Website Redesigns: 10 Mistakes to Avoid with Your New Site

While there are a lot of reasons to redesign your site, there are also a lot of reasons to be careful when you do. A redesign can make it easier to update your website and eliminate bugs. It can make the site more appealing and easy to use for your customers, and it can make it more suited to search engines, especially if you switch to responsive design. However, if you don’t do your research ahead of time, you can risk running into problems with functionality, angering current users, or destroying your ranking in search results.

Let’s take a hypothetical company run by a man named Bob who decided his company needed a redesign. Bob didn’t read this blog, so everything that could possibly go wrong with his website, did:

1. He didn’t establish a timeline, so the site took longer than expected and cost more than he planned, or it was rushed and now the site doesn’t perform as needed.
2. The goal of the redesign wasn’t established. Customers are angry because they don’t know why Bob changed their site, investors are asking why their money was spent on this project, and he has no answers for either of them.
3. Scope creep was not considered, so the aim of the redesign drifted so far no one can remember what they wanted to achieve originally.
4. Responsive design wasn’t included in the site overhaul, so many customers on smartphones and tablets still can’t access his company’s site.
5. Bob didn’t think about the load time of his pages, so many of them have flash elements and multimedia, which makes them take a long time to load.
6. The web analytics of pages before the design weren’t considered, so Bob deleted some pages that were generating a lot of leads.
7. He didn’t think about search engine results either, and now that the site is redesigned, he’s trying to remember if the old site used to be higher or lower in the rankings.
8. Because he focused on the design of the site, Bob forgot to think about SEO. He got rid of pages that had a lot if inbound links, and the search rankings dropped.
9. He rewrote the URLs for a lot of his pages without writing 301 redirects and now any links to the old pages are dead ends.
10. He put up a beta version of his new site on a server search engines could crawl, and they already found all of the content. Now when he releases the real site its SEO will be awful because the whole site will be considered duplicate content.

Don’t be like Bob.

Download the FREE ebook that contains 17 common mistakes to avoid during your website redesign.

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