Your website is one of your greatest assets. However, if it's painfully slow or out of date, it's likely doing more damage than good.

Redesigning your website can strengthen your online presence, create trust in your brand and help to generate valuable new business leads, yet it's something many businesses shy away from. Why? Because website redesigns sound complicated and expensive.

While a redesign does require time and financial resources, your website acts as the front door to your business – and that won't be changing any time soon. It’s essential that your site is having the positive impact on visitors that you need it to.

Before you start creating a website redesign project plan, think about your reasons for making changes.

Sometimes, you can refresh ineffective elements within your current design and turn your results around.

Start by asking the following questions:

• Are you prepared for other projects to stall during the redesign process?
• Is the rest of the company – staff, investors, board of directors – backing the idea?
• Are you agreed on the objectives?
• Do you have the budget for the work you want to do?
• Is more than 50 per cent of the content out of date or ineffective?
• Does your branding and look-and-feel need a complete overhaul?

If the answer to more than two of these questions is ‘no’, then making minor changes is probably a better option.

A clear set of goals and objectives should be at the core of your redesign plan. These will help you make tough decisions about design, layout and functionality. They can also provide a benchmark against which to set targets and measure success after the relaunch.

Follow these steps to help you define the goals and objectives for your business website redesign.

Analyse the existing website

You will need to dig deeper into the data at a later stage. However, when you’re setting your goals, you need to have a basic understanding of how your current website is performing.

• Which pages are your biggest traffic drivers?
• Where does the majority of your traffic come from?
• Roughly how much content is out of date or below standard?

From these answers, some goals should emerge. Perhaps most of your traffic is being driven through paid ads, but your organic reach is low. If you have a lot of outdated content too, then improving organic traffic might be a worthwhile goal.

Map out audience personas

What groups of people do you want to attract to your site? What is their background and what challenges do they face? Why do they need your website and what are they looking for when they visit? Address these questions when mapping out your audience personas.

This is a useful process that can help you to pinpoint gaps that may have been overlooked. Once these gaps are identified, ensure they are covered off in the goals you set.

Do some user testing

User testing gives you an opportunity to see the website through your customers’ eyes. It should highlight any functional issues and provide insight into whether the design, branding and content are telling the right story.

Common user testing methods include:

On-site surveys

These are quick questions for visitors to answer as they exit your website. For example:

• Did you find what you needed today?
• Was the information on the website helpful?
• Would you use the site again?
• Would you recommend it to others?

Questionnaires

These tend to be more in-depth and give you both quantitative and qualitative data to draw on. For quantitative data, include scales (from 0 to 10) and multiple-choice questions (“pick between a, b, or c”).

To gather qualitative data, ask open-ended questions so users have the chance to share their own opinions.

Questionnaires can be managed online or face-to-face. Either way, it’s a good idea to get a spread of users from across your audience personas and a mix of existing and potential customers.

Out of the data you acquire, some patterns should emerge. For example, what is stopping users from completing a task and what makes them visit a competitor’s site instead? Use this information to inform your goals and ensure the redesign addresses the current blockers to conversions.

Content is a major driver for attracting users to a website. However, mediocre content won’t have the desired impact.

Make sure you’re prepared to invest in creating and maintaining your content properly. Use your business website redesign as an opportunity to take a step back and reassess.

Be honest: how many pages are lingering in the depths of your website that haven’t been looked at for a year or more? Most businesses fall into the trap of adding more and more content that is soon forgotten.

Check that you’re maximising each page’s value, because some of these pages could be useful for search. A quick tweak could be all that’s needed to turn an out-of-date page into one that drives traffic to key parts of your website.

How to perform a content audit

Auditing all the content on your website can be a daunting task, but designing a content matrix is an effective way to decide what stays, what goes and what needs improving.

A content matrix can be laid out on a spreadsheet and should include questions to help determine the worth of each page. List every page of your website down the left-hand side of the spreadsheet, with key questions across the top.

Here are seven questions to include in your content matrix:

1. Does the page perform well in search engine results?
2. How much traffic does it drive to the site?
3. Is the content up to date?
4. Does it include useful links to other parts of the website?
5. Do images or visuals need to be improved?
6. Is the content of interest to your audience personas?
7. Does the content align to your goals and objectives?

A traffic light colour-coded system can be a quick way to present your findings. However, a lot of red doesn’t necessarily mean the content isn’t worth keeping.

An old page that needs updated information, better images and more links could still be a useful topic for your target audience. Improving the content will boost its SEO ranking and drive more target customers to your website.

Whether you opt for a refresh or a full redesign, you will need to appoint a project manager to:

• Oversee the project from start to finish
• Map out the scope of the project
• Set deadlines
• Schedule meetings
• Oversee the budget

Many companies take on external agencies to help with certain elements of a website redesign. Whether this includes project management is up to you. If you go down this route, you will also need an in-house project owner to:

• Liaise with the agency
• Gather internal feedback
• Ensure the tasks allocated to the in-house team are completed on time

The benefits of enlisting the help of an agency

Enlisting an agency is expensive, but their expertise often outweighs what is available to you in-house. It also frees up your team to work on the nuts and bolts of the project.

York-based leather retailer Maxwell Scott was disappointed with the “okay” results of its company website and worked with external agencies to improve its content and optimisation.

CEO William Forshaw believes that finding the right agency tends to be trial and error and that you may need more than one, depending on the scale of the project.

Working with different external agencies helped them increase revenue from £1m to £2.5m in two years, with the website now accounting for 99 per cent of its revenue.

A business website redesign is just the first step in improving your company’s online presence. Keep in mind your initial goals and objectives and see these through beyond the launch.

Monitor analytics to assess if the improved content and design is performing better. Run follow-up user testing to ensure you’ve addressed your customer’s needs.

By continually tweaking and adjusting your new website it will grow with your company and work harder at driving leads and conversions.