Your company website redesign is about more than style -- it’s an investment that should provide a significant ROI.
Unfortunately, we’ve talked with marketers that went through some painful and ineffective website redesigns that didn’t provide a return. Instead, the redesign came with serious consequences for their business, including lowered SEO rankings, slow load times, difficult upgrades, and more.
You might be in the same position, so I wanted to share some thoughts today about the top 5 mistakes companies make when redesigning their websites. More importantly, I want to share how you can correct these mistakes.
Every website redesign is a high stakes project that can either deliver great results or leave you worse off than you started (and chew through your budget).
Here are the five biggest website redesign mistakes we see (in no particular order) and how to avoid or correct them:
According to Search Engine Journal, some companies lose 60-70 percent of their natural search traffic after a redesign or migration. While it’s normal to lose some traffic from search engines in the 1-2 months following a website redesign, your traffic should recover if the redesign is done properly.
If your SEO rankings tank right after you redesign your site, it’s a sign that your designer didn’t take the proper precautions before they got to work.
One of the benefits of a website redesign is improving your page load speed. After all, 40 percent of visitors will leave a page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. If you went through a website redesign only to find your website is loading slower than ever, something’s gone wrong, and you need to fix it as quickly as possible.
No company redesigns its website for the sheer pleasure of doing so. It’s always a business decision that should come with a significant ROI. If your website designer didn’t design your website with business development in mind -- or if you’re not generating any leads with it -- you need to brainstorm how to turn your website into a lead-generating machine.
Your website has enormous potential to generate leads for your business. However, it won’t happen without intentionality.
There are a lot of website builders and content management systems on the market today, and some of them are easier to use than others. While learning any new system will take some training and adjustment, if you can’t easily update your website on your own, your partner didn’t redesign your site correctly. They may have mismatched your business with the wrong content management system, opting to use technology they’re comfortable with instead of what's best for your business.
When you sit down to plan your website redesign, one issue you need to consider is the usability of the new website’s back end. Once it’s built, it’s far more difficult to make changes without having to completely move the website to a different platform.
Most companies assume their website should be about the company. That’s a natural inclination, but not a strategic one. While the purpose of your website is to represent your company online, the most compelling website copy actually focuses on your customer, not all about your company. If it’s completely company-centric, you risk losing prospects to competitors who are more customer-focused than you are.
Want more? Click here for more tips on how to redesign your website without damaging your business.
A strategic website redesign can be a powerful way to boost your business development efforts and bring in more customers through online lead generation. Use this list to avoid making common website redesign mistakes. And if you’ve recently gone through a redesign and your website suffers from any of these five issues, contact us today to learn how we can help you get your website back on track.