Website redesign mistakes can ruin the face of your business. The design and functionality of your website play a major role in generating revenue, and ultimately determine whether or not your audience trusts you.
In today’s digitally-dependent landscape, how you choose to revamp your website is critical to its ROI. You already know you want a website designed to increase traffic, drive leads and enhance your brand’s credibility – but how can you make it happen?
Below, we’ve outlined some of the most common website redesign mistakes and what to do instead to ensure you rebuild a website that enhances your business’s profitability.
Quick Takeaways
- 90% of users leave a website because it’s poorly designed and 94% of people say webdesign is the reason they mistrust a website
- SEO must be incorporated into the website redesign process if you want to retain your rankings and organic traffic
- Google reported that 75% of internet users opt for mobile-friendly websites
- About 65% of companies lose organic traffic after redesigning their website due to neglected SEO
Being aware of common website redesign mistakes will help ensure you create a new website that maximizes opportunities for growth.
The Importance of Avoiding Website Redesign Mistakes
According to a recent survey, 90% of users leave a website because it’s poorly designed, and 94% of people say website design is the reason they mistrust a website. Clearly, your website plays a crucial role in the success of your digital business.
Image source: Datachieve Digital
But your site design doesn’t just refer to how your website looks – it also refers to its functionality. While your site’s visual appeal may shape the first impression of potential customers, its functionality determines whether or not you reach your target audience.
SEO, or search engine optimization, must be incorporated into the website redesign process if you want to retain your hard-earned rankings. Failing to do so will result in a loss of organic traffic and a step down from page one of SERPs.
Although redesigning a website can be a tricky process, you can simplify its steps by understanding what will hurt and help your site’s productivity.
7 Website Redesign Mistakes to Avoid
Enhancing your site’s visual appeal, keeping your site’s SEO in-tact, and avoiding a loss in traffic doesn’t have to be complicated. Conquer your site-rebuild by avoiding these 7 website redesign mistakes to ensure visual appeal and functionality.
1. Prioritizing Form Over Function
As you redesign your website, it’s important not to make the mistake of focusing on form over function. Sleek, unique and modern features are great, but not when they sacrifice practicality and functionality. Site visitors have expectations when they visit a new website and will likely struggle to navigate a non-traditional format.
Instead of prioritizing innovation in your new design, focus on maintaining a traditional layout that encourages action. For example, using a two-column layout on your blog page is both visually pleasing and optimized for conversion.
We are seeing this more and more with client website re-designs: Beautiful single-column designs that look amazing but offer zero opportunity for conversions!
Balancing usability and beautiful design will not only attract more leads, but also avoid technical issues like slow-loading pages. Making small adjustments to ensure a pleasant experience for site visitors is guaranteed to enhance engagement.
2. Ineffective CTAs
One of the biggest website redesign mistakes you can make is ineffectively (or not at all) using CTAs, or calls-to-action. The purpose of CTAs is to encourage visitors to take next steps towards making a purchase with your business without being pushy. Without CTAs, prospects have no way of knowing how to find what they need. Include CTAs:
- At the top of web pages
- At the end of blog articles
- In 2nd column of blog page
- In a welcome pop-up message
- In email marketing content
This way, their placement is noticeable but won’t disrupt your audience as they view your website. It’s also important to keep CTAs clear and concise to ensure they’re effective. To learn more about how to write an effective CTA, enjoy the short video below.
Video Source: LemonLight
3. Neglecting SEO
Remember, a website that isn’t optimized for search engines won’t reach your target audience. In fact, about 65% of companies lose organic traffic after redesigning their website due to neglected SEO.
Because of this, it’s extremely important to weave SEO tactics throughout your website to ensure you retain visibility. For example, you should:
- Submit a sitemap to major search engines
- Update (but do not delete) old URLs
- Install security measures, such s an SSL certificate
- Transfer bogs, articles & white papers to new site
- Use unique meta titles and meta descriptions on all pages
SEO is critical to the success of your landing pages, product pages, blog page, and more. Spend time working on SEO as you redesign your website to ensure your hard work doesn’t go to waste.
4. Not Designing A Mobile-Optimized Site
Website functionality peaks when it works seamlessly between different operating systems and browsers. If your website doesn’t work with the device a prospect is using, you’ll likely lose their business.
Image Source: Blue Corona
Google reported that 75% of internet users opt for mobile-friendly websites. Since most people make searches on their mobile devices, your new website design should work well on all mobile systems.
5. Hidden Navigation
When it comes to website redesign mistakes, neglecting the user experience takes the cake – and navigational issues will quickly inspire users to find information elsewhere.
In today’s world, customer needs can be met in an instant. Making site visitors wait will cause them to abandon your site. Because of this, you must ensure your new navigation menu is easy to locate and use in order to keep potential customers on your page.
6. Overlooking Content Strategy
Every well-designed website has high-quality content. Using keywords with high search volume and posting consistently will help ensure that your content reaches its audience.
Attracting leads and customers can be done with many different types of content:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Ebooks
- Templates and tools
- White papers and reports
- Case Studies
Regardless of which kinds of content you share, it’s important to have a strong content strategy in place before launching your website redesign. This way, you can help ensure your efforts drive quality leads and make sales.
7. Not Optimizing for Lead Generation
Remember, visual appeal and advanced technology are important, but they aren’t everything when it comes to making money. One of the biggest website redesign mistakes is failing to optimize your website to effectively generate new leads.
Redesigning your website is the perfect opportunity to convert traffic into potential customers. Strategically using the right graphics, text and formatting helps to make sure the elements on your site are effectively turning visitors into prospects.
The best example of this is having a CTA button on your main navigation that highlights the most important action you want your visitors to take. For example, we want our visitors to Get More Traffic (with our weekly blog service obvi!)
But for you this might be to “Get a Demo” or “Talk To a Consultant.” Using a secondary color can really make it standout.
PS – we are re-designing our website as we speak so these examples are all about to look and work even better!
Avoid Website Redesign Mistakes Today
Steering clear of website redesign mistakes is easy when you have access to digital marketing experts. Every useful, well-designed website is more likely to see organic traffic, generate quality leads and increase revenue.
Enhance your website’s visual appeal and functionality with the help of Marketing Insider Group. Perfect your website design today by checking out our weekly blog content service, or schedule a free consultation now!
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