Last edited on July 18, 2021 by Digitiz
Changing the technical or visual aspects of a website is far from an easy task. There are so many mistakes to avoid that carrying out the process remains as complex for an expert as a novice. In order not to lose performance, it is essential to start from a starting point and focus operations around a specific objective. The next step is to combine design and SEO by seeking the knowledge of an expert. Overview of best practices for carrying out an e-commerce store redesign.
1. Consider the characteristics of the site to modify
Changing each aspect of a site should be done upstream, otherwise no positive results can be guaranteed. This is not a web marketing agency that will tell you otherwise. In fact, Internet users are used to the interface offered. Avoiding taking into account the practicality of the latter will inevitably lead to a loss of visits.
The trick is to take the positives from the old version of your platform and integrate them into the new one. These details can be the presentation of the menu or the color of the design. Also fixing which elements are harmful to navigation is a good idea. In a few words, the must is to keep the strong points and strengthen the shortcomings.
In practice, the operation to be carried out consists of drawing up a performance diagram for your e-commerce store. It will allow you to see what visitors appreciate most about the interface, what they actually do on the platform as well as the pages they visit during navigation.
2. Make changes based on objectives
Many sales managers tackle the redesign of their site without necessarily having an idea of what they really want to have. In the context of an e-commerce site, each task is carried out following a logic of profitability and marketing. Before calling on a SEO agency or a web consultant, it is better to have a global point of view on your own expectations. From a sales perspective, the goal may be to improve turnover. Changes will then be made to the security of payment and presentation of products. For the blog part of an e-commerce platform, the objective will be the acquisition of visitors, hence the importance of optimizing content as well as navigation.
From a global point of view, the trick is to quantify your results as well as your needs and to establish the nature of your “personas”. In addition, knowing your competitors and maintaining good knowledge of your sector of activity are also important.
3. Redesign of e-commerce store: Think “SEO/referencing”
Preserving the same traffic during and after a redesign remains the biggest challenge in the process. The best situation would be to have all the necessary information on the effectiveness of your website. In practice, the technical and overall audit can be carried out by a professional SEO expert or by another web specialist. Depending on the result, it will be easier to know the optimizations to make, the pages to highlight, the link redirections to carry out, etc.
The referencing of an e-commerce site goes hand in hand with the presentation (design) to offer a new user experience that is just as effective. The most important thing remains the preservation of its visitors without having to ignore modernity or the use of other practical functionalities. At the same time, we must recognize that this is an objective that requires great expertise. In any case, you should not deprive yourself of getting a little help from an SEO consulting expert to deal with any other complications.
4. Focus on good settings and consider technical aspects
The changes that take place during the redesign do not only concern the visible aspects of the site. The operation often involves upgrading to a recent version of your e-commerce CMS. The integration of other modern and practical features is also included.
In addition, other technical aspects to take into account concern the optimization of content, the establishment of a favorable tree structure for search engines, the good management of internal links, the improvement of the loading speed of each page, etc.
5. Plan for post-redesign
The modifications made to the platform will cause results that should be verified after the redesign. In practice, the first weeks will be mainly devoted to monitoring technical errors and resolving them. The real positives of the redesign will be visible in the coming months. In the context of an e-commerce store, these assets will be the acquisition of a better conversion rate, obtaining more visits, etc. These elements will mark the success of the procedure, in other words, the safeguarding of traffic and the overall performance of its website.
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