Did you know that 7 out of 10 sites redesign every 3 years? Market leaders, sites at the TOP of search results and popular resources constantly make changes. Moreover, some site owners are ready to redesign immediately after the protracted release of the project.
What does that say? At least about the fact that there are objective reasons for the introduction of redesign and functional changes on the site, as well as that design trends are constantly changing.
Website redesign implies a change in the external component of the site or its individual elements, the changes themselves may affect not only the display of elements but also their order, as well as the entire structure of the page as a whole.
These works assume that your project has outgrown the current site and there is a need for new functionality or a change in the logic of the current elements.
Now we will talk about objective reasons and signals that indicate the need to implement a redesign on the site.
The design is morally outdated.
Yes, design may become obsolete and even become a reflection of the memory of generations of company marketers. To prevent this from happening, regardless of your desire, you need to update the design at least once every 3 years. Why is the design becoming obsolete?
Trends are updated every year and your site should keep up with the times. And it shouldn't be fancy elements or gradients throughout the site — everything is much easier. Page design requirements are changing and users get used to a certain location of elements, and navigation work.
It's not always easy to explain why the site looks archaic, but most users quickly catch the «ancient» design.
Overloaded structure, distracting background, unreadable fonts, a lot of text, the use of small images and eye-friendly colours — all this distracts and leads to the only desire to close the tab in the browser as soon as possible.
Most visitors to the site will initially assess the credibility of your business based solely on its design and content. Web design trends change every few years. On average, a site that has served its owner for more than 3 years is definitely worth updating.
Reduction of conversion and other indicators
Have you noticed lately that the site sells worse? Traffic is the same, or maybe even more than six months ago, but sales are less. Perhaps it's seasonality, which is easy to check with analytics data.
But if seasonality has nothing to do with it, and the time of users on the site is reduced, as well as the number of pages viewed, the conversion is lower and lower — it's time to review the content on the site.
The decline in conversion means that fewer and fewer visitors are interested in your offer. The arguments you give to the user to choose your company are losing their strength. On the one hand, it may indicate the activity of competitors, on the other hand, it is necessary to soberly assess internal factors.
For example, on each page of the site, you write about free delivery, while it would be necessary to mention the fast terms of receipt of the order. Or a price that is within the upper limits of the market requires argumentation (e.g. extended warranty, original products, unique production method, limited edition), and you hope for the strength of the brand and established beliefs of the audience about the reliability of the company.
The design change will allow you to highlight the benefits of your offer to customers. This problem is particularly acute in emotional demand goods, where demand will depend on the pain of the audience. Instead of 1 page with the product, you can do several different ones and conduct tests for different audiences.
For example, let's take the promotion of the felt-tip pen from scratches on the car bodies:
- You can show that this is a common problem in cities and a felt-tip pen should become part of the first aid kit in the car;
- Emphasising the economy of body painting;
- Show how quickly the problem with scratching on the car is solved;
- A Felt-tip pen is the best gift for a man.
Content varies depending on the specific audience and its needs. Thus, the design change allows you to analyse these events by performing A/B tests and keeping abreast of conversion.
When choosing to contact the audience, there is another, no less important problem related to the design of the site, for example, your advertising does not correspond to the content on the site. More details in the next paragraph.
Appeal to the audience, expectations and reality
You have conducted numerous tests, found the perfect appeal to the client, and chosen exactly the creative that catches your target audience. Transitions to the advertising site break all records, the traffic manager rejoices, opening another bottle of champagne... it's a pity that your site is not aware of this situation at all.
In advertising communications, it is important that the initial message is reflected in the real content of the site. Thus, users who are «hooked» by the ad will receive a detail of the information/offer for which they came.
Otherwise, users' actions are limited to looking for a continuation of the lost thought, proving to themselves «that there should definitely be something about it», instead of making sure of the advantages of the original offer.
When working with creative strategies, it should be remembered that visits to the site may be from other sources (e.g. social networks or referral links), and users may not understand creativity if they did not know about its origins.
The result is that a separate creative requires new landings, the creation of which may be limited by the conditions of current design templates.
For example, the advertising campaign used creatives «CRM for the lazy» and a familiar character who was associated with this appeal. But visitors who visited the site from other traffic sources did not realise such creativity.
Extra widgets, popups, advertising
Instead of a thousand words, watch this video:
Follow the principle of minimalism, do not overload the site with unnecessary annoying elements, everything should be in moderation.
The site loses at the level of competitors.
In market conditions, there is always work with competitors. So you will be constantly compared. You need to work out not only the competitive advantages of your offer but also to make you noticed and memorised.
Various aggregators allow you to compare prices for goods in a couple of clicks. In topics where aggregators are not represented, this can be done in 10 minutes by studying the TOP issue.
And yes, the price will be an important selection criterion, but not the only one. More importantly, the content of offers provided by different companies, based on them, buyers make their choices.
Take a look at the price navigator and see the offers of companies for any top smartphone. The difference in price can be quite significant! But transitions collect all sites, and orders will be both for the cheapest and other offers.
The whole point is how to highlight your offer and convey to the client that it is better than that of a market neighbour.
Therefore, if you go to your competitors' websites:
- You notice that visually you like it much more than your own;
- Find good ideas that would be nice to implement on your website;
- Enthusiastically spend 10, 30 minutes or more studying the content on it;
- Give it as an example to your employees;
- You want to buy goods from him or order services.
This means that it's time for change and you need to start with the site.
The site is not displayed correctly.
The age of the design is inseparable from the adaptability of the site. If you are not convinced by the point that users are waiting for buttons in their «standard» places, check your site for the most objective criterion — the availability of a version for mobile devices.
The older the site, the higher the probability of the absence of a mobile version or adaptive layout for it. But the share of mobile traffic in recent years has significantly exceeded the volume of visits from computers on most topics.
A site without a mobile device version leads to significant indicators of lost profits. There are levels of adaptability of the web resource for different screen resolutions:
- Design is only one extension;
- Compressing the page width to the device's resolution;
- Adaptive construction of elements;
- A separate version for mobile devices.
About 94% of sites are now being developed using an adaptive for different screen resolutions. The remaining 6% choose a separate version for mobile devices.
This is due to the fact that the quality of the adaptive differs slightly from the individual mobile version but requires significantly less time for the developer, which also affects the final cost of the project.
A separate mobile version is necessary in case of a significant change in the structure of pages, and changes in the user scenario. So if your site looks crooked from your phone screen, it's time to think about the changes.
New trends in business
In its development, any project constantly faces changes. Thus, any blog may have a revision of the main topics, and in business, a new product can be at the forefront of the table. Such changes will always require a revision of the concept and format of the presentation.
For example, over the years, an online store selling coffee, tea and coffee machines has acquired new areas for equipment rental and repair. At the same time, keeping the original direction of sales. Or the interior designer has added 3D room design and landscape design to his services.
The functionality that is available on the site allows you to post information about these changes, but for users to search and work with such content will be inconvenient, for several reasons:
- Adding new pages to the menu (header/footer) leads to distortion of layout;
- The structure of the main page does not allow you to place information about new directions, so users for whom it has become a login page more often leave the site without finding the information they are interested in;
- The possibility of presenting and describing new directions will be limited. Most often, site owners create blog entries that are subsequently lost in the news feed or use templates for existing pages.
Thus, trying to add new services, and directions of your company to the current design of the site, you can count on the most modest presentation for your users, which is likely to see only a part of them.
In order for the site to continue to be a tool for business, you must loudly declare new directions and help your customers, thus increasing LTV customers, average checks and loyalty.
Download speed
Slow loading of the site kills the user's desire to work with it. It is important for the user to find the answer to his question, to see the offer for a product or service, and not to watch the download icon in the browser.
In this case, the redesign of the site allows you to revise the number of blocks and their need on desktop and mobile devices, change the content and use technologies that make the site faster.
Sometimes you can do by compressing images and settings on the server, but if these actions did not lead you to the desired figures, you need to solve the problem globally.
Extending information on landing pages
I always want to say more, show in more detail, and be on the same wavelength with customers. There is a need to add new information for users on product pages, catalogues, etc.
It can be useful content, such as photos from real customers, realised through the output of photos pulled up from Instagram, not just subject shooting for a standard presentation. Or adding information that is often asked when buying, for example, care instructions.
In addition, there are more and more solutions aimed at increasing conversion.
There is a rule: any action should be available in 3 clicks. But only this rule was refuted by many on the day it was created. Imagine an online store without sorting by price and name, filters by product type and brand, in which all products are on the same page instead of grouped by category.
Agree, it's a little scary. And imagine a menu in which everything is displayed in the form of an open list, or worse, it is possible to move only to categories of the first level.
In working with the site, everything should be natively clear, instructions on how to order, how to find the right page or where to look for deferred products should not be attached to it.
Navigation problems most often arise in the case of:
- You have grown sharply and the original structure of the catalogue does not fit the current number of categories and goods.
- In an effort to take into account as much as possible, you added unnecessary partitions, functions, and blocks when creating the architecture. Now you can do anything on your website, but it's not clear how.
Perhaps you have encountered an application for mobile banking from Ukrsibbank, the redesign of which helped to continue to compete with giants in Ukraine. Surprisingly, in the redesign, they removed more than 50% of the functions for users, thus freeing up space for the most important actions.
Let's Sum Up
There are objective and subjective reasons for the desire to update the site with a fresh design. If you decide to redesign the entire site or its individual elements, please note that the changes themselves may affect not only the display of the elements but also the functional part.
For example, swap the blocks in the shopping cart, select fields, increase the size of buttons, and take out additional information about the product — all this will be considered a redesign of the checkout page. But as soon as you want to add a promotional code field, it will turn into a change in functionality.
Since the appearance of 1 field will lead to the addition of a certain logic of interaction of ordinary and promotional prices with the promotional code, the choice of the area of work of the code (price change, gift, free delivery), is quite logical that changing the functionality will require additional hours of the developer. Therefore, take this into account when planning the budget.
If your site falls under at least one reason for the redesign, it's worth thinking about it. Found a coincidence for two or more reasons — you should already be in the process of updating the site design.
