How to redevelop your website successfully. 1 – Evaluate your current website

As a business in 2020, it’s pretty much impossible to run a business without a website. It’s the default point of call when a potential customer comes across your name or services and wants to know more. As an example, just think how many times ourselves, partners or children Google after seeing something of interest on the television.

It’s usually through looking at other websites, competitor websites and feedback from customers and staff that you get the thoughts that maybe your website is out of date and needs a revamp or a refresh.

But where do you start?

How do you make sure the money you are about to invest in your new website, is spent wisely? How can you make sure you get enough bangs for your buck.

Well, we’re here to help. To give you the starting points to think about and implement so you can make sure your new website looks, acts and delivers the results your business needs to grow.

The Journey of re-developing your website

Before you go on a journey, you firstly need to know where you are starting from.

We do this by analysing your current website. We need to know the good, the bad and the ugly, so we know what works and what we need to keep on the site. We need to know what doesn’t work and what we need to do to make it work and we need to know what is old, out of date and needs to be dropped.

There are several ways of finding out this important information and 4 such methods are listed below.

Google Analytics

Firstly take a look at Google Analytics. If you are not sure if you have it, then ask your current hosting company if it is on your website. If it’s not then, get it put on. It will provide invaluable information on your current website and how it is performing.

If you are struggling to install it, then drop me an email and I’ll give you a hand, as a favour.

If it is installed, then you will need full access to get the most from it.

Once you are logged in to Google Analytics, you will need to look at the data over the past month as a general rule. If your product or service has a longer sales process, then you may need to take a longer view, but make sure you compare like for like over the same period of time.

Google Analytics with give you a plethora of data, and it is possible to dig deep and find all sorts of unknown trends and behavioural patterns, but for our purpose here we will keep it simple and look at a few simple pieces of data you can find.

Within Google Analytics you can find which are the most popular pages, the least popular and the average length of time people spend on them. By finding this out you can see what visitors to your site are interested in, and which they are not. If you have pages which are popular but visitors don’t spend long on them, then take a look at the information on them. Is it old, scarce or out of date? Is it an important page and it needs revamping, or is it no longer relevant to your website and business.

Take a look at which pages visitors come in on. Are there links from other websites to them. If so these are probably valuable and you need to keep those links, as this will help you rank in Google. If you no longer need the page they link to, then you can use 301 redirects to transfer visitors to the new page on your new website.

Yourself

If you are thinking about redeveloping your website, then you will have reasons. Think these through more to find out exactly why you think this.

Looking at your website and saying it is out of date could be down to many reasons. Is it the content that just needs updating? Does the look of it seem it was made in the last decade or do the photograph no longer reflect who works there, where you work or the products you sell?

Does it no longer reflect where you want to go? When your website was last built you had a vision for the company and therefore your website. Has that vision now been achieved? Or has it changed and the website now no longer represents where the business is or going.

Existing Customers

Ask existing customers what they think of your website.

Depending on what you do, many customers may not visit your website, especially if they are already customers. They may have no need. So use this to get a fresh, outside look on your website. They know you and your business and what its values are and what you represent. They can take a look at your site and let you know where the disparities are between the two.

You could ask customers, face to face, use your sales team, or send out a questionnaire. If it’s a questionnaire think about adding a prize to encourage participation.

Staff

Your staff are on the front line and often receive feedback from customers and potential customers. Ask them what they have learnt and heard from customers. Collect that data together and compare to your thoughts and what you have learnt from customers. Where are the common threads that come up again and again?

Ask for their feedback. Ask them to ask customers when they see them. Ask them what they have heard.

HotJar

Hotjar is a piece of software that can track the activity on your website. It’s free to use up to a limit, but this should be more than enough to gain an insight into your visitors and how they use your website.

You can sign up on their website and install the code on your website. Then you can start to gather data on visitors through heatmaps, visitor recordings, conversion funnels and form analysis.

Heatmaps will let you know how people use your website. What buttons they click, what are the popular areas of the page and how far they scroll? Visitor recordings, allow you to see how anonymous individuals navigate around your website. where they spend time and what they scroll past. Conversion funnels give you an idea of how visitors navigate through your site to then make an enquiry or download. Form analyisis gives you insight into how well your forms are working. Are people getting stuck on a particular question or are they not completing forms for another reason.

All this data gives you more insight into what to tweak, drop and improve.

Reports

Once you have collected all the data from various sources, you need to analyse the results and decide on what needs changing, improving, dropping and adding.

If you are thinking of employing a web development company or other professionals to help you, then this data will be gold dust for them. It gives them a running start on what is important to you, and your customers and can be invaluable when making difficult decisions on how the new website should look, perform and deliver.

If you need help redeveloping your website, then please feel free to give us a call or drop an email We can help you collect this data together and analyse it so your new version of the website delivers the wants and needs of your business today and the future.