existing performance metrics

As you begin to engage a website revamp, take a look at how your existing website is performing. Dig into the numbers. What is working? What isn’t? And what do your existing data and analytics reveal about what you need to change in a redesign?

Some of the metrics you might look at to answer these question could include:

• Number of visits, visitors, and unique visitors
• Bounce rate
• User time on site
• Top-performing keywords in terms of rank, traffic and lead generation
• Total new leads and form submissions
• Total sales generated
• Total pages indexed
• Total pages that receive traffic

When working with an agency, web design experts analyze this data for you. When we work with a client on a redesign, for example, we perform a full audit of their existing website to understand what issues it faces and how to solve them in a revamp.

Define your goals for a redesign

Setting goals for what you’d like to achieve in revamping your website is key. While it seems like a simple step, these goals will guide the decisions you make and aid agencies like Trajectory in redesigning a perfect site for your company.

Ask questions like:

• What would you like to change about your existing website?
• What is the main function of your site? Content publishing? Brand awareness? And how should these functions inform your revamp?
• Does your site employ specific features or tools you should highlight or would like to build?
• What are your goals for lead conversion and customer acquisition? How can your revamp serve these goals?

Analyze existing branding and messaging

How well does your existing site communicate your company? How have you used the written content on your website to cultivate your brand, and can your website’s writing be more clean, coherent and concise? Most of all, is the written component of your website tailored to communicate your company, services, and value proposition exactly?

When working on a redesign, our content experts dissect all of the brand language and copy associated with your business through market research, detailed discussion with you, and analysis of your existing site.

Enter into the redesign process with an idea of how you want your company to sound. What qualities do you want attributed to your business, and how has your current site failed to communicate those characteristics?

How do you communicate your services? And how well does your existing website showcase your products?

When we work with clients to revamp their website, we always address how your company communicates its services and presents them to your potential customers. We frequently find that the language and design a company employs to introduce customers to its products and services is in need of redesign.

After visiting a homepage, 86% of users want to learn about your company’s products and services next, so getting this right is especially important.

Take a look at how your company organizes its products and services on your existing website, and ask questions like:

• How do you list your products and services on your website?
• Is your website optimized to successfully convert customers through the presentation of your products and services?
• Have you grouped your products and services in a way that makes sense, is concise and uncomplicated?
• If not, what materials can you examine to better organize or productize your services?

While it’s our to find the best way to present your products and services, going into the revamp process with a solid idea of how you want to present this essential information is key.

Define your audience. Who should your new website address?

Depending on why you’ve chosen to revamp your website, redefining or clarifying your audience could be essential.

Will you be targeting new audiences with a website revamp? Who did your previous website speak to, and did it address them effectively?

If you’re unsure how to approach these questions, think about the buyer personas of your ideal customers.

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal target user. Is your ideal customer a manager at a regional manufacturing company in need of cost-effective packaging solutions? Or a financial advisor at a regional investment fund needing a software solution to easily organize client information? What problems face your buyer personas, and how do you solve them?

Buyer personas prevent agencies from designing your website in a vacuum. We’ll take your descriptions of a typical customer—pair them with our own detailed market research—and design your site to specifically address the needs and pain points of these ideal clients.

Analyze existing search engine optimization.

While an agency like Trajectory will design a comprehensive SEO strategy for your new website, take a look at whether you’re employing existing SEO techniques on your current site. Have they been effective?

What pages rank well on your site already? Where would you like to improve? What do these high ranking pages suggest about what users are searching for on your website? Are there search terms under which you would like to rank?

These are complicated questions, and Trajectory approaches them seriously throughout the revamp process.

While it’s useful for you to have a grasp of these concerns going into your website’s redesign, it’s our mission to answer these questions thoroughly every time we set out to redesign a client’s website.

Take inventory of your high performing assets. What works? What doesn’t?

This is among the most useful exercises you can complete as your business sets out to revamp your company site.

Is there content—or are there creative or digital assets—that you’ve had success with and would like to incorporate in your new website?

Understanding what works well on your existing website—or what assets your company likes from your current site—is an important step toward moving forward in a total website revamp.

How does a website revamp work? And how does an agency like Trajectory redesign your existing site?

Revamping an existing website can look differently from case to case, considering the caliber or extent of your existing website and digital assets. Do you need to freshen up your existing website? Or does your outdated website need to be entirely redesigned?

Either way, Trajectory approaches the website revamp process from top to bottom, examining every component of a new and optimized website.

Here are the basic things we consider and processes we complete when revamping your company’s existing website.

Choose a CMS

A content management system, or CMS, is a software application that allows users to easily manage a website’s content without having to use code. Sometimes a CMS allows users to entirely design their website without ever coding, while other times a CMS is used as a tool for a user to manage and adjust content that was custom designed and coded.

You’ve probably heard of—and use—a few of the most common CMS platforms, like Wix, Wordpress and Squarespace, all of which allow users to both design and manage their website without coding.

But many of these CMS pose serious problems for designers. Made for lay users and not designers, using a CMS like Squarespace prevents a web design agency from designing and building a custom site tailored to your business and brand design. Wordpress, powered by slow and often unsecure plugins and still the most widely used CMS, is particularly troublesome from our point of view, posing serious security risks to its users.

When working with a new client, we always build their websites on Craft CMS, a platform that allows our designers complete control over the design of your site. Craft is also built around an intuitive, simple, and concise CMS system that allows our clients to seamlessly edit and manage their content.

Out of the box, Craft is a blank slate. There are no themes or preset templates, and everything is designed, coded and built by hand from scratch. On the back end, Craft’s interface is clean and simple. Its dashboard shows users only the tools they need, unlike the cluttered sidebars that WordPress users know well.

Craft routinely proves to be among the fastest and most secure CMS and is also trusted by heavy hitters like:

• Adobe
• Apple
• Microsoft
• Netflix
• PBS
• Salesforce

Analyze competitor websites

When redesigning a website, we always ask for examples of competitor sites, often prompting a few questions. Why would we need to look at competitor websites when we should be focused on defining your company as unique in your industry?

We complete comprehensive competitor research that informs our design, content and SEO strategy to forge the most ambitious website redesign as possible. We ask questions like:

• What kind of visual styles are competitors using and how can we best their design?
• Are competitors including certain tools or features useful to your shared audience?
• What keywords are your competitors ranking for?
• What kind of industry language do your competitors use, and how can your web copy more clearly answer your customer’s problems?

Visually revamp your website’s design.

Our designers work with your existing visual assets—like logos and fonts—to design a website that lends a sleek, modern visual style to your company while encapsulating your existing visual brand.

For example, our designers engage in complex decision making about the color of your website.

Color choice is significant in branding, marketing, and web design. Color can build or demolish brand trust, increase or destroy customer loyalty, and form 90% of a customer’s opinion of a brand within just 90 seconds. Our designers consider what associations users make with certain colors, industries and business characteristics, and they consider color preferences among specific target audiences.

When devising how to visually structure your website, our web designers also consider, for example, how design affects user psychology and decision making.

A website must strike the right balance between achieving its technical purpose and striking an enticing impression, and our designers consider this when devising your website’s visual language. A company’s website must be pleasing and interesting to visit, but it also must be effective in driving sales goals and converting users to customers.

A lot goes into updating your company’s visual style when revamping your website, but what’s most important is that the final design perfectly reflects your company. Take a look at these past clients, for example.

Excelerra, a CRM software company, wanted to present a sleek, modern vision for their company while providing a compelling visual landscape that showcased their software. We used enticing and bright colors to highlight conversion features—like the “Get Started” button. We incorporated visuals of their software without overwhelming the page and used fonts that were contemporary and easy to read.

Oasis Hydration, a mobile IV hydration therapy, wanted their website to reflect the soothing and relaxing nature of IV hydration, while also staying close to colors and visual features that users associate with therapeutic services. We chose a pared-down design that presented their service cleanly and concisely.

Convert your brand messaging into compelling web copy and develop a content strategy

While our designers are at work revamping your company’s visual style, our content strategists also hone your brand’s written voice, using compelling web copy to connect with users and convert them into customers.

Our writers get to know your audience—analyzing factors like age, geography, education, income, occupation, and more—and craft language that concisely communicates your business to your ideal customer. We give extra attention to your homepage header and calls to action—features that direct your users to perform a desired action, like “Get in Contact”—and our writers clarify your brand’s message and value, interrogating questions like:

• What are your customers’ pain/pleasure points?
• How do your customers feel before visiting your website?
• How do you want your customers to feel after visiting your website?
• How will your product or service improve your customers’ lives?
• What sets you apart from your competitors?

Take this homepage we designed for an air ventilation company, Accord Ventilation.

Simple is almost always best. Our content strategist devised simple and to-the-point language that played on Accord Ventilation’s ability to provide an airy home-space and provide for comfortable living.

In addition to honing the language we use on your website, our content experts also get to work on crafting useful articles for your audience that will market your website. Sometimes we design blogs for clients that they write themselves, and other times clients will contract Trajectory to service their blog for them, as is the case with our client Helicopter Express.

On Helicopter Express’ blog, we routinely publish articles that continue to top google search results for relevant search terms, like “helicopter utility construction.”

Structure your website to align appropriately with your services, products and conversion goals

Design and content come together to inform how we structure your website and reorganize your website’s content and pages. Our strategists work to devise an intuitive and calculated structure for your revamped site that showcases your products and services, communicates your company, and converts users into customers.

For example, we usually tackle crafting your homepage first, using the homepage as a staging ground for your company’s core messaging. Often including a hero message, leading content block, products and services overview, trust building content, and calls to action, we carefully structure your homepage to make a good first impression, pave the way for users to access other pages, establish credibility with your audience, and encourage action.

Take our homepage, for example.

The hero message—or header at the top of the page—speaks directly to our customers by telling them exactly why they should work with us, who we are, and what they’ll get out of our services.

Our background design compliments our services as web builders without being visually overwhelming. And our call to action draws users to look at our case studies, since data suggest that seeing examples of our previous work is a deciding factor in converting potential customers into clients.

We also pay close attention to the navigation systems that users employ to find their way throughout your site. Almost invisible to the average user, your site’s navigation structure—or the way users access information—is a crucial part of revamping your site.

We take a detailed look at the functions of your redesigned website and devise a plan to structure your navigation as simply and as intuitively as possible. We make sure your pages are organized and not overcomplicated with layers of menus and subpages. And we present your users with the right tools—from easy-to-use menus, to search functions and internal linking—to navigate your website and find the right information to convert into a customer.

We also include calls to action on every page of your website. Essential for achieving your conversion goals, calls to action direct users to go further in your sales funnel, often included at the top and bottom of a page. Calls to action can increase conversion rates by up to 80%, though 70% of small businesses don’t implement these strategies clearly.

The call to action on Helicopter Express’ website, for example, uses a pop of color and persuasive copy to drive users down the company's sales funnel.

Fine tune your Search Engine Optimization

Perfecting a client’s SEO is a process we work to achieve over a long period of time, comprising a constantly evolving set of techniques that enables users to adequately find a company’s website or content when using a search engine. We work to bake winning and high performing SEO techniques into every aspect of your revamped website’s design, and we work with you to continually upkeep and refine your SEO techniques after launch.

While devising an effective SEO strategy is a comprehensive process, just some of the SEO techniques we employ when revamping your website include:

• Performing comprehensive keyword research for your web copy and for ranking strategy
• Prepare optimized content for marketing
• Writing title tags and strong meta descriptions
• Optimizing image size and speed for Google’s core web vitals
• Designing social media sharing buttons
• Devising strong internal and external linking
• Forging an intuitive site structure for Google’s crawling

Develop responsive designs for mobile

Among the most important things we do when revamping your website is designing and optimizing your site for use on all devices. This is a crucial aspect of web design and an important aspect of revamping your existing website.

Mobile devices now account for two thirds of internet usage, and 83% of mobile users say that a seamless experience across all devices is critically important. Further, nearly 8 in 10 consumers say they would stop engaging with content that doesn’t display well on their device.

So, creating responsive designs for mobile is an essential component of website redesign, and working with an agency like Trajectory ensures your website revamp is properly designed and implemented across all devices.

Related reads:

• How Long Does It Take to Redesign a Website?