Every once in a while, there comes a time when you need to redesign your website. The usual timeframe for this is anywhere between one and three years. Hiring a professional website design firm that can help to build and redesign your company’s website, if you want to keep things fresh and interesting. However, even though a change is good, it needs to have a purpose. You need to understand what parts of your website need an update. To help you in the process, we want to share some of the most efficient website redesign tips for 2022.
Understand why your website needs a change
Websites get obsolete after a certain period. There are a lot of things that can happen. Technology moves forward, customers change. That’s why running a website is a neverending job; it requires constant maintenance.
Some of the most common reasons why you would want to consider redesigning a website are:
- a change in your business;
- drop in the conversion rate or traffic;
- to add or remove functionalities;
- improve customer experience;
- fix technical errors;
- website optimization for mobile or accessibility.
All of these are valid reasons to do a website redesign, so let’s see what things need to change.
Simplify your website
The first thing to think about is website simplification. You want to create a more relaxed user experience. When building a website for the first time, chances are you will have more elements on it than you really need. But, have no worries. That is just the process of learning and improving your website; mistakes will happen.
Another reason why you would optimize and simplify your website is to boost the loading speed. This is a crucial factor that affects the visitor experience.
Improve website readability
Besides being simple to use, your website needs to look good to the eye. Many design mistakes happen when people mix wrong colors, use a terrible font, or stuff their pages with a lot of unnecessary elements.
If you want to keep people on your website longer, you need to improve the readability. All of the important elements need to be clearly visible and recognizable.
You also want to choose your font depending on the nature of your website. If you are running a blog, the font is probably the most important visual element.
Update images on your website
A website is made out of images of different sizes. Images are also an important part of website pages. Furthermore, they play a crucial role in SEO.
Image optimization also improves the website speed, and it makes your website more beautiful. The best way to update the images is to:
- create custom images. This will show the effort and work put into the process;
- use high-quality photos;
- make sure that the photos used match the content on your website;
- optimize all SEO attributes.
Fix errors and reduce downtime
Even though the aesthetics of a website is the first thing everyone notices, the technical backend plays a crucial part. That’s where all the functionality of a website is written. Any errors or glitches will break your website and kill your traffic quickly.
Also, fixing errors on a website usually creates downtime. During that time, your website is down, and no one can access it. With that in mind, you need to focus on repairing your website and reducing downtime.
The best advice we can give you is to plan your technical updates that might bring your website down to be done during hours when the visit is low. You will need to analyze user actions and see during what hours your website has the most visits.
Revisit your keywords
If you are rebranding your business, changing the business name, or making any radical changes with your products and services, you will also need to change your keywords. This is just a crucial step because it directly affects your SEO.
Changing keywords might take a bit more time and effort, but it is a step that you cannot skip.
The most important sections to change are your headlines and images. These two elements can generate a lot of traffic.
Work on the website accessibility
If you never made your website accessible for people with disabilities, the year 2022 is the time to do it. Accessibility is now one of the elements that seriously affect your SEO rating. In fact, in some countries, you can get sued if your website is not made accessible.
Some of the examples of accessibility features are:
- keyboard accessible websites;
- clear, visible links with distinctive colors and outlines;
- consistent navigation and layout;
- voice optimization.
The best way to handle accessibility is to create two versions of your website and add a switch button. This way, both groups of your customers can use the website how they want.
Become mobile-friendly
Your website needs to be optimized for mobile phones. There are still websites out there that are not optimized for mobile platforms, which is a huge problem. Google looks at websites with the mobile-first approach, which means that the first thing it checks is if the website is mobile-friendly or not. If you never did this part, you are at a considerable disadvantage.
Redesign your CTA buttons
One of the elements that seriously affects your conversion rate is the CTA button. There is a whole science behind making CTA buttons, so make sure to work on this update with the best people available.
While you can do website redesign on your own, it is best to let experts help you. Website design professionals know exactly what your site needs. Furthermore, they know how to make changes quickly and efficiently. We leave the decision up to you, but our advice is to find professionals to redesign your website.
Website redesign tips for 2022 made simple
As a conclusion to the website redesign tips for 2022, we want to bring some focus to the key takeaway for today. If you have user experience as your first priority, you cannot make a mistake. Do thorough research about what your website needs, and create a plan before you start any projects. Think about your budget, and what you are trying to accomplish. With that in mind, best of luck with making your website shine in 2022!