Are you noticing a consistent decline in your sales even after pouring money into traffic-driving tactics? If you find that no matter how much you invest in ads and influencers, you can’t fix the downward trend in conversions, we’ve got some news for you. It’s not you: it’s your outdated website.
Over the past few years, Adobe has introduced several changes to Magento to help merchants deliver innovative shopping experiences.
From the Magento PWA Studio release a couple of years ago to the recent introduction of the Magento Page Builder to the open-source community, they’re empowering Magento users with the tools necessary to build an attractive ecommerce store.
In this article, we’ve compiled a list of Magento website redesign tips to help you breathe new life into your website conversions and get the best returns on your marketing investments.
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Magento Website Redesign Tips
Your website is a 24/7 sales rep for your business. If it’s cluttered and old-fashioned, your customers are less likely to make a purchase.
Here are ten Magento store redesign tips to help you design an attractive website that converts.
1. Understand your audience
When you’re approaching a website redesign, there’s one thing you should remember: it’s not about you, it’s about your customers. Your company’s website design should target your ideal customer and make it easier for them to buy from your business.
You can use buyer personas to direct your decisions as you redesign your website. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customer, created using information from your store database and online research. They help you define customer demographics likely to convert quickly.
You can also use your customer database to look for recurring patterns of high-conversion lead channels. A conversation with your sales and marketing teams will help you identify any generalizations in your ideal demographic. Additionally, you can interview high-value customers for more insights.
Once you’ve created a few different buyer personas, you’ll have a clear understanding of what appeals to your ideal customer and how to redesign your website to suit their needs.
2. Have a goal
Investing in a website redesign without a predefined goal can be disastrous. You’re almost guaranteed to fail if you don’t know what you want to achieve from the project. Goals like more personalization aren’t specific. Instead, set measurable goals that you can quantify after the redesign.
Focus on important metrics like bounce rate, cart abandonment, and conversions. Targeting quantifiable metrics will make it easier for you to build a roadmap for your website redesign and measure success after its completion.
Goal setting can help you outline priorities and identify areas for improvement in your existing design. It can help you direct your redesign project more effectively to achieve your desired outcomes.
3. Outline a budget
A website redesign can quickly turn into a complete overhaul of your store. Outlining a budget at the outset of your redesign will allow you to set realistic goals and tailor your expectations. A budget helps you separate what you can afford and what you can’t and prioritize new implementations.
A Magento store redesign budget can range anywhere from a couple of thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although the latter will generally include a complete rebranding service, it’s an indication of how elaborate website redesign projects can be.
Besides a monetary budget, you should also plan a timeline for the project. Once you’re in the deep end of a redesign, you can find yourself losing track of time as you discover new possibilities and begin reconsidering the scope of the project.
A deadline will help you orient yourself and launch your new website on time.
4. Analyze what’s working (and what isn’t)
If you’re considering a website redesign, you’ve probably already identified several shortcomings in your existing design and functionality that warrant concern. Maybe it’s an unintuitive UI or a high-friction UX that’s hurting your conversions.
Identifying what’s working on your website and what isn’t will help you direct your Magento website design project effectively. You can use an analytics tool like Crazy Egg to analyze customer behavior using heat maps and website recordings.
You can correlate those findings with website traffic patterns from Google Analytics and reports from your Magento store to identify problem areas. Understanding your customers’ journey through your website and identifying friction points is the first step towards achieving a user-friendly design.
5. Rethink your website functionality
A website redesign isn’t just a cosmetic overhaul of your existing look and feel. It’s also an excellent occasion to revisit your current website functionality.
Innovative ecommerce businesses are constantly hunting for ways to reduce friction and improve their online shopping experience. You can conduct competitor analysis to identify the functionality missing on your website and add it to your redesign.
Maybe the sizing estimator you’ve integrated is hurting your website performance, or perhaps, your customers might benefit from a product customization feature. Your website redesign is the perfect time to alter its functionality and improve the customer experience.
6. Prioritize accessibility
When you sell online, you should ensure your website and products are accessible for everyone, irrespective of their ability or situation. Accessible website design provides more avenues for customers to interact with your business and allows you to reach more demographics.
Although accessibility isn’t a ranking factor on search engines, including alt text for images and implementing markup correctly can improve your website’s SEO-friendliness. Moreover, it helps future-proof your website SEO.
Google’s open-source Lighthouse tool measures accessibility among other metrics such as performance and SEO. And if Google’s incorporating it in their testing tool, a future where accessibility becomes a ranking factor isn’t far off.
But accessibility isn’t only about better SEO or conversions. It’s about making the internet accessible for everyone. Therefore, ensure you prioritize accessibility in your website redesign from the start.
7. Weigh your options
Adobe introduced the PWA studio over two years ago, laying the foundations for a future where headless commerce is the norm for Magento users. If you’re considering a website redesign in 2021, you can look beyond the traditional mobile-friendly design approach and consider a headless solution instead.
Progress Web Applications give you the benefits of a mobile-friendly design and allow you to leverage features exclusive to native apps such as offline operations and push notifications. Alternatively, you can also consider building an entirely custom frontend and integrate it with Magento for its powerful ecommerce functionality.
More recently, solutions like Hyvä are making it easier to leverage the benefits of headless commerce while reducing complexity and increasing performance. Carefully analyze and weigh all options so that you can make an informed decision and invest in a future-proof redesign.
8. Invest in quality content
A survey by Content Marketing Institute found that 70% of consumers prefer learning about products through content over traditional modes of advertising. And by those metrics, investing in quality content is more likely to result in a better long-term ROI than paid ads.
When you’re approaching a website redesign, it’s easy to get lost in color palettes, mockups, and wireframes. But even the most professionally designed web page won’t perform in the absence of compelling copy.
Therefore, you should consider adopting a content-first design approach to provide web designers with context and allow them to adapt your website design to its content. Moreover, incorporating SEO-friendly content into your design strategy will help you rank your website on search engines and drive traffic organically.
9. Stay true to your brand
A website redesign should help you recreate your website’s appearance while staying true to its brand identity. At no point in the redesign process should the project turn into a rebranding effort unless you want it to.
Although you might feel tempted to invest in a complete store makeover, staying true to your core values will help you ensure new changes aren’t too drastic. An improvement in the aesthetic and appearance of your website will pleasantly surprise most of your existing customers, but a complete rebrand can leave them confused.
It’s easy to lose objectivity chasing the latest trends and technologies. Your priority should be creating design and functionality that resonates with your audience and helps them connect with your brand. Therefore, ensure the look and feel of your new website aligns with your customer expectations.
10. Always be testing
A data-driven approach to branding and design is one of the best ways to ensure success. Split testing your website design changes can help you determine its efficacy and rethink what doesn’t appeal to your customers.
You can A/B test every aspect of your website design, including layout, copy, and media, to improve the end-user experience. Simple variations such as changing the color or font size of a call to action can affect your conversions tremendously.
Moreover, you can continue split testing changes even after your website redesign is complete. As consumer preferences change and trends evolve, A/B testing will help you ensure your website design remains relevant to your audience.
Make the most of your Magento store redesign
One of the most important things to remember when starting a redesign project is that your website is merely a medium to present products and content to your customers.
Everyone loves an attractive website. However, the success of your ecommerce store relies on factors beyond appearance alone. Ensure your Magento website redesign helps your customers find products and content quickly; the metrics will fall in line on their own.
