A website redesign strategy is a structured plan for improving your site's design, content, performance, and user experience to meet specific business goals. It covers everything from stakeholder alignment and competitor research through to design, development, testing, and post-launch optimisation.
A strong website redesign now focuses on business goals and conversion, not just visual appeal. Smart marketers know the real goal is moving users through the buyer journey and driving measurable outcomes.
Good web design:
- Promotes usability
- Concentrates on conversion-centric design features
- Adheres to web design aesthetics
- Delights customers
Research from ScienceDirect found that most people conduct extensive product research online as part of their decision-making process. This trend continues to rise as younger, digitally savvy buyers increasingly make purchasing decisions on behalf of organisations. Source: ScienceDirect
It's now more important than ever to ensure your website redesign project meets their needs and moves them seamlessly through the buyer journey.
How Do You Start a Website Redesign?
Start a website redesign by locking in stakeholder buy-in, defining your end users, benchmarking current performance, and running a competitor analysis. These four steps form the strategic foundation before any design or development work begins.
Here are 4 key steps to keep in mind when you start considering how to revamp your existing corporate or enterprise website.
1. Get Stakeholder Buy-In
The first step is to ensure you get buy-in from relevant stakeholders so you can move forward with the project, as well as see it through to launch.
Identifying core stakeholders and engaging them, especially if you need to put together a business case to get this project approved, is critical for success. Face-to-face meetings with stakeholders are effective at getting them interested and thinking about contributing to the website project.
Different stakeholders have different priorities, depending on their own goals:
- IT departments are concerned with technical objectives and becoming closer to business processes.
- Leadership departments are concerned with the bottom line.
- Sales departments are concerned with generating new leads and sales.
- Customer service departments are concerned with providing quality service to customers.
Using the above list as a starting example, work out your core messages to each stakeholder. Targeting your efforts will help with your stakeholder management plan and result in multiple engaged stakeholders to help you deliver a new website everyone is on-board with.
2. Understand Your End Users
This is a good time to gather up-to-date information about your end users and redefine your buyer personas as part of your redesign objectives. For each type of end user, you want to understand:
- What motivates them?
- What is their purpose for visiting your website?
- What are their pain points?
- How will your product or solution solve these pain points?
- What are the barriers to purchase?
3. Benchmark
You should have a record of current website metrics in a spreadsheet. Use Google Analytics, Google Search Console and any other analytics tools you have to serve as a baseline for later decisions, and to determine how effective your website redesign is.
For example:
- Traffic metrics: Record total site visits, unique visitors, and the sources of traffic (e.g., organic, paid, referral, or direct). This helps you identify areas where traffic patterns can be improved or optimised.
- Engagement metrics: Note metrics such as bounce rate, average session duration, and pages per session. These will help you understand how engaging your current website is for users.
- Conversion metrics: Track key conversion points such as form submissions, newsletter signups, or purchases. For e-commerce sites, include cart abandonment rates and sales figures.
- SEO performance: Benchmark metrics like keyword rankings, organic search traffic, and click-through rates (CTR) from the search engine results pages (SERPs).
4. Competitor Analysis
Who are your key competitors? Select a handful and go through their websites to see what you can use as inspiration for your own website. What are they doing well? Is it easy to recognise the CTA for each page? Is it easy for you, as the visitor, to find information or complete a purchase?
You don't have to limit yourself to direct competitors. If you're a technology provider, you can turn to other technology providers. For example, Krost, a B2B furniture retailer, looked beyond similar retailers and took inspiration from fashion e-commerce websites featuring strong, visual imagery.
Use this competitor analysis to make your website more intuitive for visitors and ultimately prompt them to perform the action you want on each page.
What Are the Steps in a Website Redesign Process?
A website redesign follows seven core steps: define goals, review and plan, design, develop, test and optimise, launch, then analyse and improve. Each step builds on the last, and skipping any one of them is where most redesigns run into trouble.
There are several steps you can expect to encounter during the website redesign process. They are:
Start by documenting the reason why you are redesigning your website. Here are questions you should answer:
- What are the main applications for the website? For learning purposes, marketing purposes, members to access their accounts and so on.
- What are the long term objectives for this project?
- What are the short term objectives for this project?
- What are your specific business and/or marketing goals?
Tip: Set SMART goals for your redesign
As with any objectives, creating SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely) goals enables you to easily measure how effective your new website is.
- Specific: Name exactly what you want to improve (e.g. increase trial signups).
- Measurable: Tie it to a number (e.g. by 30%).
- Attainable: Confirm it's realistic for your team and budget.
- Relevant: Align it to a genuine business priority.
- Timely: Set a deadline (e.g. within 6 months of launch).
For example, a short term goal might be to ensure the new website is mobile responsive and can be easily viewed on mobile and tablet upon launch or to make it easier for website visitors to find relevant information by providing dynamic content personalisation when the website launches. Whereas a long term goal might be to increase product trial signups by 30% within 6 months of launching and refining the new website.
Now you need to define the plan, scope and limitations of the redesign.
Here are the key actions to undertake during this stage:
- Determine budget and timeline.
- If you haven't already, meet with end users across different audience types to understand what they want to see from the redesign.
- Identify what aspects of the current website you like and do not like, including navigational structure, design, videos, images, and specific sections.
- Review existing webpages you want to keep, delete or update. This is a great time to perform a full SEO content audit to determine what pages are ranking for specific keywords and opportunities to rank for other target keywords.
- Identify what's missing and incorporate it in the new design, including mobile responsiveness, social share buttons, videos, and integration to existing business systems.
- Consider whether the domain name needs to be changed.
- Check your current website's trustworthiness and authority to use as a benchmark once the redesign is implemented.
- List out all requirements (split between must-have vs. nice-to-have depending on budget) e.g. document management, event management, and form automation and workflow features. Then prioritise.
- Use this information to form the basis of your request for proposal (RFP).
During the visual design stage, the look and styling of the interface, as well as its particular feel, is determined.
Think about:
- How do you want your brand to come across to your customers? Part of this includes defining your value proposition. It should convey what you do and reinforce why you are clearly the best choice for your target audience.
- Making it "mobile first". How many versions need to be designed for different screens and interface components?
- What do you want users to do on a page and what their next steps should be. Be strategic about placement of buttons and CTAs.
- Using contrasting colours for CTAs. If you don't want to stray too far from your branding guidelines, you could use a much lighter version of the same colour.
- The sidebars, footers and navigation menus.
- Simple layouts and whitespace to make it easier on the eyes.
- Limiting clickable buttons and unnecessary images.
- Choosing colours that are reflective of your brand.
- Using real customers and examples of work you have done where possible.
- The number of iterations (or visual design versions) needed to validate the design.
For organisations in the government, healthcare, or education sectors, accessibility is a legal and ethical requirement. Design to WCAG 2.1 AA standards from the start to ensure your site is usable for all visitors, and to meet obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992.
Tip: Full-bleed background images on mobile
- The same image renders differently on different devices.
- If you choose a full-bleed background image, it will be cropped differently on mobile vs. desktop, because desktop devices are generally viewed in landscape and mobile in portrait.
- If most of your visitors access your website through desktop, choose a landscape-oriented image, or one that can be cropped in a variety of ways.
- Your vendor's designers should pick up on this and advise you.
Further Reading: Website Design Examples | Website Design Trends | How to Use Dynamic Content Personalisation to Increase Engagement
This is the stage where all your planning comes together.
During this stage, the vendor will take your requirements, apply the designs as discussed and, if applicable, incorporate custom development such as integration to your existing business systems, on top of their CMS website development services to deliver your project in a high quality and timely manner.
Having a good site map to start with will make this stage so much easier. If in doubt about what to do, refer to your plan.
When starting a new project, developers will begin on a development server or in some other closed environment. Once the development of the website enters a state ready to be shared with you, all work will be transferred to the staging environment. This is a private version of your live production site (your public website) that is used to make sure everything is functioning correctly before your audience sees it.
- Review the overall flow and usability in this staging environment.
- Check that your vendor has staged with noindex, nofollow, disallow pages in the robots.txt file. You don't want these pages to be crawled and to appear in Google Search results.
Once your build is ready, move to the next stage. Ensure you choose a CMS that improves SEO rather than hinders it.
Testing, testing and more testing, as well as optimising the website for better SEO results.
UAT ensures your requirements for the website have been met by the vendor, and all elements are working as agreed upon and intended, e.g. fast website loading speed, proper rendering of images, and so on. The website is tested in the "real world" as though the vendor, yourself and your team are acting as the intended audience. During this phase you want to explore every inch of the website, and test everything.
SEO protection matters as much as functionality testing. Pay particular attention to:
- Core Web Vitals: Google uses Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) as ranking signals. Test these in Google PageSpeed Insights before launch.
- 301 redirects: Map every old URL to its new equivalent. Without correct redirects, you can lose organic traffic and ranking equity overnight.
- Meta tags: Confirm all page titles, meta descriptions, and heading tags are unique, keyword-relevant, and correctly transferred.
- Mobile usability: Test across real devices and screen sizes, not just emulators.
Tip: Your vendor's UAT checklist
- Ask your vendor for their detailed UAT checklist before the project starts.
- A good vendor uses the same checklist for every website redesign, covering performance, SEO, redirects, and device testing.
- If they don't have one, that's a signal worth noting.
Go live with the new website and monitor performance straight away.
Go to Google Analytics and add an annotation. This will help you keep track of traffic and conversion changes after your new website goes live.
- Submit your new XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
- Fill out a change of address in Google Search Console if your domain is changing.
- Notify relevant audiences via email, social media, and other channels that the new website is live.
- Verify that all tracking tools, forms, and interactive elements are working as expected.
Related reading: A guide to Google Analytics 4 reports.
Analysing your website's improvement in metrics after the redesign is implemented is key to ensuring you meet the needs of your end users and your SMART goals.
Some key actions after launching include:
- Rechecking for proper robots.txt set up.
- Is your content crawlable? If not, were noindex, nofollow and robots.txt disallow directives removed? Check the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console.
- Resubmit sitemap via Google Search Console if needed.
- Are Google Search Console and Google Analytics installed correctly?
- Are your webpages redirecting correctly? Are your 301 redirects working?
- Are meta tags (titles, meta descriptions, headings etc.) correct and unique?
It's a good idea to regularly check your website analytics to ensure you've maintained your ranking on the search engines, and you're moving closer to achieving your goals. For example, you might notice only a small percentage of visitors are clicking on the "start a trial" button on the homepage. Take the opportunity to experiment: change the button colour, move it to a different location, or change the text or image that accompanies it.
What Does a Good Website Redesign Look Like in Practice?
A good website redesign delivers measurable improvements across traffic, conversions, and user satisfaction within the first 6 months after launch.
When Dubbo Regional Council worked with Elcom to consolidate their digital presence, the goal was clearer community access and a single, manageable platform. The outcome was a unified website that reduced maintenance overhead and gave staff the tools to update content without relying on IT for every change.
That kind of result starts in the planning stage, not the design stage. Getting stakeholder buy-in early, understanding your end users deeply, and giving your vendor a clear brief are the factors that determine whether a redesign succeeds or falls short.
Website Redesign vs. Website Refresh: What Is the Difference?
A website redesign is a structural overhaul of your site's design, content, and technology. A website refresh is a lighter update, usually limited to visual changes like colours, fonts, or imagery, without changing the underlying structure or CMS.
| Factor |
Website Redesign |
Website Refresh |
| Scope |
Full overhaul: structure, content, tech stack |
Visual updates only |
| Timeline |
3 to 9 months typically |
2 to 6 weeks typically |
| Budget |
Higher investment |
Lower cost |
| Best for |
Outdated platform, new business goals, declining traffic |
Brand refresh, minor UX tweaks |
| SEO impact |
Significant, requires careful migration planning |
Minimal, low risk |
| CMS changes |
Often includes CMS migration or upgrade |
Rarely involves CMS changes |
Now that you know what's involved in the website redesign process, get a copy of the website redesign playbook for deeper insights into effectively planning and launching your website. It also comes with a comprehensive checklist to help you get started on your own successful website.
Ready to start a conversation about your next website project? Talk to the Elcom team and see how our Australian-built CMS website design and development platform can support your goals from planning through to launch.