In our experience, we’ve noticed that a majority of the time, business owners and executives are reluctant to redesign their website. After all, the website may be making the company good money, why fix what isn’t broken? While we won’t be going into the reasons why your website needs an overhaul, we can at least help put your mind at ease by outlining the process and steps to an ecommerce website redesign.
Before we dive into the ecommerce website redesign process and steps, we should explain that every website is unique. As such, each website redesign will have different steps, order of events, and processes.
Important Steps of eCommerce Website Redesign & Its Process:
Evaluating the status quo
How are things working currently? What is working well? What isn’t? Are there areas of the website that need to be improved more than others? What change would we like to see if we performed a redesign? Asking and answering these questions first will help you determine the answers and course of action for the next steps.
Ecommerce and CMS solution
You may be using an older version of some software. You may also be using a solution that is outdated as a whole. It may be worth it to evaluate new solutions. For instance, you may have set up your website with WordPress and WooCommerce when you had only a few products. Now that you have 100 times more visitors and thousands of new products, you may want to look into a new, robust solution like Magento.
Host
Now that you’ve determined your software and space requirements, you might want to find out if your host has the capability of handling a new influx of traffic. Moving to a new host or leveraging content delivery networks like Amazon Web Services (AWS) might change the way your website is currently configured.
Design
Are you surprised that discussing the design is step four? After all, this is a post about ecommerce website redesign processes and steps, right? Your design will highly depend on new business goals and objectives, analytics and tracking needs, and your ecommerce solution. A designer will create wireframes and mockups that utilize both new and existing content from the website. Sometimes, several drafts are necessary until our clients are happy with the final design results. These design drafts include the home page, product pages, search pages, and internal static pages (as well as many others depending on the business).
Development
Our developers will ensure that the latest best practices are used. For instance, CSS has changed considerably over the past 3-5 years. If you haven’t updated your website since then, you could benefit from doing so. This can increase the site speed, usability, and cross-browser compatibility. Additionally, there are several back-end/front-end features that are newly available, such as logging in or creating accounts with your email or social media account.
Data transfer
you will want to make sure that your data is transferred from your previous site. There is precious customer data that you will not want to lose. Often times, redesigning an ecommerce site means updating the database and making some changes. Taking the time to transform your old data so that it works with the new site will ensure no valuable historical data and customer information is lost.
Testing
Last, but not least, we have testing. We cannot stress enough the importance of testing. For starters, you may incorrectly place blame on the design of a new website if goals or orders decrease. In many cases, a lack of testing is the cause. Sometimes, a simple payment source error could cause hundreds or thousands of orders to disappear. You would want to make sure that all forms of payment work and are setup correctly.
Hopefully, you will feel more at ease about the process of redesigning your ecommerce website. It certainly isn’t simple, but you can avoid a lot of pitfalls that we see in the industry. We learn from the mistakes of our competitors and provide seamless transitions to your new website.
We’d like to talk with you. If you’re in the website redesign process, talk with an Informatics eCommerce expert.