How to Assess Whether You Need a Website Redesign

A website redesign is a significant investment, that’s why you don’t want to guesstimate if you need it or not. You should do a thorough assessment of your current website and performance and then decide on your next move based on real data.

Once you go through the long list of reasons that can help clue you into whether or not it’s time for a redesign, you can begin to think more objectively about your current website and gain some technical input to help you determine how dire the need is.

Run the following are seven major assessments to determine if your site is ready for a complete redesign.

1. Measure your website speed

A key part of assessing whether you need a website redesign is measuring your loading speed.

Remember how almost half of your visitors will expect your website to load in 2 seconds or less?

If your website is lagging, it’s costing you precious clicks and conversions. That means a higher bounce rate and less time spent on your pages, resulting in both a ding to your Google rankings and a loss of conversions.

So, how do you know if your site is fast or slow?

It’s easy enough to find out with tools like PageSpeed Insights and Gtmetrix. Both will provide a website speed score and tell you just how many seconds it takes for your website to load.

Once you know your website speed, you can begin exploring ways to make it load faster.

Each tool will provide insights into what elements of a page are causing slow loading times as well as suggestions on how to fix the issues.

But in case your speed is very low (like in the screenshot above) you’re likely in for a complete website redesign as normal speed optimization tactics may not be able to improve performance.

2. Inspect your Google Search Console

Another tool you should use to assess if you need a website redesign is Google Search Console. If you’re not already familiar with it, this is a tool that directly allows you to submit pages to Google so it can supercharge your SEO efforts.

Google Search Console is actually a multi-faceted tool that you can use to assess your rankings, view indexing and coverage issues and identify other issues that may be causing SEO problems.

Another crucial report in GSC is the Core Web Vitals report. It shows your performance across three major Google ranking factors that directly impact your business visibility in the search results.

Since Google is the biggest search engine in the world, you should definitely be using these insights to your advantage. If you see too many errors, warnings, and issues it’s probably a good time to contact a web design agency to get your site redesigned.

3. Go through your Google Analytics

Google Analytics is another one of those tools you should use to help evaluate your website and its potential need for a redesign.

One of the first metrics you should look at in your Google Analytics dashboard is your bounce rate.

This number tells you what percentage of people who click on your links click the “back” button within a few seconds. In other terms, a bounce is when a user lands on your page but doesn’t interact with any of its elements and doesn’t visit any other page on your site.

Bounces are most often caused by a slow-loading or unattractive website, so take them to heart.

Moreover, combine your bounce rate analysis with the average number of pages visited per session and the average time on site, which helps you understand how long people stay on your website and each page.

Finally, look into your Goal Conversions and Conversion Rate reports in your Google Analytics account.

These reports are probably the most important as they show if your website visits result in leads or sales.

If you do operate an e-commerce site, make sure you analyze your checkout performance. Google Analytics allows you to inspect every step in your checkout flow to identify any problematic areas with potentially high drop-offs.

If your conversion numbers are low, try and find out why your site isn’t converting.

While in some instances, elements can be tested and optimized for conversions, other issues may require a comprehensive overhaul of your website and landing pages.

4. Analyze your competitors

Competitors are another essential thing to consider when deciding if you need a website redesign. Perform competitive research to see how your site fares against your rivals.

The situation is simple: if your website is of a lesser quality than that of your competitors, you’re most likely losing customers and sales to them!

Your top-performing competitors are surely doing something right, which is why they make great role models for how your website should look and perform.

Here are a few things to check:

• Check your competitors’ SEO rankings
• Look at competitors’ website design
• Inspect their pages, content, and structure
• Analyze how they optimize for conversions, etc.

Take note of anything that’s giving your rivals an advantage and try to replicate that. If your site is lacking in features, then it may just be the right time for a revamp.

While you don’t want to be a copycat, you should take the time to look at multiple competitor websites and take notes about what’s consistent among them.

Then, find ways to improve upon what they’re doing so you can be even better.

5. Run a survey on your site

Running a survey on your website can help gain valuable insights and decide if you need a website redesign.

One of the best ways to give your users what they want (and make them feel listened to) is to run surveys on your website.

Surveys can help you get a better understanding of what helps your customers take the desired action as well as what’s stopping them along that journey.

A tool like HotJar can help you do it, too, and it’s all relatively easy to implement. You can ask practically any question that comes to mind, whether it’s concerning your site’s UX, speed, or features they’d like to see.

Analyzing the answers to your surveys will certainly prove valuable in helping you determine if your site is due for a redesign or what you should consider when pursuing one.

6. Check for any accessibility issues

Older websites built before the AODA enactment rarely meet all WCAG criteria. This is sort of understandable since back then there wasn’t enough awareness, and most websites weren’t built with accessibility in mind.

That’s why it’s critical to run an accessibility evaluation of your site.

Use tools like Wave to check for any accessibility issues.

Remember, an accessible website is essential (and even required in some places) to serve your entire audience equally.

Of course, many website owners don’t even realize how accessible or, rather: non-accessible, their website really is.

That’s why an accessibility evaluation can help determine if you need to do a full website redesign to improve accessibility and avoid hefty fines.

7. Run a full website audit

Lastly, the final thing on your to-do list when evaluating your website should be a complete website audit.

Running an SEO audit isn’t too difficult, albeit a bit time-consuming to go through all the checks and results.

However, it will prove well worth it once you have an actionable audit checklist in hand showing you all the areas where your site could improve.

A comprehensive audit includes:

• Checking for critical issues
• Ranking audit
• Technical SEO audit
• On-Page SEO audit
• Analyzing UX signals
• Backlink analysis

You can download our full SEO audit checklist here and run the analysis yourself.

With having these 7 assessments in mind you will have no problem determining if your site is ready for a rewamp.

Ultimately, getting started with website redesign begins with reaching out to a professional team that can help with the “due diligence” of evaluating your existing website and walking you through all the critical components of a successful redesign.