Website Redesign Guide – Tips and Trends to Consider in 2024

The time people take to form an opinion about a website through its visual appeal is reduced from 3-4 seconds to 500 milliseconds. It’s shocking news for businesses as they have less than a second to impress the people who convert them. If poor customer experience, mobile unresponsiveness, slow loading time, or cluttered design won’t let people visit the website again, it’s high time for businesses to take action; that’s website redesign.

Website redesign will help businesses capture visitors’ attention and turn them into potential customers. When businesses approach web design companies to redesign websites, considering the strategic tips and the latest web design trends will help ensure the best results. This article will shed light on a website redesign overview when your website redesign is essential, and how to improve the website design in alignment with the latest trends following the website redesign tips.

Let’s explore different ways to make your website design appealing to drive more traffic, increase conversion, and uplift ROI.

What Is a Website Redesign?

Going beyond website design, color, fonts, and image updates, a website redesign is a strategic approach to redefining user experience with new structure and content. The custom website redesign gives the website a refreshing look and feel, including a new theme or template that helps rebrand.

Technology upgrades are sometimes part and parcel of a website redesign to improve performance, security, and scalability. The aim to redesign your website is fulfilled when content meets the target audience’s needs, uniquely positions the business in the competitive market, and enhances website accessibility.

How Do You Determine if Your Website Needs to Be Redesigned?

Before you look at the website redesign guide, it is important to assess whether your website needs a redesign.

• Does your website look outdated as compared to the Website of your competitor?
• Is your website not responsive or mobile-friendly?
• Is the web traffic on your website either stagnant or decreasing steadily?
• Are your users complaining about a lack of good user experience on your Website?
• Can you make minor changes like adding a blog post or changing a product description quickly?
• Does your website take too long to load the content?
• Does your website rank well on search engines?
• Does your rebranding sync with website visuals and messaging consistently?

The significant decision to redesign the Website is based on the answers. It tells you if your website needs to be redesigned or not.

Tips to Consider for Website Redesign

When you have finalized a web redesign project, planning strategically and considering a few tips before engaging with the right web design agency is important. These redesign tips ensure no critical detail is left out when redesigning the website.

Define Website Redesign Goals

Website redesigning is a lengthy and cumbersome process. Before initiating this exercise, identifying your purposes for conducting it is critical. What do you want to achieve? Do you want to build a more extensive email list? Or do you wish to sell your product more often? Or do you want to increase the social media imprint of your website? Remember to finalize your goals based on cold-hard data, not your “gut instinct.”

It is important because achieving each goal requires a different strategy, and your website must be designed to be aligned with this strategy. For example, if the goal is to reach more email conversions, then conducting A/B testing with signup forms can work for you.

Conduct a Website Audit

To improve your website’s design, knowing what to improve and where to improve is essential. For this conduct, thoroughly audit your website, analyze the frequently visited pages, and in which section of the website are your users spending the maximum time. You will uncover a few things that will help you to attract quality organic traffic, and some star pages that you thought were out-performers will reveal themselves as not-so-great pages.

For example, on analysis of your old website, if you find that the cart abandonment ratio is very high, then it is time to redesign your website to encourage users to complete the purchase more often.

Use Google Analytics to identify patterns in your web traffic. Find if your website experiences higher bounce rates. Identify the problem-causing pages, and either change the content on them or remove them altogether if they hurt your website. E.g.:- you would have kept the CTA’s too close, resulting in users bouncing off your Website.

You could even hire a digital marketing agency to identify the problem areas and provide solutions for them.

This analysis gives you an idea of which pages need minor edits and which need to be overhauled completely. Everything needs to be kept the same on a website. Especially the elements which are perceived as being the identity of your brand, For example, if your brand’s logo is well-recognized by the users, then it is advisable not to change it.

Prepare a List of Changes That You Wish to Implement

Once the analysis of what needs to be changed is complete, it’s time to move on to the next step. In this step, write down the changes you want to implement on your Website. It could be either installing a cool new tool or initiating changes to the Website’s look and feel. Do the landing pages look good? Should the content be revamped? What could you do to make the UX of your Website memorable? Ask these questions to find the changes that must be implemented on your Website.

Once you complete these steps, you will need to outline a detailed plan that entails the website structure and the timeline within which the website redesign process shall be completed. Understand that good things take time to build; hence, be prepared to spend anywhere between 2-4 months on your Website redesign project. The growth-driven iterative design process is a great way to control budgets as it focuses only on the most important pages first and then on gradually improving the other pages. This way, you get the most benefit from the Website redesigning process without going over-budget

Assess Branding

Assessing current branding is essential for businesses to determine if they want complete rebranding or want to refresh the website with small tweaks. After the branding assessment, you must check that the web page design clearly communicates the brand messaging and value proposition. It’s because when users visit the website, they must understand what the business does, what it offers, and how users will benefit from it.

It’s important to consider website redesign so that the brand’s visual identity is communicated through the logo, color palette, images, and design aesthetics. With the help of branding professionals, one can create new or improve current branding strategies. They can help to create social proof for visitors as well.

Understand Target Audience

Before you outsource your design requirement to a team of web designers, you need to understand your audience’s preferences. Often, the website you thought would attract a particular set of visitors is not built according to their preferences. Sometimes, when the Website was initially developed, the user’s preferences matched the Website. But with time, the user has evolved, and so have their choices. In such a case, a redesign of the website is imminent.

Re-examine the buyer’s personal preferences; what appeals to the buyer? Create a detailed buyer persona that includes all the details like location, age, gender, education, hobbies, sports preferences, income, values, apprehensions, social circles, and other parameters.

Creating a detailed user persona will help you craft your Website in a manner that is appealing to them. For example, if your website deals with products for senior citizens, it is wise to use bigger fonts than usual as our eye loses the ability to read smaller fonts as we grow older.

Crafting a perfect user journey is critical for the success of your Website. It would help if you asked the users about their likes and dislikes, questions like, “What do you hate the most about this website?”, “What things would you like us to change about our website?” can work wonders, as users love brands that listen to them.

Select the Best Web Design Agency

A website redesign project can only be successfully executed with hiring the best web design company. Businesses should research for top website design agencies, collect the quotes for their site redesign project, and then finalize the right web design agency that matches their requirements.

Businesses can check the reviews of previous customers and existing portfolios of web design companies and even interview them to identify if they are ideal for their website redesign project.

Determine Budget

Website redesign projects are expensive depending on the length of the required redesign work. Sometimes, the website redesign cost inhibits businesses from redesigning the website. Knowing how much you can spend on a website redesign project is essential as it helps in understanding what aspects of the website should be redesigned without going out of financial planning.

Taking a step further, businesses can choose website designers that facilitate redesign work within a budget, scale the website with additional features without cost overruns, and get creative with UI that impacts the budget little.

Give Credence to Mobile Design

Google has taken a mobile-first approach while indexing websites since July 2019. As a result, even web development service providers are increasingly opting for the mobile-first approach.

The effects will be far-reaching, and your website should be prepared for this. Make your website mobile-friendly; it should quickly load onto a small screen, and the images and fonts should be clearly visible on any smartphone. The website should be responsive to any of the mobile device screen sizes without affecting the speed. This will increase the user retention rate of your website.

Enhance SEO Score

Poor visibility on Google and other search engines determines the website’s need to be optimized for search engines. Website redesign helps improve SEO scores with quality images, and other factors that are optimized for performance. In addition to UI optimization, enterprises ensure quality content is created with optimal keyword density, meta tags, and quality backlinks.

Ensure broken links are fixed, old URLs must be redirected to new ones, and images are manageable in size, which improves SEO and, thus, the organic traffic to the website.

Post-Launch Maintenance

After finishing the website re-design, continuous monitoring and maintenance are indispensable to ensure the goals are achieved that are set. Different KPI metrics such as lead generation, traffic, conversion, and retention will help businesses know the website’s performance to determine the success of redesigning the website.

Google Analytics tool is leveraged to get insights into website performance in real-time, along with a detailed view of what’s working and what’s not. This data is invaluable in making the website work to the notch.

Top Web Design Trends That Reinforce Your Website Redesign Project

You can ensure success in your website redesign endeavor by following the latest website design trends in 2024. These trends ensure your website feels, reacts, and connects with its target audience.

Voice Interface

The way we access information on the internet is changing rapidly. In a world that is gradually becoming hands-free, users are using voice-enabled devices instead of typing to search for information online. Web design needs to keep up with the changing customer preferences.

Here are the top reasons to integrate voice search on websites.

• Google says that 1 in 5 searches conducted on Android is via voice searches.
• Smartphones come with a voice assistance feature by default.
• Voice recognition technology will become more accurate in the coming days.
• Amazon, Google, and Apple are investing heavily in voice assistant technology.

Due to its wide range of benefits, voice search will emerge as a viable option to traditional search in present to upcoming future.

Chatbots

Chatbots have revolutionized a wide variety of business processes. Chatbots and other virtual assistants have become ubiquitous nowadays as many businesses have realized their importance. Whether it’s a small business or a Fortune 500 company, all view chatbots as the future of engagement. A chatbot helps businesses initiate a conversation, help customers make buying decisions, respond to customer queries promptly, and help the business create a more personalized experience with minimal human interference.

The chatbot market is expected to reach $15.82 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 30%. When you redesign your website, consider including a chatbot. With progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning, chatbots will become the norm for simple customer service requests and even contribute to making the shopping experience more personalized.

Text-Only Hero Images

In web design terminology, a hero image is a term used to describe the oversized banner image in the top section of a website. A hero image is the first glimpse of the website for the user and is considered a high-value space in a website.

Hero images are fairly common, and in most cases, the users rarely notice a hero image if it’s not noteworthy. You can catch a current trend in hero images to stand out from the crowd. Instead of placing a hero image as countless other websites do, you can use eye-catching typography in the hero section. A bold, unique font text with an attractive color combination will help you quickly catch the user’s attention.

Thumb-Friendly Mobile Design

Looking at the sheer number of smartphone users worldwide, it is evident that to survive and thrive online, your website must be mobile-friendly. There are high chance that you’re reading this blog on your smartphone; hence, your fingers will be wrapped around the phone, and your thumb will take over the browsing part. Most people use their thumbs to navigate a website, and it is understood that you design your website according to user behavior.

When you redesign your website, ensure you put the navigation bar, menu, and contact buttons within a thumb’s reach. These simple changes will make your site more comfortable and improve the UX significantly.

3D Visuals

When 3D designs first erupted onto the web design scene, they were primitive. But with new design techniques, 3D designs have come a long way from being blocky and beveled edges. We are now seeing high-quality 3D visuals being seamlessly woven into web designs. That said, 3D designs have evolved from being distractions to adding something to the overall experience.

Here are a few reasons why you should consider 3D designs on your website

• The 3D design is more eye-catching and can help improve the website’s click-through rate.
• The 3D elements in web design offer a realistic look and create a feeling of physical presence.
• The 3D design is a modern and futuristic approach to web design, and it can enhance your brand’s image.

AR

Remember Pokemon Go? The game that took the world by storm. Pokemon Go used AR (Augmented Reality) technology to create an immersive gaming experience for its users. With the rising popularity and falling costs, AR is entrenching new arenas like medical imaging and automobile and aircraft manufacturing.

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, automobile dealers had to think innovatively to sell cars. Jeep is a brand that once used AR for external walkarounds, providing customers with a unique experience. Augmented reality technology not only helped Jeep to sell cars contactless but also made the experience more engaging.

More retail and eCommerce websites will tap into the power of AR to sell their products in the future. To lure customers and make the experience more engaging, you can also choose to integrate AR into your website.

Pay More Attention to Your Blog

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive quality traffic to your Website. It is worth noting that your Website will earn decent money only if it can solve the user’s problem. How your product/service intends to solve the user’s problem can be explained to the customer via informative and user-oriented content and blogs. It would help if you kept disseminating quality content that addresses the user’s problem on various subjects related to your industry. You are bound to benefit from increased user engagement and social media sharing.

A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words!

Humans are visual beings; we prefer viewing a picture or video instead of seeing text. It was found that humans process images 60,000 times faster than text versions. You should use this to your advantage, implement more visual elements into your website, and use captivating photos and videos instead of text.

One pro tip is to use custom images instead of downloading and editing them online. When you put customized pictures on your website, Google indexes them, and websites with original images with a better perspective tend to rank higher. You should apply image SEO practices to rank your website on Google. Google image search is a ranking avenue that is not much explored by the web world, and its potential can be tapped by using good Image SEO practices.

Build a Brand and Not Just a Website

As they say, although the first impression is not the last, it has a lasting impression. Your website is the first place people go to know more about you. Hence, it would help if you took an interest in the web design and development process of your website.The design of your website provides an excellent opportunity to convey your brand’s identity to the external world.

If you want to project your brand as a peppy, youthful brand, then you should design the layout of your website accordingly. Use bright colors and humorous, informal language on your website, and remember to use the relevant slang and references of pop culture to connect with the users. For instance, Game of Thrones and Squid games references are a good idea if your target audience is the young populace.

Another good tip for using colors is highlighting essential tabs on your Website using contrasting colors. For example, if you prefer to use the top of the funnel operations with an orange color, then the bottom of the funnel operations, like asking for a quote, could be given a blue color. It will help the user quickly identify where they need to go.

Hear Your Customers

Voice will be the next big thing in the world of technology in the not-so-distant future. What started with smart home speakers like Alexa and Google Home has spread to voice-enabled home automation equipment and even cars.

You should equip your website for the future and make it voice search-friendly. Voice SEO optimization will help you in achieving this. People are starting to rely more on the Internet to find out about their local businesses. Suppose you have a pet care store, then it would boost your sales if you could rank your pet care business when someone searches for the best Pet care services near you.

Emerging Trends That Prepare Website Design for 2024 and Ahead

Stepping into an era of reactionary design and customer experiences requires making website design engaging and meaningful. These trends remain at the forefront, ensuring web experiences are enjoyable for target audiences.

• Using AI in website design in the form of AI-generated content and design
• Interactivity and motion effects
• Y2K has gained prominence
• Digital maximalism
• Parallax scrolling
• Typography madness is growing

Embark On the Website Redesign Journey Effortlessly!

Website redesigning, if implemented correctly, can pay rich dividends to you. Do not look at it as a tedious process that ‘has’ to be done, but instead, take this as an opportunity to reconnect with your users. A practice to keep your website good and healthy is to constantly assess your website’s design and redesign it- to keep it visually striking, intuitive, and responsive to users’ preferences. Considering the website redesign tips and keeping up with the latest website trends ensures businesses can leap towards the digital world that’s engaging, inclusive, and in tune with the user experiences.