We get it, your website has been around a while. It served its purpose when you first commissioned it with your web developer, but now your business has grown and evolved. Perhaps you’ve changed your service offering, perhaps you work a little differently to how you did a few years ago or perhaps you’ve had a full rebrand – new logo, colours, fonts – and your old website just doesn’t represent your business anymore.
Making the decision to redesign your website is not always an easy one and it’s a decision that requires careful consideration, especially if it’s attracting plenty of traffic each month from repeat visitors. Your customers are used to seeing the familiar layout and design, so a sudden change can be a learning curve and may have knock-on affects for customer service.
The good news is, if you’re in the position of needing a new website, you can use some of the data in your Google Analytics reports to analyse how your site is being used. This data will not only provide useful information when creating your design brief, it will also be invaluable for benchmarking when your new site goes live.
New vs. returning visitors
In GA4, we have our Retention report which aims to highlight the ratio of new versus returning visitors to our site. A high number of returning visitors suggests a complete redesign will have a bigger impact on their user experience so it’s important to factor this in when redesigning the site. To minimise the impact, consider helping out your visitors by including an announcement about the redesign on your homepage with a link to view an article that describes the changes being made and where they can find the same information in the new design. It’s also an opportunity to gather feedback from users who visit regularly to find out how they like the changes and any issues they have with the new design.
Most viewed pages
Planning the content for your new site is an opportunity to revamp existing copy, add new pages and remove some out of date content. Checking in to your Google Analytics data (specifically your Pages and Screens report), will show you which pages are viewed the most on your website. Make sure you set the date range to 12 months to get a better idea of trends over time. The pages that are viewed the most are likely to be the ones you want to prioritise, revamp and make more prominent in the navigation. If there are popular pages that you really don’t want to keep on your new site, make sure you redirect these pages to an appropriate page on your new site.
Site Search
If you’re tracking site search on your website (and you should be!), creating a report for search terms used on the site will give you insights into the information people are looking for and perhaps struggle to find using just the navigation. Again, make sure you look at data over a long period of time as this can be affected by seasonality depending on your industry.
Engagement rate benchmarking
A new website should always be an improvement on what came before it, so tracking some basic metrics like Engagement Rate and Conversion Rate will enable you to create benchmarks from your old site which you can use to evaluate the success of your new site. A drop in engagement rate could suggest you need to review the customer journey; are you providing all the information a customer may need before purchasing or getting in touch? Have you included strong calls-to-action (CTAs)? What has changed from the user’s perspective that could negatively impact their experience?
Next steps
If you’re contemplating redesigning a website or putting together a brief for your web developer as you’re reading this, then we highly encourage you to run an audit of your current Analytics data. Your audit should focus on where your current website excels (things to keep) and where it lacks engagement (things to improve). It’s easy to get excited about a new design, but this shouldn’t be at the expense of usability, so make sure you’re monitoring how people interact with your old site to compare with your new site.
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