Website Redesign: The Ultimate Checklist for your SaaS website overhaul
Whether you’re looking to give your website a completely new look or somebody has said that you need a “website redesign” for your SaaS website - you’re at the right place.
This article is all about giving your website a makeover of the century: for better leads, more clients, higher sales and more.
So sit back and get ready for our ultimate checklist for your SaaS website overhaul. It’s going to be an exciting read.
Table of contents:
- Website redesign - what is it?
- Website redesign vs website refresh
- Questions to ask yourself before a SaaS website redesign
- Signs your SaaS website could use a redesign
- What a website redesign can give your SaaS business
- Redesigning a SaaS website: best practice
- Saas website redesign examples: before and after
- Going beyond a simple website redesign with LiveSession
- Summary
- Website redesign FAQ
Website redesign - what is it?
Redesigning your website involves making significant changes to its code, content, structure, and visuals in order to make it more user-friendly for your visitors. A successful website redesign can allow you to improve user experience (UX), boost revenue, and even significantly reduce bounce rates.
Website redesign vs website refresh
The terms “website redesign” and “website refresh” are often mistaken by people. So let us clarify what the difference is before going further.
A website redesign usually involves a significant change in a website’s code and appearance.
Examples: restructured pages with better functionality, updated information architecture, a new CMS, new branding and visual identity elements.
A website refresh, on the other hand, refers to minor changes, with no changes to the website code.
Examples: little UX tweaks, updated brand color scheme, new typography.
Questions to ask yourself before a SaaS website redesign
Before attempting to do any kind of changes to your website, especially as big as in a redesign process, you should ask yourself specific questions. If you aren’t able to answer them straight away, a redesign project might have to wait for a later time.
The questions are:
- Which pages are most valuable to you and your target customers?
- How and why do people visit your website?
- Are there any pages or elements that work well?
- Are there any outdated design elements?
- Which metrics will you use to measure the success of the redesign?
- In what ways is the website used by the rest of your team/business?
- Does the current website not meet a specific, measurable customer need?
- Why do people leave your website?
- What are the most popular pages on your website?
As soon as you answer them all, you can begin to think about the redesign itself and how you’re going to approach it.
Signs your SaaS website could use a redesign
Sometimes it’s difficult to notice the need to update your website or completely change it. This is because business owners rarely put themselves in the shoes of a regular website visitor who knows nothing about their website and is only seeing it for the first time ever.
Once you put yourself in this scenario and go through your website again, you’ll understand far more.
There are multiple signs that your SaaS website is in a desperate need of redesign. Here are some of them:
☝️ Outdated design and missing content
Your SaaS product has developed significantly recently (e.g. new features, added integrations), but your website doesn’t really reflect that? This means you have some redesign decisions to make.
☝️ Change in branding and visual identity
Have your branding and visual identity changed since the last time you updated your website? Have your slogans or unique selling propositions been updated? Is the logo different now? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes” - consider a redesign.
☝️ Decreasing conversions and sales
When a business doesn’t meet basic business objectives like increasing conversions, leads or sales, it is a clear sign that the website is not effectively designed to do it. You could change it by giving your website a new life through a redesign.
☝️ User complaints and bugs
Another indication that something is wrong with your website and it needs fixing is user complaints, together with bugs. In this case we also recommend coming up with some redesign goals.
☝️ High bounce rate
If your website has a high bounce rate, it could be a sign that visitors are not finding what they’re looking for or that the website is not user-friendly. What does this mean? You guessed it - a redesign.
☝️ Poor mobile optimization
Not having a mobile-friendly website puts your business at a big disadvantage given how many people are primarily mobile users. It’s time to redesign your website if you haven’t implemented this yet.
What a website redesign can give your SaaS business
A SaaS website redesign carries a list of attractive benefits that people can expect.
The pros include:
➕ more subscriptions
First of all, a SaaS website redesign can give your business more subscriptions by improving the user experience and making it easier for real people to sign up for a free trial or demo.
❌ “Subscribe to our software today” placed at the bottom of a page by your design team
✔️ “Join free trial now” in a visible, clickable spot on the custom website design
➕ better brand awareness
Another benefit of a SaaS website redesign is better brand awareness. When you refresh and modernize your brand, you make it more appealing to potential customers, improving their customer experience. Once your website effectively communicates your brand message and value proposition, it’s easier to establish your business as a leader in your industry.
❌ unclear branding, no brand colors and slogans
✔️ properly presented branding and visual identity, understandable slogans
➕ improved user experience and satisfaction
Moving on, imagine your SaaS website as a business card that you hand to everybody who visits it. If your visitors are satisfied with the business card, they like it and can easily find the necessary details on it - congratulations. If that’s not the case yet - a website redesign can help you achieve it.
❌ a website that is not visitor-optimized
✔️ a website with visitors in mind, tailored to their needs and expectations
➕ increased website visits
Referring back to the previous point, more people will want your business card if they like it and if it’s properly presented to them. If you nail your website SEO during a redesign, you’ll quickly see an influx of new unique website visitors.
❌ a website that’s not optimized for SEO
✔️ SEO optimized and relevant keywords-stuffed website created by a content writer
➕ reduced costs and time
Finally, in the long run it’s sometimes better to do something once and properly, instead of fixing things one by one, every now and then. A proper SaaS website redesign strategy and execution will allow you to save costs and time. As a result, you can allocate these resources to promoting your SaaS or developing it further.
❌ making changes to website too frequently
✔️ changing your website once and properly, in a concise manner
Redesigning a SaaS website: best practices
Having learned about the basics of website redesign (what it is, when you should do it and how you can benefit from it) it’s about time we share our best practices with you.
If you want to ensure your SaaS website redesign goes as smooth as your latest product update launch, follow these tips:
✔️ Write down your current performance
To have any sort of evidence that your website redesign was successful (or will be), it’s important you analyze the current situation before entering the design phase.
Some of the key metrics you might want to look into now include:
- number of unique visitors and visits,
- keywords the website ranks for,
- number of leads,
- bounce rate,
- number of indexed pages,
- time spent on your website.
Finding all of this out will later inform you about the elements of your website redesign strategy that were righteously implemented. Treat this tip as a “before” and “after” kind of a makeover where you will be comparing your results and performance.
Tip💡: Use tools like LiveSession and web analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics) for this purpose
✔️ Make a list of your redesign project goals
Having analyzed the current state of your website, next you should focus on thinking in-depth about what you have seen. What challenges or problems are you currently facing?
Is it a low conversion rate? Are you not getting enough leads? Maybe your monthly visits have been dropping down?
Based on this data, prepare a website redesign project goals list and craft your strategy around it.
Tip💡: Take advantage of popular website redesign framework examples
Tip💡: Hire a branding and visual identity strategist that will help you in the branding design process
✔️ Identify your ideal customer persona
Doing this helps to ensure 1 significant thing. The new website will be designed with the specific needs and preferences of your target audience and customer personas in mind.
By understanding the demographics, behaviors, and pain points of your ideal customer profile, you can create a website that is tailored to their needs. This way, it’s more likely that they will engage with your brand and, eventually, convert.
We recommend asking yourself the following questions:
- What is my buyer persona’s demographics?
- What is my buyer persona’s behavior?
- What is my buyer persona’s location?
- What is my buyer persona’s challenge/goal?
- What are the interests and preferences of my customer personas?
Tip💡: Take a look at the 6 buyer personas (types) and decide which one is your SaaS customers
✔️ Optimize pages for search engines
An effective website redesign cannot go successfully without proper search engine optimisation for your website.
You want your website to be easily discoverable by search engines and, therefore, by potential customers. This can be achieved by implementing a variety of techniques, such as using relevant keywords, staying on top of high-quality content management, and building backlinks.
After you optimize your website for search engines, your business will improve its search engine rankings. As a result, this can lead to increased website traffic, higher conversion rates, and even more revenue.
8 key steps to SaaS SEO strategy:
- keyword research,
- competitive analysis,
- technical SEO audit,
- content audit,
- SEO roadmap development,
- content creation,
- link building,
- performance analysis and optimization
Tip💡: Use keyword research tools to find what keywords your website may rank for
✔️ Identify competitors and analyze their websites
As a SaaS business, you’re probably already checking out your competition on a regular basis, so this shouldn’t be difficult to do. The reason why you should do it is because you want your website to be better than theirs. And you won’t be able to make it better if you don’t know who you’re competing with.
Tip💡: Conduct competitor analysis using the PESTLE framework for example
✔️ Observe how your visitors behave over time
Last but not least, you will have a lot of analyzing and optimizing to do prior and after a website redesign. And it’s not because your website redesign didn’t go as planned or wasn’t properly prepared. Instead, it’s because your users are constantly changing the way they behave, together with their preferences.
Tools like LiveSession can give you rich insights into all sorts of data you would need here. Using it, you should be monitoring things like the change in your website visits, conversion rate, bounce rate and so on.
Tip💡: Use tools like LiveSession to help with that.
SaaS website redesign examples: before and after
Now, let us show you 5 examples of a SaaS website redesign so that you see what everything we described above can look like in practice. Let these be inspirations for your own redesign strategy in the feature. All because we learn from the best, don’t we?
#1 Skype - telecommunications software
What Skype did here:
👉 changed brand colors
👉 simplified the website
👉 added visuals visualizing the tool for easy recognition
Before redesign:
After redesign:
#2 MailChimp - marketing automation platform and email marketing service
What MailChimp did here:
👉 simplified the website design
👉 changed brand colors
👉 changed the website colors
Before redesign:
After redesign:
#3 UserTesting - a human insight platform
What UserTesting did here:
👉 deleted unnecessary text
👉 changed brand colors
👉 made the buttons easier to read
Before redesign:
After redesign:
#4 Slack - an instant messaging app for businesses
What Slack did here:
👉 added visuals visualizing the tool for easy recognition
👉 changed brand colors
👉 added more CTAs
Before redesign:
After redesign:
#5 WordPress - a content management system
What WordPress did here:
👉 deleted unnecessary text
👉 changed brand colors
👉 included an attention-catching CTA
Before redesign:
After redesign:
Going beyond a simple website redesign with LiveSession
As you already know from this article, website visitor preferences are constantly changing and evolving. Not only these, but also things like browser technologies, accessibility standards and design practices.
Because of this, it’s vital that you stay informed about what is happening around your website at all times. Valuable metrics and data like session replays, heat maps and funnels analysis can give you tips on what your website redesign should look like and how you can further perfect it.
One of the tools giving you access to these features is LiveSession - your go-to, all in one web analytics software with session recordings.
LiveSession will help you increase your engagement score and improve user journey. With us, understanding your users has never been easier.
Top LiveSession features to help with website redesign
Our solution is filled with tools and features that will introduce you to a whole new level of website analytics. All so that you can nail that website redesign process.
Among the examples are:
👉 Rage clicks & error clicks - automatically detect pain points and errors on your website
👉 Inspect mode - select any particular element of your website and see how it’s used.
👉 engagement score - find the most engaging sessions without having to watch them all.
👉 user journey - watch and analyze website visits to improve it
We believe we will be a great addition to your already existing tool stack. So join us today - we have a free trial and even a forever-free plan for you to take advantage of. We will be more than happy to help bring your website to the next level.
Check how:
- we increased the number of paid subscriptions by 40% for RocketLink
- Databox achieved a 223% increase in conversions to paid accounts with us
- we assisted Talentlyft with achieving a 25.2% increase in trial to paid customer conversions
Summary
And that’s a wrap from our side! We hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as we enjoyed writing it for you.
By this time, you should already know things like what a website redesign is and how it differs from a website refresh.
What’s more, we shared with you tips on what you should ask yourself before a SaaS website redesign, and when you should even consider it. Finally, you should now also be familiar with the benefits it brings, best practices and some good examples.
If you liked the article, be sure to come back for more interesting content on our blog. And don’t forget about LiveSession - a tool that will keep you up to date with your customer preferences and behavior.
Thanks for coming along and see you in the next article!
Website redesign FAQ
As a bonus, we provide you with a short but insightful section on the most commonly asked questions when it comes to website redesign. Enjoy learning more with us - it’s a true goldmine of insights!!
Why do I need to redesign my SaaS website?
You may have to redesign your SaaS website for various reasons. It may be that your website isn’t mobile-friendly, is difficult to navigate or isn’t properly optimized for SEO. It’s important to regularly evaluate your website and see if it still meets your business goals and user needs.
Will a redesign improve my SaaS website’s performance?
It can, but only if you do it properly. In general, a redesign can potentially improve the performance of your SaaS website in several ways. Examples include better user experience, better SEO, increased functionality and security, as well as stronger branding and visual elements.
How much does a SaaS website redesign cost?
The cost of a website redesign can vary greatly depending on various factors, like the complexity of the site, and the amount of development work required. On average, a basic website redesign can cost anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars.
Does website redesign affect search engine optimization results?
Yes, a website redesign can affect search engine optimization results, both positively and negatively. A well-done redesign can improve your SEO, while an incorrectly done one can negatively impact your SEO by causing broken links, redirects, and other technical issues.
How often should I do a SaaS website redesign?
The preferences of your customers, browser technologies, and accessibility standards are always evolving. As a result, there is not a set timeline for redesigning a website.
Other commonly asked questions: How will the redesign project improve the overall user experience for our SaaS business? What steps will be taken in the redesign process to ensure that our website is optimized for search engines and has a responsive design? How will the redesign project improve our website’s performance according to Google Analytics data? How will the redesign project incorporate design elements that will appeal to our target audience and potential customers? How will the redesign process ensure that our website is mobile-friendly? What steps will be taken to ensure that the redesign project will improve the website’s load time? How will building user personas be incorporated into the redesign process to create a more personalized experience for visitors? How will the redesign project improve the website’s ability to convert visitors into paying customers? How will the redesign project improve the website’s ability to handle large amounts of data and analytics? How will the redesign project improve the website’s ability to integrate with other third-party software and APIs? What design elements are necessary in a website redesign plan? Are there any effective marketing strategies or marketing tool for inbound marketing announcing a website redesign? Are there any feedback tools for rating my website redesign?