As a person responsible for your company’s website, there’s a high likelihood that you came to the point where you had to completely redesign your website. Whether it’s just a presentational or a full-blown e-commerce website, completely redesigning a website is a tedious task. What if there’s a way to avoid that monster of a project.
The best way to dodge a full website redesign project is to have continuous small upgrades and updates to your website. Website is never complete, this is not a print project where once something is printed, there’s no going back. If you maintain a mindset of constant changes by keeping up to date with latest design and functionality trends, your website will never need a full redesign.
When do websites need a complete redesign?
Let’s face it, it’s easy to think your “just redesigned” website is now done, and you can relax. The fact is, you cannot stop evolving and working on your website. Technology is rapidly changing, and new expectations arise almost weekly.
If you haven’t worked on maintaining your website in a long time, then
If you haven’t maintained your website regularly, here are few reasons your website might need a redesign:
- Your website is not responsive
- Your website’s branding is completely different than your company brand, with very little options of just refreshing
- Pages on your website are slow to load
- Marketing department doesn’t have a way to manage new content on your website
- The platform you built your website on is out of date and no longer supported
Read my 5 Obvious Signs That Your Website Needs a Redesign post for more detailed information.
It’s best if you can avoid a full redesign, let’s look at a few ways you can do that.
Keeping up-to date with user interface trends
You don’t have to be a website designer or user interface expert to notice when a website simply looks ‘old’.
How many times have you heard someone say that a website looks like it was built in 2000s? I’ve heard it too many times and most of those comments come from people who are not designers.
As a person in charge of a website, you must stay up to date with current design trends. Whether it’s overall look and feel, imagery used, scrolling effects or something similar, try to find ways to incorporate those into your website.
Sometimes the change can be as simple as updating elements margins and padding to give the website more room to breathe or changing the typography of your H tags and paragraphs.
If your website was built before SVG and has PNGs for icons, make sure you refresh them with vector-based graphic which will ensure crisp look on any screen.
Here is a great resource for design trends to look for:
https://www.theedigital.com/blog/web-design-trends
Continuous updates to your website functionality
While website design makes your visitors feel comfortable, it’s the functionality that keeps them coming back. Functionality is important for every website, but it’s most critical on online stores.
Even if you have a small development team supporting your website, you must keep up with functionality that larger websites offer. Websites like Amazon, Walmart and others are what your customers are very used to and what they will compare your website to.
Every out of the box ecommerce platform offers basic functionality like one page checkout, order tracking and favorite products, but does your website have advanced functionalities like estimated order delivery and hassle-free returns?
Find ways to match features that big ecommerce stores offer as closely as possible, this will make you stand out from your competition and keep your customers and visitors happy.
Staying up to date with web development technologies
Recently, headless approach is all the buzz in web development world. This will be another step you need to take as soon as possible. If you don’t act right away, you will come to a point where you will need that full redesign again.
Are you thinking about benefits of AI and AI generated content? How about that PHP framework that is no longer supported and is stuck on PHP5?
Technology trends of today, will become technology requirements tomorrow. Do not discard them as nice-to-haves.
Often overlooked benefit of continuous website changes
Customers can get too comfortable with your website, and this is not necessarily a good thing.
Disruption to customer journey when fully redesigning a website can be overwhelming. This is especially true in B2B ecommerce.
A better alternative is to make changes often and gradual. Slightly change a position of your add-to-cart button, change your navigation in order to make it more user friendly, but do it regularly and based on research.
What worked yesterday, might not work today. Keep close attention on website’s user experience and make constant changes to adjust. If you do this, then you can sneak in small brand changes that won’t completely throw your users off as a full redesign would.
Conclusion
You must fully redesign or build a website from scratch at least once. If you prepared your website for easy continuous changes, you would never have to fully redesign your website again. Remember, it’s always easier to make continuous small changes than having to rethink and redesign the whole website at once.
