The Top 5 Mis­takes To Avoid When Re­design­ing Your Website

If you’re like most peo­ple there will come a time when you want to re­design your site.

Maybe you just threw up a ba­sic site in the be­gin­ning and it’s now time to de­liver some­thing spe­cial to your read­ers. There could be thou­sands of rea­sons why you would want to change your site and none of them are important.

The only thing that mat­ters is that you do every­thing the right way, es­pe­cially if your web­site is mak­ing good money be­cause you don’t want to throw it all away.

Some peo­ple try to make big changes and they don’t like the out­come, but you don’t want to let that hap­pen to you. It’s cru­cial that your re­design goes as smoothly as pos­si­ble be­cause it will make every­thing so much easier.

We can look at some of the things you need to keep in mind. If you get them right your web­site will be an even big­ger suc­cess than it is at the moment.

1. Don’t kill your money makers

Think very care­fully about how you make money.

• If some peo­ple find your prod­uct on a cer­tain page and you move it you might lose some income.
• If every­thing you make comes from your email list and your re­design means 50% less peo­ple sign up, you’ve lit­er­ally just threw away half your income.

Be smart when you touch any­thing that is bring­ing in money, care­ful plan­ning will help you out more than any­thing else.

2. Los­ing all your SEO link juice

A lot of peo­ple de­cide to move every­thing over to a new do­main name when they de­cide to re­brand the site.

Your new de­sign might look su­per, but you have just lost every sin­gle one of your backlinks.

You will ob­vi­ously have to use a 301 redi­rect to make sure your old do­main points to the new one. If you de­cide to take away any spe­cific pages on your cur­rent do­main you also have to be care­ful that you don’t throw away good link juice.

3. Scar­ing away your loyal readers

Do you know your read­ers in­side out? If you don’t, then ask your­self why you want to make any changes at the mo­ment. Do you think it would be bet­ter wait­ing un­til you know what they want your site to look like? You might re­vamp the de­sign and within a few days your traf­fic will drop be­cause you’ve suc­cess­fully scared your loyal read­ers away.

It’s al­ways a good idea to sur­vey peo­ple be­fore you make any big changes.

4. Not dou­ble check­ing everything

Once you’ve suc­cess­fully de­signed the new site you want to test every­thing to make sure there are no ob­vi­ous mistakes.

If you’re not a com­pe­tent de­signer you are prob­a­bly us­ing Word­Press, so build the en­tire site on a new do­main or a sub do­main and hide it from the search en­gines. Once you know it’s per­fect you can al­ways trans­fer it over. Be­cause your new web­site is still run­ning along­side your old one, you can ask a few friends to play on the new site so they can look for faults.

5. Ig­nor­ing your mo­bile users

You might not have a mo­bile site at the mo­ment, but one look at your an­a­lyt­ics will tell you how many peo­ple are look­ing at your site from a mo­bile device.

When you re­design the site you should se­ri­ously con­sider mak­ing it re­spon­sive be­cause it could ac­tu­ally earn you money. If some­one on an iPad can’t buy your prod­uct it’s a wasted sale.

You’re lucky be­cause most de­cent Word­Press themes will be re­spon­sive any­way, but you can check to make sure.

[rms] Ralf Skir­r’s com­ment: While this ar­ti­cle is writ­ten for web site own­ers, it’s also in­ter­est­ing for web agen­cies and con­sul­tants.

I have seen more than one failed web site re­launch by so-called ‘ex­perts’ who messed up Google rankings.

If you’re do­ing agency work and site re­launches for your clients, it will help you a lot to cre­ate a ba­sic check­list for all im­por­tant steps of a re­design project. It’s a time saver and helps you de­liv­er­ing your best work to your clients. The 5 points men­tioned by Todd de­finetely be­long on this list!