Everything you need to know about website redesign

Redesigning your website? You’re not alone. Maybe things are starting to feel a little outdated, or traffic and conversions have plateaued, and you’re hoping a fresh look and feel will turn that around. A website redesign can be a powerful move. Done right, it solves long-standing issues, unlocks new growth, and dramatically improves the customer experience. Done wrong? It can derail your entire business. We’ve seen both.

This guide is here to help you get it right. And the most reliable path we’ve found is this: redesign your site with your users in mind from start to finish. That means asking them what’s working (and what’s not), watching how they navigate your pages, and using real user data to guide every decision. 

Because when you put customers at the heart of your redesign, you don’t just build a prettier site—you build a smarter, more effective one. One that works better for your visitors and your business.

What is a website redesign?

A website redesign is a high-level overhaul that involves significantly changing elements like the code, content, structure, and visuals of your current website to better serve your visitors. A great website redesign tends to boost revenue, lower bounce rates, and improve the user experience (UX).

Website redesign vs. website refresh

First of all, some semantics to make sure you’re in the right place. Whether what you’re doing counts as a redesign or refresh depends on how many changes you’re making during the process, and how far-reaching they are:

• A redesign usually implies that the code and visual appearance of a website change significantly. For example, a new visual identity and branding are rolled out, pages are restructured UX-wise to incorporate new modules and functionality, the information architecture gets updated, a new CMS (content management system) is introduced—and this all goes live around the same time.

• A refresh takes place when the core structure and functionality of the website remain largely untouched and minor changes are applied. For example, the look and feel of the site gets updated with a new color palette and typography, or small UX tweaks are added to individual page templates.

A redesign and a refresh will significantly impact your customers and their experience of your website. At the end of the day, whether you call what you’re doing a ‘redesign’ or a ‘refresh’ is far less important than HOW you go about it in the first place. And it all starts with asking a few questions:

6 things you need to know before and during a website redesign

Research is a crucial part of your website redesign process: it’s the best way to find what’s working and isn’t, and to dig deeper into what your target customers want and how to make your website more user-friendly. 

Here are 6 things you need to know when approaching, and then going through, a website redesign: 

1. What your website’s most valuable pages are

2. Who is visiting your website, and why

3. What propels or stops your customers

4. How your team and business will be impacted by the redesign 

5. How to measure success with key performance indicators (KPIs)

6. What to change—and how to test it 

1. Identify your website’s most valuable pages

Before launching into a redesign, you should have a clear map of your website ecosystem, scope out your wireframes, and know which pages need to be handled with care versus which ones can be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. 

One way to go about it is to investigate the relationship between traffic and conversions; depending on how the 2 are connected, each of your website pages will fall into one of 4 likely categories:

• High conversion, high traffic pages: these are the most precious and valuable pages for your business: any mistake you make here could have disastrous consequences, which is why you need to approach them with caution and 10x more care compared to everything else you are going to redesign on your website.

• High conversion, low traffic pages: these pages are important because of the conversions they lead to, even if they don’t currently have a lot of traffic, which means you need to approach the redesign with care so as not to break anything that is already working.

• High-traffic, low-conversion pages: traffic is high on these pages, but something is not working conversion-wise. Redesign while keeping improvement in mind: you’re not risking conversions with the changes you make, so you can afford to be more experimental than in the previous 2 categories.

• Low-traffic, low-conversion pages: changes to these pages are probably not going to be noticed because of the low traffic, and you’re not risking conversions anyway. Redesign all you want: these are the most risk-free pages on your site.

⚠️ Why this is important: understanding which pages must be preserved and handled with care helps you get the most out of your website redesign while making sure you a) don’t break something that is working well and b) don’t tank conversions.

How to do it → Contentsquare (or any other traditional analytics tool you use on your site) is your best ally. The second chapter of this guide gives you a step-by-step process to identify your most valuable (highest-traffic and  highest-converting) pages.

2. Understand who’s visiting your website, and why

In our experience, identifying your most valuable pages is one of the most overlooked parts of a website redesign. But finding out what the important pages are is only half the story: you also need to know who is visiting them, and why.

According to Flow Ninja, most people land on your website with one of 4 clear intentions: informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional.

That means your visitors are either:

1. Looking to learn something about your brand or products

2. Trying to find a specific page or physical location

3. Comparing options before making a decision

4. Or ready to buy—right now

These are very different reasons for visiting a page, and redesigning with your customers in mind means knowing the intent or ‘driver’ that leads them there. One way to do it is by creating customer personas: semi-fictional representations of your existing and ideal customers, based on real demographic and psychographic data. Personas help you determine with a good degree of clarity:

• Who your ideal customers are (less in a ‘female, 42, has 2 dogs, lives in the city’ and more in a ‘project manager who leads a remote team of 5’ way)

• What their main intent or ‘driver’ is when visiting specific pages on your website (for example, the project manager who leads a team of 5 might be ‘looking to purchase software that helps her automate 30% of her tasks’)

⚠️ Why this is important: persona information helps you paint a clear picture of who you are redesigning for, and keep their needs and motivations in mind as you make redesign decisions. For example, if customers land on your top landing page and the only thing they’re interested in is a store locator, the best thing you can do is to give them that. They don’t want to convert. That’s not on their mind right now. So don’t try to force them to buy—simply give them the information they want.

How to do it → if you’ve never created personas before, you can get started by placing on-site surveys on your website pages and collecting useful data from your customers about what’s driving them there:

For more instructions, check out this guide to creating a user persona in 3 steps.

3. Learn what propels or stops your customers

At this point, there are still 2 main gaps in your knowledge: what convinces and helps customers to complete the actions they came to take and what stops them along the way.

You can think of these as the ‘barriers’ and ‘hooks’ that your customers experience on the website:

Investigating barriers and hooks helps you form a clear idea of:

• Where people get stuck and experience issues

• What’s working and what isn’t on individual pages

• What people like or dislike about the overall experience

• Whether your current CTAs are working

• Whether experiences differ between mobile devices and desktop

• What’s almost stopping people from converting

• What’s creating doubt and frustration

⚠️ Why this is important: if you can’t make the connection between customer behavior and your website performance, and you can’t differentiate between elements that work and don’t, you won’t know what to keep and what to remove or rethink—and you might end up replicating a lot of the existing problems in the new design.

How to do it → when building this map of your website, it pays to combine insights from traditional analytics (think Google Analytics) and internal sources (such as your success and sales teams, chat logs, customer interview transcripts) with those you get from specialized behavior analytics software. These can include Contentsquare tools such as:

• Heatmaps and Session Replay, which help you visualize your customers’ actual behavior and interactions with individual pages and elements

• Surveys and feedback widgets, which customers can use to leave in-the-moment feedback about what’s working, and what isn’t, with a specific page—or even with the entire site

Contentsquare’s Heatmaps and Session Replay capabilities in action

Why existing insight is important to a redesign

Fio Dossetto, a former senior editor at Hotjar (now part of Contentsquare), has seen her fair share of redesign projects—and the same costly mistake pop up time and again. In her own words:

Most of the businesses I worked on a redesign with were eager to get rid of what they had and start from zero. They’d often been dealing with outdated designs and unoptimized pages for a while and were looking for a drastic change. They would have happily burned everything to the ground and started again. 

But throwing everything away is a huge waste of time, resources, and potential. A website is a goldmine of insights—what people are looking for, where the flow gets stuck, what makes a prospective customer hesitate and drop off. If you don’t leverage this information, you may as well start crossing your fingers right now—because I can guarantee that something is going to go wrong.

For example (true story from a former client) you might spend weeks and $$$ redesigning the ultimate, pixel-perfect store locator experience, fighting to get stakeholder approval, bringing on extra developers to design and launch new functionality…only to find out that people were absolutely fine with the previous version, and all they needed from the page was an extra line with the store’s opening hours, which could have been added on your own in about 5 minutes. 

4. Determine how your team will be impacted—and get them involved early on

Rather than doing the usual company-wide grand unveiling of the redesigned website once it’s all done, consider getting people involved earlier on in the process. Your website has an impact on all aspects of your business, and everyone who works with it (and with customers) should be aware of what’s going to change. For example:

• UX and design teams will need to make sure the user experience isn’t compromised and will have crucial insight into which website design elements need adding, changing, or redoing

• Content and copywriting teams will be in charge of new copy and editorial decisions, and will need to know where their new content is displayed and how much space they’ve got to work with

• SEO (search engine optimization) and dev teams will oversee the technical aspects of the redesign, including a potential URL migration, to make sure nothing breaks on a page and existing search engine rankings don’t tank post-launch

• Sales reps may currently use the website to capture target leads and will need to know the ins and outs of its updated structure

• Support and success teams will need to understand where to direct customers who are looking for information or issue resolution

⚠️ Why this is important: bringing cross-functional teams on board for a redesign helps you get buy-in and support throughout a process that will inevitably impact them in the long run. Folks from outside your team will also have valuable insight that you missed: for example, your sales and success reps speak to your customers day in and day out, and are one of the best sources of data when building user personas.

5. Measure success with key performance indicators (KPIs)

If you are a business selling online, metrics related to your bottom line are the most accurate way to see whether your changes were successful. They get straight to the point: did your redesign pay off for the business?

Revenue-related metrics tie back to the point of your redesign: to create a site that your target customers love—and therefore, purchase from. They include 

• Number of conversions

• Conversion rate

• Revenue

• Average Order Value (AOV)

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

You can also use qualitative metrics to determine the impact of your redesign. For example:

• Volume of support questions or tickets → has it decreased since the redesign?

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

• Net Promoter Score® (NPS®)

• Customer Effort Score (CES)

⚠️ Why this is important: without clear KPIs, you won’t be able to determine a) if your website redesign was successful and b) by how much. 

6. Take action and conduct tests

You’ve done your research, lined up your KPIs, and are ready to start the redesign. The temptation to completely overhaul your site at once is probably lurking in the background—but a safer, more efficient way to go about it is to focus on the small things that can make a big difference first, make changes, and test the results.

A/B testing is often a good solution, especially if you have enough traffic to get statistically significant results. You simply take one of your new elements and test the impact on your site’s goal in comparison to the current site. For example, you could:

1. Test whether the video on your homepage (which existing customers have already told you they enjoyed) could be moved above the fold. If that works… 

2. Test whether social proof makes a difference to conversions on your checkout page. If it does…

3. Continue with another change 

💡 Pro tip:  if you don’t have enough traffic or an A/B testing tool set up, there are other ways to test the effectiveness of a few website designs. For example, you can use Contentsquare’s User Tests tool to run usability tests with real users. Test prototypes or live pages, watch how people interact with your designs, and capture direct feedback—so you can spot usability issues early and launch with confidence.

Contentsquare’s User Tests tool in action

When a website redesign goes right

Ben Labay, Research Director at CXL, approaches redesigns with a deep commitment to data and structured experimentation. Here’s how he described the process behind a mobile revamp for Adora Beauty.

“When we redesigned Adora Beauty’s mobile website, we started by running a dedicated research round looking specifically at the qualitative, four-pillar ‘I want to know, I want to go, I want to do, I want to buy’ framework. 

“We collected a lot of data on the questions people had: how they were going through the site, what their anxieties and what their motivations were. This resulted in a lot of insight: for example, [we learned that] on the product page the benefits need to pop out and speak to mitigating customer anxieties.  

“But we didn't just do the redesign and then launch it. We had hypotheses for every section of the flow, and we A/B tested each hypothesis separately, came up with the set of winners, combined all the sections, and then tested the full user flow at once.”

[The result was] a nice 16% jump (confirmed with insane amounts of data) increased on their web conversions.

⚠️ Why this is important: a handful of landing pages likely form the bulk of your traffic and conversions. You do not want to break any of them. So take the most impactful idea that came out of your research, test it, implement if needed, and move on to the next one.

How to do it → Create a PXL Prioritization Framework to solve the problem of ‘Okay, but which one is the most impactful idea that came out of my research?’ Add your test hypotheses and changes in the first column, score them throughout the sheet, and pick the ideas with the highest ‘result’ score. Those are the ones to get started from.

A website redesign is never really done

If you thought your job would be done after the redesign is complete, think again. 

Customer preferences are always changing, and so are browser technologies, design practices, and accessibility standards. Plus, things that worked at the time of the redesign might no longer work 12 months down the line. You’ll need to keep track of what your customers want and need—after all, they’re the people you’re designing the website for.

How to do it → use the same behavior analytics and feedback tools you used throughout. For example, compare heatmaps of your older website pages vs. new ones to see whether new design elements are attracting a user’s attention differently, or add a permanent on-page poll to your site and determine whether a user’s reason for visiting your site changes over time.

FAQs about website redesign