Website Redesign Checklist For Business Websites

If your business website needs a redesign, follow these steps in this website redesign checklist.

Are you thinking about redesigning your website? Pretty sure, at some point, you’ve started pondering about changing how your site looks. Have you been trying to make a website redesign checklist? Have you started researching it? Congratulations! You are on your way to creating that updated look for your website.

Many website owners know what pain in the neck website revamping is. It’s the sheer amount of work that needs to be done that makes the entire process intimidating. A website redesign, after all, is one of the most important things you can give to your business. We made the process easy for you as we gathered the essential steps when thinking and considering how to update a website. We have also included the reasons why you should do a website redesign.

This website design checklist assesses whether you indeed need a redesign. This checklist will also determine why a redesign is essential. With ITDwebdesign.com on board, you’ll find the entire process easy, as we will facilitate the whole endeavor with you. We will also give out some tips on how to organize these next big move for your business.

1. Plan It First

Before you dive into the entire process, you must understand the ins and outs of a redesign.

What are your goals?

Part of the website redesign project plan is knowing what your goals are. Remember that a website redesign is an enormous project. Without properly-set and well-defined goals, you’d get lost in the middle of the chaos. Using the website checklist questions laid out for you in the central parts of this post, are you now aware of what your goals are?

What to expect as the results?

Having the outlook even before actually doing the redesigning can make the entire thing a piece of cake. Having the vision makes transitioning from old to new more successful as you are whiteboarding everything even before you even implemented the changes.

Are you ready? Check out the questions below to know if you need website redesigning.

2. Is Your Website Mobile Responsive?

Search engines put great emphasis on how well your website is viewed on mobile phones. By only slimming down to its mobile version won’t assure you of a positive mobile experience. Sometimes this mobile version is harder to navigate or may contain some bugs and glitches, primarily when used on devices with higher resolution.

On the other hand, a mobile responsive website scales down all the elements of your website to that of the screen size of the mobile device to provide your reader with the maximum mobile experience. Mobile-first indexing has become the norm where your website’s mobile version is where search engines start crawling before the desktop version.

That being said, an unremarkable mobile experience can directly affect your rankings. Users would most likely avoid returning to your site and preferring your competitors’ because of bad mobile experience.

Also, having a mobile responsive means you’re grabbing the opportunity that more and more people are using their mobile phones to access online information. Almost 75% of the world’s population will access the internet through their mobile phones in the coming years. Also, mobile users prefer to have seamless online experience across all their devices.

Our recommendation: Use online tools that can check if your website is responsive and mobile-friendly.

Here are a couple of tools to check if your site is mobile-friendly

• Google Mobile-Friendly Test
• Bing Mobile Friendliness Test Tool

3. Is Your Website More Than Three Years Old?

If you want your website to stay functional and useful to all users, you should need to seriously consider having steps to designing a website again if your site was developed more than three years ago. This timespan is already long enough if we are talking about web design. Chances are, your website isn’t working at its optimum state as when it was last upgraded.

With the constant updates in search engine guidelines and rapid changes in web technology, it’s not surprising that some of your third-party tools are already outdated. Standard tools that often need to be upgrading include eCommerce plugins, social media scripts, and popups.

Our recommendations:  You should review whether your website goals are still in line with your business goals every two years. Check if your tools are slowing down your site. Replace the ones that slow down your website. Make your site up-to-date by redesigning it every three years. This timeline is reasonable enough to make everything modern.

4. Does Your Website Still Generate Leads and Sales?

You should consider a redesign website checklist when your website no longer converts prospects or the leads you’re recently having are not the ones you’re targeting. You need a website redesigning when people leave the site after briefly visiting it.

Leads and conversion rates are also affected when you shift your target audience to accommodate a new product or service. ITDwebdesign.com can help you gain more leads and retain them. We use several strategies that enhance your sales process, so more people are brought to your funnel.

Our recommendations: Check your landing pages and other paths to customer conversion. Usually, these areas often fail to reach goals. Check if your landing pages are easy to comprehend. Also, take note of your call-to-action. Usually, the culprit is complicated wordings or the lack thereof. If so, rephrase or add them. Make sure these are catchy, creative, and reflect your company’s ideals and goals. Call-to-actions should appeal to their emotions.

5. Is Your Website Platform Outdated?

Your website platform has an immense impact on how successful your business website is. But if it’s outdated, your platform could be a potential risk as that would perform poorly in SEO. Worse, your website can be very open to hackers and people with malicious intent when it’s still using basic HTML codes. If you can’t make easy changes to your website, you might not even be using any CMS at all. Content management systems give you more control of your website.

Websites are now created on content management systems (CMS), which makes it much easier to maintain and update compared to how websites were created in the past- with complicated programming languages. Issues with popular CMS platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal often occur when you embed your site with plugins that have not been updated for a long time, resulting in a website that works so slow.

Remember that Google awards websites that load quickly, but website platforms that are not updated regularly lag almost all of the time. You’re missing out on numerous opportunities.

How to know when it’s time to replace your plugins:

• Are these tools still working?
• Do the tools make your website work slower?
• Are there some more updated versions of these plugins?

Design trends are also changing from time to time. One such example is Flash. At one point, Flash was the trend, but with the advent of mobile devices, websites with Flash were rendered outdated as these sites were more challenging to access on smaller gadgets. Should you use Flash, use it conservatively.

Also, look at the page URLs. If these still contain .htm or.aspx or have longer strings, you might want to consider revising them. For SEO reasons, use shorter URLs that include your main keyword and follow naming conventions. Also, try to avoid having URLs with numbers with it as these don’t play well with SEO, too. It’s even a good practice to check for deadlinks, broken SSL connections, etc. There are many dead link checkers you use. Here’s one you can use.

Our recommendations: When creating your website redesign checklist, make sure to update your plugins as well as your website with the latest technology. Make sure that your CMS is optimized for SEO. Run periodic updates on your security and the platform itself. Analyze your website speed using page speed analyzers, which will be discussed more later. Here are some other technical things that you have to take note of:

• Professionally looking URLs
• SSL certificates
• Page loading speed
• Images
• Broken links

6. Is Your Content Search Engine Optimized?

It might seem far-fetched that your optimized content is directly related to your website design guideline. For web pages to be part of the first 20 in SERPs, there are more than 200 factors that Google needs to consider. These ranking factors include the correlation of design with optimized content. These two ensure better user experience on your website.

You must optimize content, so this becomes more visible to your readers. There is a high probability that users are more likely to click your content when the latter becomes more popular. When you follow the SEO guidelines correctly, you get rewards, which translates to higher rankings.

Our recommendations:

• Add keywords to your title, headings, and content. But never overstuff the latter with too many keywords. You must use long-tail keywords and your focus keywords inside your content.
• Add some pillar content. Identify the typical type of written content in your niche.
• Don’t forget to use your keywords in the meta description. This is one of the things users check out before clicking your URL.
• Your images should have an alt text. These make non-visual reading easier.
• Develop a content strategy. Make sure that the new content is useful for your new target audience. Check if you can rehash old material for your new goals.

7. Is Your Website Adaptive to Your Company Goals?

Everything changes after a few years, so your goals are going to change with the times. Relatively, your website should follow suit too. When your market’s preferences shift, you tend to move along with it by offering a different set of products. You can find another industry to sell your products and services. These are just examples of how your company goals can change over time.

Our recommendation: You must assess your goals and your website if these two still align with each other. If not, you need to restructure your website, so it reflects your company’s new goals. With these two in sync, you can reach your benchmarks better.

8. Have You Incorporated All the Basic SEO Requirements in Your Website?

SEO is strongly tied to your website design and user experience. We have found out that only 40% of the sites are optimized for search engines. We are not just talking about written content- this could be anything from videos to images and even the headlines.

Your design and content should go hand-in-hand. That being said, your website’s credibility relies much on how you’ve integrated quality content and other SEO elements into your site’s architecture. Without doing so, your website could encounter technical issues you aren’t even aware of.

The SEO elements on your content, as well as your pages, play a vital role in improving your search engine rankings. To many, the title tag is the most critical SEO element because this hooks the searchers to read your content on SERPs. Take note that you can find long term results when you effectively use SEO tactics on your page.

Google is the go-to search engine as it accounts for more than 75% of the total search traffic. Improving your ranks in Google SERPs would help expose your site to more potential leads. The two most important factors Google uses to rank sites are high content and link building. What this means is, Google focuses more on the quality of the content rather than the quantity.

Our recommendations:

• Make sure that all your content reflects the aesthetics of your design. It only takes a reader a few seconds to scan your entire written content in an F-pattern. You should place optimized content on the areas where your readers can most likely view them. Most readers will read a large part of the article if you highlight the first line of your content, just like what we’ve done with this article.
• Make sure you optimize your content for Google. Keep updated with changes to Google algorithms. Develop on-page and off-page SEO. You should factor in content length, the information value, the richness of keywords, and your backlinks when developing your content. Also, add alt tags to images, so these also become indexable. Your headlines, headers, and content should contain your keywords as well.
• Identify the type of content you wish to have in your redesigned website. Your content must be in line with your new goals. You can choose from the different kinds of material which can focus on blogs, product features, and audio, among others.

9. Have You Integrated Social Media to Your Website?

Another important ranking factor for search engines is social media integration. Search engines can rank your web pages according to how easy it is for the audience to share your pages in their social media accounts. Your website, on the other hand, would be rewarded with Social Authority, thus, increasing your brand’s credibility.

Our recommendations:

For Instagram. You are telling your audience that you are growing your business by showing the up-to-date pictures of your products on Instagram. You can also gain more followers by tapping a large number of Instagram users. That way, you are providing your readers additional value long after they have left your website.

For Twitter. Twitter is particularly useful for time-based businesses such as events coordination where an up-to-the-minute update is necessary. With the integration, you won’t have to update your website content by the minute.

For YouTube. You can embed YouTube videos on your site using the YouTube video links. This way, your website storage isn’t filled with videos from Youtube.

Add social call-to-actions on the header and footer of your page. These buttons allow your readers to check out your social media pages from your website. Your audience can also follow you without having to leave your website.

Add share to social buttons. These buttons allow your users to share your content with their social media accounts directly from your website.

10. Is Your Website Too Distracting for Your Visitors?

Are there too many elements on your website that these become too distracting? When your audience cannot immediately find the information they need, they tend to leave your site. Are you using white space effectively? If the page becomes too noisy with so many images and texts, that page becomes too tricky to navigate. How you organize the placement of your content is just as important as the content itself.

Our recommendation:

You should do your research. Know what it’s the trend in your industry. Checking out your competitor is doing, the features they’ve added to their site and the likes are great ways to be on top of your game.

11. Does Your Website Load Fast?

One indication of a brilliant user experience is the fast loading time of your website. People want access to information fast and quick. If your website can’t provide this, chances are, they are going to end up at your competition’s doorstep. If your pages load slower on the desktop, how much more if you use a smaller gadget like a mobile device? A lot of things can cause such an event.

Your visual elements can be the culprit as these carry a considerable amount of data, which can contribute to the lagging of your webpages. Another common problem is the hosting company’s slow server. If you got one of those low-cost shared plans from some hosting company, then, most likely, your slow website could be attributed to the server of your web host company. The bad news is, you can’t do anything about it, even if you redesign your website in the best possible way. It’s like building a house with the worst foundation. So what good is the house, then?

This dilemma is precisely why our own hosting company came to fruition. We are dedicated to providing you with specially optimized WordPress and Joomla websites that quickly load so you can increase your SEO results and keep you at the top of search rankings. Google isn’t indulgent in penalizing sites that download so slowly and isn’t user-friendly. After all, the focus of your website is to provide your visitors with the best experience possible.

Website design is a process.

The ITDwebdesign.com team will collaborate and work with you at every stage of the development cycle. We have a professional team that comprises award-winning web designers, programmers, expert search engine marketing specialists, and dedicated project managers. Located in the Chicago area, ITDwebdesign.com is always ready to lend a helping hand to ease you of the challenges that go along with website development. We create visually appealing and cost-effective websites that employ the latest web technology and guidelines, so you get the value for money.

We Create Responsive Websites

Websites nowadays must be adaptive to all kinds of electronic devices; they should be vi