Thinking about giving your WordPress site a facelift? Getting a custom WordPress redesign is exciting, especially if you want to stand out from the crowd and renovate your website so it’s more likely to get views.
However, there’s more to a redesign than just a fresh look. It’s also the perfect opportunity to update your site’s appearance, improve user experience, boost performance, and keep your SEO tactics intact, which is crucial if you want to hold that #1 spot. Here are a few things to keep in mind before starting a custom WordPress redesign.
1. Set Clear Goals for Your Redesign
Before diving into your redesign, take a step back and ask: What do you want to achieve? Are you looking to modernize your brand’s look, improve user engagement, or increase conversions? Whatever your answer is, it will define everything you do afterwards.
Why? Having clear, measurable goals will guide every design and functionality decision. For example, if you want to reduce bounce rates, you might focus on improving navigation or speeding up your site, which are both crucial for UX. Plus, connecting those redesign goals to metrics like user retention or traffic growth can help make sure your new design aligns with your business objectives.
2. Don’t Forget About SEO
SEO can be tricky during a redesign, and if you’re not careful, your rankings could take a hit. This is because a simple thing like changing an image and forgetting to compress it can completely change your website’s speed, therefore affecting your SEO, but we’ll talk more about that later.
To avoid this, one of the most important things is making sure you preserve (or even improve) your existing SEO. This means mapping out your current site structure, setting up 301 redirects for any URL changes, and making sure your high-traffic pages stay intact. If you don’t do this and skip these steps, you can have broken links and a drop in traffic.
But, if SEO is prioritized throughout the process, a redesign can actually boost your rankings. How? In short, it improves your website’s ranking and visibility, helping you to attract more visitors and increase your ROI.
3. Make Mobile-Friendliness a Priority
Did you know that more than 50% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices? (Google) Plus, Google’s mobile-first indexing – aka the very first website Google takes into account for your rankings is your mobile version – means that if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, your rankings could suffer. In short, your website needs to be mobile-friendly, and it’s no longer a “nice-to-have”.
But mobile design isn’t just about shrinking your desktop site – it’s about making sure menus, buttons, and text are easy to use on small screens. And, if you don’t prioritize these things, you could face a higher bounce rate for mobile users, which obviously affects both user satisfaction and SEO.
4. Speed Up Your Site for a Better User Experience
On the other hand, reducing mobile site speed by even just 0.1 seconds can lead to a bounce rate improvement of 8%. (Deloitte) This shows that page speed is crucial, and not just for SEO, but for keeping visitors happy. In fact, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. (Google) Talk about pressure to keep up!
But this isn’t meant to scare you, this is just to make sure you understand just how important building lightning-fast WordPress sites is. So, during your redesign, focus on making sure your site is fast. To do this you can compress images, enable browser caching, and get rid of unnecessary plugins. Remember: a faster site keeps users on your page longer and improves your search rankings. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.
5. Test Everything
You did everything you could to make sure your site is top-notch quality and are ready to show it off? Think about testing it in a staging environment beforehand. We get it, you might be excited and want your users to experience this new site with all it has to offer, but if you test it a couple of times before actually showing them, you may have a chance to catch any design or performance issues before your visitors do.
Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Screaming Frog can actually help you find potential problems early, making sure you have a smooth launch. Testing also helps you avoid unpleasant surprises like broken features or slow performance on launch day, which is nerve-racking in and of itself.
Final Thoughts
A custom web revamp is more than just a visual upgrade – it’s about making sure your site performs at its best. By focusing on SEO, user experience, and mobile-friendliness, and by carefully planning each step of the process, you can set your redesign up for success!
However, if you feel overwhelmed by all you have to do and are in need of expert guidance, EpicDevs is here to help. We’ll make sure your project delivers the results you’re looking for every step of the way. Contact us today!