Website development is not a one-time thing. You do need to maintain it regularly and sometimes you may have to redesign it as well.
When is the right time to redesign your website?
Well, there could be many signals from your website that would indicate a complete website revamp. Below are some of those signals:
- When your website design is outdated.
- When your website loads too slow.
- When you don’t get any conversions from your website, even if you have consistent traffic on it.
- When you experience functional errors on your website.
- When your website gets infected with malware or viruses multiple times.
Website redesigning could be a great opportunity for your business because it may help you to grow your sales but it has to be done strategically.
Are you too looking to redesign your existing WordPress website? If yes, this blog post may help you.
In this blog post, I have shared 9 quick checklists that you must go through before launching your redesigned WordPress website.
#1 Browser compatibility
Before you launch your revamped WordPress website, you must make sure to test it on different browsers.
If not all, at least you must check your website on all the major browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer etc.
Your WordPress theme may be browser compatible, but after making several changes and customizations on your website, its compatibility may get affected.
#2 Loading speed
No matter how attractive is your new website, if it doesn’t load within 3-4 seconds, you may lose a lot of customers and sales.
Therefore, before your website developer makes your website live, do ask him to check your site for its loading speed.
You could use a free tool like https://tools.pingdom.com to check your website’s loading speed.
Your WordPress developer can fix the loading speed of your website by:
- Installing a cache plugin like “WP Total Cache”.
- Minifying CSS & JS.
- Fixing or replacing the faulty plugin, if it’s causing your website to load slower.
#3 Forms testing
A form is an important part of any business website. It could be a contact form, inquiry form, appointment form, signup form, or checkout form. Whichever the case, you must ensure to test all the forms for their validation, functions, and submissions.
If you find that any of the forms on your website is not functioning properly, you must ask your web developer to fix it immediately.
#4 On-page SEO
If your WordPress website is already ranking on search engines, it may be a bit trickier to redesign your website. Perhaps, you may need to follow some strategies and if you don’t, you may lose your hard-earned rankings.
Below are some of the important SEO checklists that you must go through before launching your redesigned website:
- Migration of meta tags to their respective pages.
- Maintaining the consistency in URLs.
- Taking care of the sitemap.
- Ensuring that the contents are linked from appropriate menus or keywords.
- Ensuring that the webpages are interlinked as on your previous website.
When you need to redesign your website that’s already ranking on search engines, you must choose an experienced website designer who understands the complications of on-page SEO.
#5 Tracking scripts migration
Now, this is one of the blunders that many website developers do while redesigning a website. They don’t migrate the tracking scripts from the existing website to the new one.
Below are some of the commonly used tracking scripts:
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Pixel
- Conversion script from Google
- Conversion script from Facebook
If your new website doesn’t have the tracking scripts, you may not be able to measure the performance of your website.
#6 Page header statuses
Does your new website have all the page header statuses in place?
Are you using a custom 404 page for all the links that may not work for the users?
If there is any change in the URL of a webpage or set of pages, do make sure to redirect the old links/URLs with 301 header status to their respective new link.
#7 Image optimization
High-resolution images may cause your website to load slow. Therefore, before you launch your redesigned website, you may like to check with your website designer or developer to sure that he has optimized all the images on your website.
To optimize the images on your WordPress website, your developer may use any of the effective plugins like EWWW Image Optimizer.
Other than the image optimization, you should also check the quality of all the images that have been used on your website. A professional website would never have blurry or distorted images.
#8 Content check
Has the content been fully migrated from your previous website to the new one? If not, it may affect your website’s SEO. As a result, you may get less traffic to your new website.
What’s the solution here?
You need to check every page on both the websites and ensure that all the contents have been migrated properly.
#9 Data migration
Does your existing website have data like customers’ information or form submission details? If yes, you may like to check and ensure that all of those data have been migrated successfully to the new website.
Fortunately, for WordPress websites, there are several plugins available that you can use to migrate all the data from your existing website to the new one.