If your website has become stale or isn't performing as you want it to, it may now be time to consider a website redesign. However, before you go ahead and start changing things, there are some things you need to think about and there are ways to go about it that will help you achieve your goals without damaging what success you've already had.

First of all you need to ask yourself WHY you want to redesign your website. There is no point making changes for the sake of it and without knowing what you want to achieve. Some good reasons for a website redesign include:

To Improve Usability & Increase Conversions

If your site isn't achieving the sales or sign ups you were hoping for it could be that it's too complicated to use or your call to action isn't clear. Using Google Analytics you can see which are your most successful pages and which aren't performing as well as they could.

Look at where you want your visitors to end up and how you are currently getting them there. Make a list of what is working and what isn't and address the latter, leaving the former alone for now.

Redesigning your website to achieve what it's there for in the first place is a perfectly valid reason!

To Improve Accessibility

Many website owners don't consider making their website accessible to the disabled a high priority but the reasons for doing so are, at least, two-fold.

First of all, by making your site inaccessible for those with colour blindness, poor eyesight or even blindness you are immediately reducing your target audience by thousands - that's thousands of people who may well have bought from you if they'd been able to read your message.

Secondly, a fully compliant, accessible website is regarded better by the search engines and so will rank higher than those sites who haven't taken accessibility into account. Which brings me to the third good reason for a website redesign…

To Improve Your Search Engine Optimisation

If you're struggling to rank highly on the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Bing then refreshing your website and redesigning the badly built parts can help. They key here is to not go overboard changing all your links, but to subtly 'fix' the areas of your site that need it - changing page titles to be more relevant, updating content, that sort of thing. It's all part and parcel of a website redesign.

Once you know your reason and what you want to achieve, you need to know HOW to go about giving your website a makeover.
If you built the site yourself then you can, of course, redesign it yourself. Updating your site in this manner gives you more control but can be a lot of work. The addition of widgets and new technologies may not be something you are familiar with though.

An alternative is to use a web design company for your website redesign. There are many advantages to using a design agency to carry out your redesign. They have the experience, the technical know-how, they can advise you on your brief, help update your branding, ensure your site is fully optimised for search engines and accessibility and deliver the site to your budget.

Either way, as long as you have decided why you want to redesign your website and what you want to achieve through it, your website redesign will be a success.