Website Redesign: Challenges and Solutions

The decision to redesign a website improves a brand’s online presence. However, it comes with challenges that require a thoughtful approach. One that balances innovation with integrity and user engagement with aesthetic appeal.

In the other article, we covered why marketers should consider website redesigning and important strategies. This article highlights the challenges they might face in the process.

Website Redesign Potential Challenges and Solutions

1. Maintaining Brand Consistency

When brands decide to update or redesign their visual identity, such as their website, logo, or overall theme, they face the challenge of incorporating the newest design trends without straying too far from their original brand identity. The established brand identity is important because customers recognize and trust it. If the redesign changes the brand too much, it can confuse customers. Moreover, it can weaken their connection to the brand.

Solutions

Any redesign effort should focus on maintaining the brand’s basic elements. This means that the color palette, logo design, and typefaces that customers have come to associate with the brand should remain consistent or be carefully changed. It ensures that, even though a brand may receive a fresh, updated look, it remains recognizable and familiar to its existing audience.

Moreover, a redesign is an opportunity to reinforce the brand’s message and identity rather than completely changing it. This is especially true unless the business is aiming for a complete rebranding, which involves deliberately changing the company’s image.

Keeping the brand’s core elements consistent while updating its outlook can strengthen its market position and improve customer loyalty.

2. Improving UX

Improving UX involves solving any issues on a website that might hamper user satisfaction or accessibility. For instance, users might face problems like poor navigation, slow loading times, or non-responsive design.

As per Hostinger Tutorials’s blog, “21 Essential Web Design Statistics for 2024,”

Solutions

To fix these problems, it is important to engage in user research and A/B testing. User research helps to gather data about how users interact with the website, the challenges they face, and what improvements they desire.

A/B testing which version of the web page performs better regarding user engagement and satisfaction. This data-driven approach allows for informed decisions when redesigning the website. It focuses on creating a smooth, easy-to-navigate, and mobile-friendly user experience.

Also read: Designing Budgeting Strategies for Marketing in Turbulent Times

3. SEO Preservation

With website redesign, there’s a risk that the changes could negatively impact its search engine ranking. This happens because search engines, like Google, have already indexed and ranked the site based on its current content, structure, and SEO practices.

If the redesign changes URLs, alters content greatly, or modifies the site structure without carefully considering SEO, it can lead to a loss in search engine visibility. This may result in lower traffic and fewer conversions from organic searches. Therefore, it’s important to strategize and implement the redesign so that it preserves or improves the site’s SEO.

Solutions

Maintain URL Structures or Use Redirects – It’s important to keep the URL structures unchanged. If changes are necessary, ensure that the old URLs are redirected to the new ones. This helps preserve the SEO value that has been built up over time.

Update Content Strategy and Meta Tags – Alongside the visual update, the content strategy should remain focused. Meta tags, snippets of text that describe a page’s content, must be updated to reflect the changes in design and content. They help search engines understand what the page is about.

4. Content Relevancy and Organization

It’s important to keep a website’s content current and well-organized for user engagement and satisfaction. However, as time passes, content on a website can become outdated or lose its relevance. This makes it hard for visitors to find useful information and potentially damages the site’s credibility.

As per the same report,

Solution

A content audit thoroughly reviews the website’s content. This helps brands decide what should be updated, what remains valuable, and what should be removed due to its lack of relevance or accuracy.

Also, it is important to organize content in a user-friendly manner. This involves arranging information logically and in an easily navigable format, using clear headings to guide visitors through the site. This allows users to easily find the information they are searching for without frustration or confusion.

Investing in high-quality, engaging content helps meet the needs and interests of the website’s audience. Such content attracts visitors and encourages them to engage more deeply with the site. This improves metrics like time on site and conversion rates.

5. Technical Issues and Integration

Problems often arise when incorporating new functionalities or platforms into an existing system. The primary challenge lies in executing these integrations smoothly without encountering technical issues.

Solutions

It is important to ensure collaboration between the project’s stakeholders and the development team from the early stages of planning. This early collaboration helps anticipate and mitigate potential tech issues that arise from integrating new and complex functionalities.

Rigorous testing involves testing the new features in various environments and scenarios to ensure they work as intended. This ensures that the new additions do not introduce bugs or compromise the system’s performance and security. Identifying and fixing these issues before the site or the new features are made live greatly reduces the risk of performance hiccups or downtime. This leads to a smoother, more reliable user experience.

6. Budget and Time Constraints

It is common to face budget and time constraints issues during website redesign projects. Website redesign efforts can often be expensive and take longer than anticipated. This can pressure project teams to make compromises or rush aspects of the redesign to stay within budget or meet deadlines.

Solutions

Brands should focus on the various elements of the redesign based on their importance and potential ROI. This means focusing on changes that will improve the site’s performance or UX.

Moreover, launching the website redesign in stages spreads the financial burden over time. This makes it more manageable. It also provides an opportunity to test and measure how users respond to each change on a smaller scale before fully committing to the next phase. This incremental feedback helps to make informed adjustments and improvements. It ensures the redesign is more effective and aligned with user needs.

7. Maintaining Website Performance

The immediate weeks following the website’s launch are critical for monitoring and optimizing its health to ensure its long-term success and visibility. This includes monitoring the site’s performance metrics like load speed, responsiveness, and UI. These factors play an important role in search rankings and UX.

Also, broken links and crawl errors can negatively affect the site’s SEO and UX. Broken links can lead to frustrating dead ends for users. Crawl errors can prevent search engines from indexing the site correctly. This affects the site’s visibility online.

Solutions

Using performance analysis tools like Google PageSpeed Insights regularly helps maintain performance. These tools can help identify issues that slow down the site and provide suggestions to improve its overall performance.

Regularly checking websites with Google Webmaster Tools helps identify and fix broken links and crawl errors.

Also, it is important to pay close attention to the site’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). A drop in ranking may indicate underlying issues with the site’s SEO strategy or technical problems that must be fixed.

Conclusion

When navigated with strategic foresight, website redesign leads to improved UX. However, it also comes with its own set of challenges that brands need to overcome.

The key lies in embracing change while keeping the core elements that define a brand’s identity intact. This ensures that the redesigned website resonates with both existing and potential customers.

This allows brands to create a visually appealing, functionally robust, and user-friendly website.