Risks to Avoid When Redesigning Your Business Website

Most people are sophisticated internet users and expect a certain level of professional experience from a business website, and a professional look and feel. For the latter reason, many websites that function well are redesigned in order to retain the attention of visitors and gain more customers.

A website that looks dated can convey the wrong message to potential customers. But a business website also has to deliver a good experience: it needs to be fast, easy to navigate, easy to take the necessary actions whether that’s purchasing a product, requesting more information or simply picking up the phone. It’s easy to lose potential customers if they have a poor user experience on the website and that’s reflected in a low conversion rate.

However, there are risks associated with redesigning a website (not to mention costs). And these risks are not just about making sure a new website is fast or provides as good a user experience compared to the old website. There is also the risk that the online visibility of the old website is compromised in the redesign. The online visibility is simply how easy it is for the website to be found by someone searching for what a business has to offer.

Web developers and web designers rarely have the expertise to understand the complexities of optimising a website in order to be found by online searchers. Yet if people can’t find your website it doesn’t matter how perfect the design is. For that reason, I am convinced that a website should only be redesigned with the input of the digital marketing team.

I’ve recently seen 2 businesses that had a website redesign and subsequently experienced serious problems because the website was built without any input from the digital marketing teams. For both of these businesses the outcome was a drop in their online visibility hence a drop in traffic to their websites and a drop in revenue. The image below from Google Analytics shows a real-life drop in traffic of 35% over a 2-month period due solely to a website redesign. So I’d like to share the 3 main risks to be aware of in a website redesign…

A technical sidenote: Google released Google Analytics 4 in late 2020 so any Analytics accounts created since then will by default be GA4. This has a significantly different interface to GA3 and the image used below is from a GA3 account.

RISK 1:  Creating a Different URL Structure

A good URL structure helps visitors easily find their way around a website, but it is more than that. It also helps search engines such as Google decide which pages on that website are the most important. As an example, consider a business that provides project management training. They might have a website structure with these 3 URL examples:

domain-name.com/project-management-training

domain-name.com/project-management-training/advanced-courses

domain-name.com/project-management-training/beginners-courses

The first of the above 3 URLs would be considered more important in the website hierarchy and probably have a higher ranking in the search listings. But if some levels of the URL structure were removed during a rebuild then it might be changed to:

domain-name.com/project-management-training

domain-name.com/advanced-project-management-training

domain-name.com/beginners-project-management-training

Now the first page will not be considered any more important that the other two. This could negatively affect the rankings of that page.

RISK 2: Deleting Too Much Text

Large sections of text can be unappealing to the human eye so web designers often remove text to create an uncluttered look and feel. However, that text will be contributing to online visibility i.e. how easy it is for people to find your website. Large amounts of content are a factor in search rankings and top-ranking pages will often have several thousands of words of content on them. This is because search engines such as Google are better able to determine what a page is about if there is more text.

So instead of removing text it should be designed into a web page so that it is appealing; break it down into smaller sections, intersperse with images, make the content interactive or use tabs or accordions that pop open to reveal the text when someone wants to read it. There are multiple ways to create an uncluttered design but still retain large amounts of text.

RISK 3: Reducing Page Speed and User Experience

Since mid-2021 the speed with which a website and it’s individual pages can be seen by a visitor and how quickly they are able to interact with it (e.g. by clicking a button) has significantly impacted online visibility. Google has 3 specific metrics that it checks called Core Web Vitals to determine if a website is efficiently built for maximum speed and page experience. If, for example, a WordPress website uses multiple plugins rather than a bespoke template with efficient coding then it will probably struggle to meet the minimum requirements to pass the Core Web Vitals tests. Or, if a website uses large images without compressing them then it will also struggle to provide a fast page experience meaning less well-engaged visitors, fewer conversions and lower revenue.

You can check your Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console and speed for individual pages in Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (both are free to use)

These potential pitfalls are far from the only things that can go wrong during a website redesign but they do highlight the importance of involving someone with in-depth technical expertise in website optimisation during the process.