Planning for a website design and/or migration to a different CMS?
Here’s a little food for thought:
There were a handful of times last year alone that I’ve personally seen the negative impact of a botched migration:
A lot of designers and design teams are generally not marketers, SEOs, or conversion experts – they’re experts in design – which is their specific craft.
Website design changes at the strategic level are best built around desired business outcomes and lead from a specific strategic marketing direction.
Want to keep your hard-earned right-fit traffic after migration?
High-level, here’s what you want to keep in mind to save yourself some trouble in the near future:
There are way too many custom-built back-ends that rather should have been built on a platform like WebFlow or WordPress.
This massively reduces the headaches for marketing teams when later making modifications, without the continual need for development or engineering involvement.
Before considering a custom-built solution, question if you *truly* need that level of customization.
The vast majority of SaaS businesses don’t – and it would save a lot of time, money, and frustration building on an existing proven CMS like WebFlow or WordPress.
My suggestion?
Do some research on WebFlow before diving into custom-built solutions – it more than likely can serve everything you’d need if you think you need deep customization, and will allow for easy marketing-based modifications in the future.
The reason pre-built CMS solutions like WebFlow are so powerful is that they already have for the most part:
Basically – the vast majority of important Technical SEO items are already handled for you out of the box.
Related Content: Technical SEO for SaaS
Why would you want to custom-code all of that when you can have a well-oiled machine that runs and drives all of your marketing wishes and desires?
You need to have a solid planning framework for bringing improvements to the new design, rather than just coating the walls with some fresh paint.
This is the perfect opportunity to find weaknesses in the old design – and make massive improvements with the new one – that comes from auditing and finding those weaknesses, and making a checklist of improvements and needs in the new design:
Here are some examples of what you might find on your existing website:
A great exercise to conduct before the re-design is actually running a Growth Audit on the current website to uncover those improvements, and bring them to the table to provide direction for the re-design agency – rather than just saying “go for it, we trust you.”
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You’re planning to spend budget on a re-design, so it’s not only about building-out new pages – but getting down to the granular level of page structure for conversions.
Examples include:
It’s not enough just to throw up a page template and hope for the best.
Related Content: SaaS Page Structure & Content Strategy
There needs to be a structure based on previous data points which can build a proven high-converting page, which can then later be A/B tested further for squeezing even more juice from the page.
There’s no reason to jump in blind – a bit of homework goes a long way.
The best advice for a re-design is to have your team heavily involved and know exactly what you want to get out of the new design.
If that experience doesn’t come from in-house, and the design agency lacks (this should be clear by asking the right questions during initial conversations), bring in a third party that can steer you clear of mistakes and headaches down the road.
The redesign process can be an exciting time – looking forward to launching and seeing an impact on demos and signups.
But – without proper execution, you could go the opposite way and see a massive drop off from past performance.
Use the above considerations during your internal planning process even before hiring or starting working with a designer or design team – ask the right questions, and you’ll get the answers you need to know.
Founder of Rock The Rankings, an SEO partner that helps B2B SaaS brands crush their organic growth goals. An avid fan of tennis, and growing micro-SaaS businesses on the weekend. 2x SaaS Co-Founder – Currently working to build and scale Simple Testimonial.
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