Benchmarks Before you launch your website redesign, be sure to familiarize yourself with your site’s traffic, bounce rate, average time on site and other stats so you have an accurate picture of how successful — or unsuccessful — your re-launch is. You can do some intensive research through sites such as SEORush and find out what keywords competitors are ranking for, as well as their most visited pages. Listen to Your Site Visitors Once you actually re-launch your site, take the time to gather feedback from your site visitors. This way, when site visitors come to see what has changed, they’ll see the content is fresh and updated. Colors and designs should repeat on social media, for example. Update your social media headers and profile images. Link any interesting new content to your social media pages. Test for Speed Whenever you add new features, images, plugins and such, there is always the possibility one or more of those things will slow your site down. Test your site’s speed. Pingdom has a free and easy speed test you can use to see how quickly your pages load.
An outdated website sends a message that you aren’t up on the latest trends. There comes a time when every business needs to revamp and re-launch for maximum impact.
For example, older websites might not be optimized for speed. About 40 percent of those who visit your website will bounce away if it doesn’t load within three seconds. You can’t afford to keep a bulky, outdated website with statistics like that.
At the same time, relaunching your site might seem almost overwhelming. Fortunately, there are some simple rules of thumb you can follow that will make your re-launch not only easy but successful.
1. Benchmarks
Before you launch your website redesign, be sure to familiarize yourself with your site’s traffic, bounce rate, average time on site and other stats so you have an accurate picture of how successful — or unsuccessful — your re-launch is. This will also give you a baseline if you wish to create some split-testing models.
2. Goals
Once you know where your traffic is, it’s time to set some goals for where you want it to be. Take a look at your competitors. You can do some intensive research through sites such as SEORush and find out what keywords competitors are ranking for, as well as their most visited pages. Using this information, set some firm goals for your own website.
What do you hope to accomplish with your re-launch? Do you want more traffic? Perhaps you want more visitors to convert into customers. Whatever your goals, write them out and then work backward on how you will get there.
3. Give Your Current Customers a Heads-Up
You likely already have some loyal followers who have been with you and your website for years. They deserve to know before anyone else that you are revamping and relaunching your site. Send a short note to your mailing list and social media followers. Let them know you are in the process of redesigning, why you chose to do so, what you hope to accomplish with the redesign and when they can expect to see the new look.
4. SEO Still Matters
There are more than 1 billion websites on the World Wide Web. You have to stand out from all of those, rise up the ranks and somehow capture the attention of potential site visitors. There are so many factors that play into ranking and how many people visit your site, but in general, you…
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