Is your website showing its age? When a business website becomes out of date, isn’t generating enough search traffic, and doesn’t have the functionality to match user expectations, it may be due for a makeover.
A successful website relaunch involves rethinking the purpose of your website. What roles could your website play in helping to accomplish your business goals? How can you improve the user experience and the site’s appearance? You’ll need to answer these and other questions before developing a suitable relaunch strategy.
Discover the most important indicators that you need a redesigned website, then review the checklist for pulling off a successful website launch.
What is a website relaunch?
A relaunch is a major overhaul of an existing website’s design, content, and sometimes purpose. Ecommerce businesses undertake a site relaunch when they need to add functionality, improve the user experience (UX), update content, and make the site look better.
Online shopping hasn’t stopped growing since 1995. On average, the ecommerce share of total sales in the US has increased at an average rate of 7.47% each year since then. In the first quarter of 2024, 15.6% of all retail dollars spent came from online sales. So, you can understand why your online storefront must work smoothly, preserve domain authority and high search rankings, and remain aesthetically attractive to prospective and returning customers.
Signs you should initiate a website relaunch
A combination of red-flag signals could indicate that it’s time for a website relaunch:
Traffic has flatlined
Use a website analytics tool to gauge your website’s traffic patterns. Has traffic reached a plateau? Has it actually gone down? If your bounce rate has risen and the website’s pages-per-visit rate is down, it’s a pretty strong indicator that users aren’t motivated to visit your website. If they do visit your site, they likely aren’t finding the experience satisfactory.
User experience has declined
The user experience (UX) tells the story of how visitors engage with your website, and poor UX negatively impacts customer satisfaction and conversion rates. See whether your site’s design (both on the back and front end) is causing sluggish performance—especially when it comes to mobile responsiveness. Is the UX being tarnished because the site lacks functionality and accessibility in key areas? You can and should address these issues as you plan your relaunch.
Design is outdated
Web design trends come and go, and what appeared fresh and exciting five years ago might now look like ancient history. Analyze your existing content—do your product pages feature reviews or other forms of social proof? Do you offer personalized recommendations based on viewer preferences and search history? Is the tone of your content fresh and persuasive, and are your graphics, images, and other design elements in lockstep with your brand guidelines?
Having a sleek and well-designed website with up-to-date content isn’t just an aesthetic choice, it’s essential for creating a harmonious user experience.
SEO content is ineffective
Search engine optimization (SEO) can help users find your website when they look to search engines for answers. If your content isn’t SEO-friendly—with optimized URL structures, meta tag descriptions, and relevant keywords—your target audience isn’t going to be able to find you, and traffic and sales will likely suffer.
Real-world example of a website relaunch
Take the legacy clothing brand Belstaff as a case study. The brand recently unified its commerce strategy to pave the way for its next 100 years in business. In an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Belstaff’s chief brand officer Jodie Harrison and director of technology Navid Jilow explained the evolution of their website relaunch.
Navid notes that in 2021, Belstaff was seeing double-digit losses because their outsourcing practices were too expensive, and their debt was adding up due to inefficient business operating models. One problem was their technical infrastructure, including the infrastructure underpinning their website. The company decided to partner with Shopify, which allowed them to relaunch their website with an eye toward multichannel unification and simplification.
“The architecture was a black box to us. We didn’t really know what was behind our requests and how complicated the systems were being built. Some of the issues we had were around the website, point of sale, and our [enterprise resource planning] ERP system, which were really monolithic and complicated,” says Navid. “Basic tasks relied on key people to do because some of these systems were not intuitive for the wider business to use.”
Belstaff’s move to Shopify allowed the brand to build a cohesive and efficient website that could accommodate its adapting needs.
How to relaunch your website
- Define your goals
- Identify key metrics
- Understand your users
- Plan your relaunch strategy
- Develop the new site
- Run tests
- Announce your website relaunch
- Update and maintain your new website
A website relaunch can seem like a daunting task, but developing a clear plan and taking it one step at a time can help you create a website that showcases your brand’s offerings, vision, and unique selling proposition (USP). Here’s a checklist to help you get started on your new site:
1. Define your goals
It’s important to know at the outset what you want to achieve from your relaunch. Here are some examples of objectives you may want to target:
- Add new and up-to-date editorial content.
- Optimize page load times.
- Optimize page content and structure for better SEO.
- Revamp the website theme.
- Improve performance on mobile devices.
- Add new features like customer support forums and chatbots.
- Make the website accessible for disabled visitors.
When planning Belstaff’s relaunch, Jodie wanted to make sure the company honored the brand’s quintessential character. “I was quite keen to bring back that lens of Britishness that I think had been dissolved over the years through different ownerships. I felt like we had an opportunity to really get it back to its roots. That was the prospect that really got me excited,” Jodie says.
For Belstaff, it was all about modernizing the brand while maintaining an attachment to the products the company was known for. “For anything new that we introduced, it always had a reason for why it existed. It wasn’t just brought about for a trend’s sake,” Jodie says.
2. Identify key metrics
How will you judge your new website’s performance? Identify key metrics you want to track. These could include:
- Total sales
- Total website pages indexed
- Total pages getting traffic
- Number of site visits
- Number of unique visitors
- Bounce rate
- Best-performing keywords and landing pages
3. Understand your users
To create a successful website, you need to know your users and what their priorities are. You can study user behavior using analytics tools and create buyer personas for your customers to understand who they are and what motivates them.
Surveys, in-depth interviews, and other forms of customer feedback can also provide you with valuable insights. For example, you can conduct user testing to observe the paths website visitors take to get to a specific page and note any inefficiencies that you could remedy to better the user experience. You can also ask users what kind of editorial content they would like to read and compare their experiences on your sites with their experiences on competitors’ websites.
4. Plan the relaunch strategy
To set expectations and get everyone on your team working toward the same goals, establish a timeline that answers:
- What are all the stages of the web development process and who owns each stage?
- How much time will you need to test all of the new features?
- What is the projected launch date and promotion plan?
- Who is in charge of monitoring the success of the website relaunch?
You may also want to create a thorough marketing plan that demonstrates how you’ll promote the new website on social media platforms, email lists, and paid advertising channels going forward.
5. Develop the new site
Start with your website’s technical infrastructure and make needed changes to hosting options, and your content management system (CMS), security measures, and database optimizations. These technology improvements should have direct impacts on page and image loading times.
Next, consider themes, overall design, and navigational structure. Develop brand guidelines, and apply them across your website to ensure layouts, images, logos, colors, and fonts are consistent. Use high-resolution images but compress and optimize them for web loading times. At this stage, it also makes sense to apply responsive web design techniques that can provide users with mobile-friendly browsing experience at different screen sizes. Design a user-friendly site for accessibility and efficiency.
Look through all the pages of your website and update the written content so it’s aligned with your brand voice. Adopt a consistent writing style that’s informative and entertaining for your buyer personas. Include keywords in product descriptions and add meta descriptions and titles to improve SEO rankings. Use standard formats and update the meta and alt tags in visual content to increase accessibility and make it easier for search engines to index the content properly.
6. Run tests
Rigorous testing can help you avoid costly errors and potential embarrassment. Crawl all outbound and inbound links and make sure there aren’t any broken links. Test all forms, downloadable content, CTA buttons, and menus, and ensure the site’s search function is fast and effective. Perform compatibility testing, which verifies the site’s performance on different operating systems, web browsers, devices (including mobile), and screen sizes. You can then test for website speed performance with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, which will analyze loading times and make recommendations for improvement.
7. Announce your website relaunch
Your improved website is an opportunity to reach new customers and get existing ones excited about your new offering. Get ahead of the curve and implement an announcement strategy a few weeks in advance. You can generate buzz about the big changes to come by sharing teaser posts on your current site, social media channels, and email lists.
As the launch date approaches, offer special promotions to drive traffic back to the site so visitors can see the new website features, design, and blog articles for themselves. If you run a local business, send press releases to regional newspapers and other local news outlets. On the launch date, consider holding a website launch event—either virtually or in person—to build more excitement.
8. Update and maintain your new website
It’s a mistake to think that once your updated website is up and running, your work is complete. To keep it running smoothly and bringing in visitors, track your website traffic every day and monitor any significant fluctuations. Additionally, track user behavior with ecommerce analytics tools, analyze the key metrics you’ve prioritized, collect user feedback, and continue making fixes and adjustments as new feedback comes in. Continue refining your SEO efforts so customers can easily find your website through search engines like Google and Bing. If your ecommerce website feels like a continuous work in progress, you’re doing it right.
Website relaunch FAQ
What is a website relaunch?
A website relaunch involves updating and redesigning an existing website to improve its functionality, user experience, and appearance. This may include changing the layout, theme, textual and visual content, and technology infrastructure.
How do you market a website relaunch?
You have plenty of options for marketing a website relaunch. You can post a redesign announcement on social media, distribute a press release to media outlets, spread the news to your email subscribers, and hold a launch party.
Why should you consider relaunching your website?
You may want to consider revamping and relaunching your website if its content and structure are outdated, if it isn’t user-friendly and secure, or if it doesn’t offer all the functionalities you need. A relaunch is an opportunity to improve the user experience, boost search engine rankings, increase conversions, and solidify your brand image.
