Website Redesign Services: How to pick the best provider
When you first launched your website, you were proud of it. If you’re not feeling that thrill now, that’s expected. Experts say that design trends, user behavior, and search engine algorithms change so much that a website should be redesigned every 2 to 3 years. That being said, although change is good, it may not be easy. A lot of work can be involved in a redesign. There’s also potential risks to be considered.
Done right, a redesign could improve the user experience and spike sales. If done wrong, you might lose SEO equity you have worked hard to build. Hence, it is crucial to have a clear plan and a strong website redesign service provider to execute your vision.
Do you need a website redesign?
Given the complexity of this project, the first decision to make is whether or not you really need to redesign your website. This isn’t a project you should take on lightly. On the other hand, there are many instances where you should not delay a redesign since it’s an essential part of your sales funnel. Here’s when you know it’s time to start your design:
- The website has outdated content or design
- The website is not mobile-friendly
- The company is being rebranded
- The website is slow
- The website is hard to navigate
- The website needs to be moved to a new server/ CMS
- The conversion rate has dropped
DIY or Outsource website redesign services?
Once you have decided to redesign the website, the next decision is – who takes on this project?
You can either do the redesign project in-house or outsource the task. There are many factors that must be considered before you make this decision – Do you have the experts on your team? How soon do you want to launch the redesigned website? What is your budget and so on.
In-house development might be less expensive (if you have the knowledge to master this process) and gives you more control over the design process. However, it may not be the best use of your resources. Outsourcing the task can reduce the time to launch. It lets you leverage the experience of experts and ensures that the project receives the attention it requires while your internal team remains focused on their core tasks.
Key choices when outsourcing website redesign services:
Choosing the right team to redesign your website plays a large role in determining the outcome. If you outsource the project, you need to make sure your website is in the right hands. Outsourcing options available fall broadly into 2 categories:
Freelancers
Freelancers are independent developers and can work with members of your internal team to tweak your website. For example, you may work on the content in-house and have a freelancer work on the design and development.
That said, the scope of work they can undertake may be limited to their individual specialization. They may not offer the proven guaranty that the work will be done with quality in mind and, as lonely workers, they do not have the possibility to use collective intelligence to build the best experience - the quality will only depend on the experience of the freelancer, and may highly vary without the aility for you to evaluate the pertinence of the design and technical choices. A freelancer will naturally prefer to work with tools he already knows, even if they're not necessarily the most suitable for your needs.
On the other hand, working with freelancers is usually cheaper than working with an agency - the princing depends however on the experience of the person, and an experienced, reliable and qualitative profile is sometimes more expensive than a Web agency. Beware of the least expensive profiles - they're probably also the ones with the least experience, the least hindsight, or the least investment in ergonomic, technological or creative intelligence.
Web Agencies
Choosing an agency puts the website in the hands of a team of people with varied skill sets. This allows them to take over the project as a whole. Their experience gives you a fresh perspective and access to advanced tools you may have been unaware of. Since the project is being handled by a team, their timelines are more reliable and could even work out to be much shorter.
Choosing an agency means you can entrust the website to a team of people with a wide range of skills, who can compare and contrast their ideas. This enables them to take charge of the project as a whole. Their experience gives you a fresh perspective and access to advanced tools with which you may not have been familiar.
The project deliverable (both the site design and code, operating tools, maintenance procedures, etc.) is therefore not the result of the work and experience of a single person, but the collective, re-read, verified result of a team of generally highly experienced professionals. Working with a Web agency is often a guarantee of project success and a tangible level of quality. That said, it's always a good idea to find out more about the agency you've chosen, checking the expertise of the profiles proposed to work on the project and the values promoted by the agency.
Another advantage of an agency is the distribution of knowledge: whereas with a freelancer, only one person knows the ins and outs of your web project, with an agency it's a team, made up of several people, who can intervene quickly and efficiently. So you're less dependent on vacation periods or the unavailability of a single person!
Ultimately, working with a web agency usually works out to be the most efficient way to get it done. If you're looking for professional teams for a job well done, we know a few around redirection.io 😉 - the Web agencies JoliCode, Digital Ping Pong and Premier Octet all offer a qualitative approach and professionalism to meet the needs of all serious projects.
Your website redesign checklist
Since agencies work at varying levels of quality, you need to monitor them and make sure all of your website redesign needs are covered. Here is a website redesign checklist you can use to ensure everything step is taken care of properly:
Backup the current website
Before you start making any changes, you need to have a complete backup of your existing website along with the current metrics. This includes traffic sources, average time spent on a page, bounce rate, etc. The agency undertaking the project should be able to document all page text, posts, images, videos, downloadable reports, etc. This could be used for the new website or serve as a reference point. You may also want to export data on existing user accounts, reports, purchase history and so on.
Wherever possible, try to keep the "old" version of the website online, possibly under a different domain name and with HTTP authentication to prevent it from being crawled by search engines.
Optimize for SEO
When it comes to websites, looking pretty isn’t enough. The website must be optimized for SEO. This involves having an error-free URL map. To guarantee this, you or your agency will need to crawl through both the existing and redesigned websites.
Using a website crawler can make this process easier. As it audits each page of your website, flags errors, and classifies issues that may interfere with SEO. This includes broken links, slow pages, duplicate meta tags and thin content pages. They can also override Meta tags in the HTML body of a response and simplifies the management of response headers and robots.txt files to secure SEO quality of your website.
Test load speed
The speed at which a page loads is important for SEO and user experiences. When pages load fast, users stay engaged and thereby increase site ranking. There are a number of tools the agency can use to test load speed. They should then be able to use the insights gained to make necessary adjustments to optimize content and improve server response times.
Set up redirects
In order to maintain your current SEO standing, the agency must be able to set up redirects. This ensures that search engines as well as website visitors can access relevant content. Redirections no longer need to be set up manually coded by a dev team. Redirection tools allow you to build and test URL redirects with a simple 2-step process. You simply enter the source and destination URLs, test it and it is done. That said, the agency must be able to map out the URLs carefully and make sure there are no loops and minimal redirect chains.
Check for 404 errors
404 errors are HTTP status response codes returned when servers cannot display the requested content. Left unaddressed, it can frustrate users enough to take them to competitor sites. Hence, all URL connections and redirects must be reviewed from time to time to identify such issues.
Log collection tools can help agencies access logs to all HTTP traffic in real time to isolate common traffic errors like 404 errors. 301 Redirects can then be set up to redirect broken links and preserve your SEO equity.
Verify internal links
Internal links connecting pages on your website play an important role in site navigation and SEO ranking. If these links do not work, they interfere with the user experience and could bring down your SEO ranking. Some of the common issues found include orphan pages, broken links and too many links to the same page.
Website auditing tools can help identify such issues with internal links. Your web designer should then be able to analyze the results to spot and correct broken links and lengthy redirect chains.
Review mobile responsiveness
Customers should ideally have a seamless experience of interacting with your website on a tablet, laptop or desktop screen of any size or a mobile phone. Hence, your website designer must be able to design a responsive website. This includes looking into the page loading speed, use of responsive buttons, optimized images and so on.
Succeeding your website redesign
Every website redesign project is unique. You may need to redesign the navigation, improve the checkout process, update images and content, make it more responsive and so on. Irrespective of the intentions for a website redesign project, you need the right team and the right tools to make it happen. Getting a hold of the best tools and infrastructure will be able to help you launch the redesigned website faster and safer.
SaaS solutions like Redirection.io ensure the redesign project is simple and secure. Redirection.io makes it easy to audit the website before and after launch and implement required URL redirects to ensure a smooth user experience. In addition to providing a simple way to create redirects, redirection.io allows you to test these redirects before they are launched.