WordPress Website Redesign
Many companies already have a working WordPress website, but technology and trends change quickly and having a website without proper maintenance and ongoing improvements means that company is losing some value from digital marketing.
If you have a WordPress website and thinking it’s time to redesign, there are few important considerations to follow before and during this transition to ensure gaining full advantage of opportunities and avoid losses.
SEO Matters
SERP Benchmarking: Your website is similar to a tree, moving it will cause some changes in the traffic it gains from Search Engines and it’s important to protect your rankings. We always start our website redesign process with benchmarking to track the existing pages and indexed sitemap and the keywords each page is ranked for and their respective positions. We use tools like Google Search Console or premium tools like SEMRush, Ahref or SEO Master Box.
URLs and Redirections: Sometimes a website redesign considers for improvements in sitemap. While changing the site structure and URLs, it’s important to ensure the URL changes are followed with proper redirection setups to avoid Search Engine ranking losses.
Meta Tracking: Tracking meta titles and making sure changes made are toward gaining focus on primary keywords on each page and what they currently rank for. This includes the Meta titles, Meta descriptions, Headings (h1, h2, h3), Image Alt and Link titles, internal links and common SERP elements that search engines examine our page and index for.
Redesigning for Users
User Experience: Redesigning your website should combine a deep study of how currently users are navigating and finding the information on the website as well as how the future hypothesis and changes we propose to make would impact their usability. Reviewing the User Behaviour Data from Google Analytics or similar analytic tools and even setting up Headmap tools can help to better understand the user’s behaviour and what we need to solve for during our website redesign exercise.
Accessibility: Ensuring Accessibility has become an important aspect of today’s business standards meaning that we respect all users to be able to find and access our business and benefit from services without exclusivity for anyone. This requires testing the website for various accessibility impairment requirements (W3.org).
Use Mobile First Approach
Responsive: Many people look up and research on their cellphones, especially for the first attempt to find us, leading from Search Engines or AI Chats to our website to make the first impression.
Short Content: While short video content are on the rise, the same idea applies for refining our website content when comes to redesigning. Writing short content helps users find the information needed and longer content are served in articles, podcasts and video formats as what appeals to our audiences today.
Become Mobile First: This means, start putting the elements of your website together thinking if each element serves a purpose when a user is visiting your website on mobile. If it’s taking too much space and it’s not found necessary, then it perhaps can be also removed on Desktop views.
WordPress Considerations
WordPress websites that are often updated (Core and Plugins) have an easier transition to a new theme. Also when content including pages, posts and media are organized, it’s usually best to keep the WordPress setup intact and focus on refining the theme or building a new one. Deciding on a new theme or editing the old one can be made based on checking the code structure and how old it is. We often use libraries like Tailwind for CSS that have major upgrades every 2-3 years and upgrading the foundations usually require rewriting the theme for WordPress.
Remember, websites have evolved from desktop softwares where we had a big screens. Fewer websites had the opportunity to serve more content and get the clicks. In Today’s world with millions of content pieces generated everyday. Today, our websites need to deliver the messaging simply and clearly while making it easy for everyone accessing it to use its intended functionality on any screen or device.
