Ask any seasoned website pro, AI chatbot, or search engine, “What is the website redesign process?” you will get a task list with a lot of agreement on what steps to take.
The good news is that a website redesign process is agreed upon across many channels of authority, so you can trust that it is well-established and proven.
The bad news is that there are three initial, vital steps that are usually overlooked.
This omission can often inflate budgets and prolong timelines.
When shepx is asked to partner with a brand on a website redesign, we always start with three foundational steps:
Let’s cover each of these steps in detail.
What do Coke®, Gap®, and Tropicana® have in common?
They went with a redesign when they just needed a refresh.
What’s the difference between a redesign and a refresh?
A redesign is when we start from a blank page. Every part of the experience is open to change.
A refresh maintains the core equity of the experience but uses strategic change to give it a refreshed feeling—just enough new without being new.
Sprite® recently launched a refresh. Tide® frequently refreshes itself.
Yet brands like the aforementioned Coke®, Gap®, and Tropicana® mistakenly thought they needed to reinvent themselves when their business goals could have been accomplished with a refresh.
This applies to web redesign: Often, a brand does not need a start-from-scratch redesign but rather a refresh to its website.
Any web designer can start from scratch because it’s essentially creating a new website. It doesn’t require strategy, tactics, or an eye for equity.
A website refresh requires a higher level of expertise and strategy yet often results in a stronger brand with a better return on investment.
a url is also known as a web address or link. you found this article thanks to the url: shepx.us/website-redesign-process
Existing URLs are worth real money, and we need to preserve them.
A massive mistake that often occurs with website redesign is not paying attention to every website’s myriad URLs.
Every image on a web page has a URL. the navigation bar is primarily many URLs. Your brand’s website has many URLs, and they tell search engines and AI chatbots where your content is located.
When those URLs change, it is like starting over from scratch to a search engine. You lose 100% of the SEO a webpage has when its URL is changed.
Unfortunately, many website redesign projects do not factor this in.
The process does not preserve the URLs; therefore, the equity your website has from its URLs is tossed aside.
Consider this: If you restructure your brand’s website and URLs but want to regain the SEO equity the former pages had on your new pages, you can use many available tools to calculate the cost of running search engine marketing campaigns to regain the lost equity.
URLs are real, tangible, and financial equity.
Preserve them in your website redesign or refresh project.
Website hosting is part of the brand’s content and user experience strategy.
Website redesign needs to rethink how updates to the new website.
The days of making changes to your live website should be in the past. There is a new standard for creating and publishing updates, and it looks like this:
» Stage is where you make updates, write and create new pages, post new videos, etc.
» Live is what the public, search engines, and AI tools see.
» Therefore, your brand’s Stage website is always the most current since it has all the work in progress.
» When the Stage website reaches a point where it is ready for Live, you copy it to the Live environment.
This method allows your website content strategy more room to explore, is not dependent on developers as gatekeepers, and will enable you to make mistakes without disrupting live website experiences or traffic.
All best-in-class website hosting platforms use this approach, but many website hosts still use the old method of having one website for everything.
It might be time to change website hosting companies that allow your brand’s website hosting to be part of your strategy.
These three steps will make the standard steps of a website redesign more impactful and increase the likelihood of faster, fuller ROI.
® Brand Shepherd llc • shepx is a service of Brand Shepherd
