How to Redesign a Website: A 2025 Guide to Boosting Your Online Presence

UI/UX design services and custom website development should be an integral part of your business plan when you want to keep pace with market expectations as good as your competitors do, or even better. 

Websites are a short-living asset. According to website redesign statistics collected by HubSpot, websites have an average lifespan of only 2 years and 7 months before a redesign is required. Moreover, businesses operating in a highly competitive market or niche may need an even shorter lifespan.

Let’s discuss below the key signs of a degrading website, steps to UI/UX and performance improvement, and essential points that can increase your chances of successful redesign.

Website redesign is a massive project beyond changing fonts or brand colors. It involves a significant website revamp with the changes on multiple levels, including:

The above changes are required to support website redesign goals, which can be:

It is important to remember the difference between website redesign and website refresh:

Website redesign addresses fundamental issues, such as difficult navigation, lack of responsiveness on mobile devices, use of conflicting or outdated technologies, or missing functionality. It includes a large scope of work.

Website refresh focuses on less comprehensive updates, such as changing colors and typography, updating images and layouts, or renewing content to ensure its relevance. It includes a small scope of work.

Businesses need to make a large investment when starting to redesign websites. The development team can use the iterative approach to improve delivery quality.

The development team can deliver enhancements to different website parts quickly and on a low budget, using an incremental approach to website development.

Businesses often postpone website redesign for multiple strategic and operational reasons. They may not want to upset users who stick to an existing flow or website look and may leave in response to changes. 

Businesses may also be concerned about the scope of work on custom website redesign and hesitant about its ROI. This reason can resonate with the fact that they may have completed a website overhaul not long ago (based on stakeholders’ perception of not long ago) and love the result.

Still, changes might be necessary to enable a business to remain competitive in the long term. Let’s analyze in detail the common signs that a business should take this next step to redesign website:

Visual presentation plays a key role in customer decision-making. According to graphic design statistics collected by G2, 46% of website visitors decide on a company’s credibility based on its design. 

When you do not adjust your website elements (fonts, background, buttons, images, and so on), visitors may start thinking that you no longer invest in your business development and do not provide great products or services.

Here is why you should prioritize website responsiveness: 90% of all Americans own a smartphone, according to Pew Research Center. Moreover, mobile users made over 75% of all online retail visits and generated 64% of all online orders in the first quarter of 2024, according to Statista.

Although modern CMSs provide responsiveness out of the box, websites require constant tuning and improvement to ensure they are displayed correctly on mobile screens.

Website elements can grow in complexity with time, deteriorating User Experience, for example:

Little surprise, over 70% of shoppers worldwide abandon carts. Improvements based on regular usability tests and audits can increase conversion rates and visitors’ satisfaction.

When users provide feedback on what they want to see on the website, you might need to redesign your website to meet these expectations and prevent user churn. 

Adding new features to an up-and-running website can be difficult, requiring codebase rework, website restructuring, and intensive testing to ensure a seamless integration.

Adding and updating plugins and functionality can slow down website performance or cause crashes, which is why performance optimization can be required. 

Also, the development team might need to update technologies or enhance website structure to close security vulnerabilities, reconsidering website codebase.

When the user base grows, the website infrastructure may need to be redesigned. The maintenance team may also need to improve scalability and optimize maintenance costs when it detects excessive use of server resources.

The website project team can determine bottlenecks and main sources of cost creep (e.g., non-switched cloud services or non-optimal scaling) and eliminate them based on issue severity.

SEO optimization is necessary for high rankings in search results and inclusion in AI-generated answers, which are both important for sales and brand recognition.

Website developers can help with:

Before you proceed, you should assess and evaluate your website redesign strategy to ensure that you focus on finding solutions for real problems:

The hard truth is that pages may perform worse after an unsuccessful website redesign. This is why you should identify which website pages perform well and which not so much and handle the former with extra care.

You need to determine how end users use your website and why. This knowledge lets you meet their expectations. For instance, 16% of website visitors who abandon shopping carts use them only to check upfront purchase costs. You could make them happy by providing a cost calculator.

Audit user steps to identify where a regular user can become bored or annoyed. For instance, 62% of ecommerce websites use unclear labels and jargon without explanation, which can deteriorate product search and lead to website abandonment.

You should assess the scope of required changes, which you will need to translate into budget and timeline. Also, consider which parts of your redesign project you can complete in-house and where you might need to consider custom web development services.

You need to set metrics that enable you to determine whether website changes positively affect visitors and your investment will pay off. Metrics can vary and depend on your goals.

Consider A/B testing to validate different assumptions that could improve UX. Also, regular usability testing should be scheduled to identify further areas for improvement.

Short answer: The project team may require three weeks to over six months to redesign your website, depending on the number of changes.

Simple websites can be ready within three to six weeks, requiring moderate changes in codebase and infrastructure and minimal after-launch revisions. 

Mid-size projects may be completed within two to six months, which the development team will spend on technological updates, code refactoring, migrations, UI/UX enhancements, rebranding, and more. 

Large, high-load websites may require over six months of intensive work on UI, structure and catalog updates, security enhancements, infrastructure improvements, and beyond. 

Also, we recommend you use the Agile approach to your website and practice continuous, incremental updates. This approach could save you redesign costs in the future.

Website redesign includes input from business development, marketing, and engineering teams. It requires thorough planning of how to redesign website based on performance data and user feedback and prioritizes redesign activities depending on their business value.

Let’s discuss the essential steps to redesign a website:

Make a list of goals you want to achieve when you redesign your website. The list depends on type of your business (products, services, subscriptions) and can include:

You will use your list of goals to evaluate the current state of your website and user interactions with it, estimate the scope of work and possible timeline. 

Examine current website performance as part of its comprehensive audit. Check technical and user-related metrics, such as:

Rank website pages based on their importance and performance to ensure you will not accidentally break the pages or website parts that work well. 

You need data and evidence to make informed decisions on how to redesign an existing website. Use analytics and heatmaps to check what visitors do on your website and interviews/surveys to understand their goals, preferences, and motivation. 

Also, ask users what they lack in your website functionality. When missing points repeat, you can assign them high priority on your list of improvements.

Check what website functionality users use as envisaged, what functionality they use differently, and what features they want you to deliver. Based on the results of your user study, make a list of all possible improvements.

Also, study your competitors’ solutions to the same or similar user problems to ensure the same or higher level of provided experience and prevent user churn.

Sort user demands based on their frequency. Divide improvement areas into four categories depending on user demand and implementation complexity. Consider IT consulting services for a relevant complexity estimate:

Also, think about what parts of the website redesign process you can complete internally and what tasks might require hiring an external IT consultant or a dedicated team to save on implementation costs.

Create wireframes of the new website to outline page layouts and design prototypes. They will help you see how the new look enhances your brand identity and what changes in page structure or its single elements can be required. 

Also, the new user flow should be reviewed to ensure it meets user expectations. When flaws and inconsistencies are detected early at this step, the cost of rework will be minimal.

Now, you need to implement changes in website interface and user experiences without causing user churn or loss of high positions in SEO rankings.

The development team might need to:

Also, consider transferring your website to a new platform when your website needs have outgrown your current platform’s capabilities.

Redesign website processes can also involve revising project technologies. This step can be optional for websites where technological updates are part of the maintenance routine but critical for projects where only occasional updates occur. 

The development team can also initiate project transfer to alternative technologies when containing scalability or security concerns or when implemented third-party services become deprecated.

Emphasize mobile performance and responsiveness across different screen sizes. Check whether your website performance has improved on mobile devices after an update and whether UX meets the expectations of mobile users. 

Ensure seamless data synchronization across different devices from which users log in. Also, consider launching a progressive web app or a cross-platform app when website users require offline access to website functionality.

Focus on monitoring website performance and compare it with your initial website redesign goals. Remember, it can take weeks before the results become visible. 

If you have completed a large redesign, you may start with a focus group of different users for usability testing. After ensuring they respond positively to novelties, proceed to a full-scale transition to a new website.

Also, you can offer long-time users support for the old design for a reasonable time to support their loyalty.

Be ready to make some adjustments after the redesigned website launches based on the user response or received performance metrics. For instance, you might need to revise your scaling strategy after detecting more visitors than initially anticipated.

Prepare to act quickly in response to processes that can deteriorate visitor or user experiences on your website.

Consider redesigning the website on an ongoing basis. Such an approach will enable you to keep up with intense competition. Adding constant improvements can help you track changes in user needs, recognize new technologies, and recognize emerging design trends.

As a result, ongoing optimization and enhancement will ensure that your website remains relevant and effective in the long term and requires less rework in case of a major update.

You’ve decided to redesign your website. Is there anything in particular you should keep in your mind?

Yes, here are some tips to help you improve your website and evade big mistakes:

Create and regularly update project documentation to keep the big picture of project progress, reasons behind project decisions, and their long-term effect on ROI.

According to the 2022 State of UX, 43% of organizations did not have processes for making UX decisions based on user feedback, which prevented them from fully reaping the benefits of their investment. Ask users for feedback and review it carefully!

The top visual elements website visitors/users appreciate in website design are images (40%), colors (39%), and videos (21%). Also, 38% of visitors look at page layout and navigational links.

Embrace voice search optimization to increase your audience. Use AI-powered voice search assistants to let people find you from smartphones, tablets, and smart speakers.

To use your constrained time and resources efficiently, work on improvements that first bring you the biggest value for the lowest investment. 

IT Craft specializes in both website refresh and website redesign, ensuring you get help with a wide range of tech tasks you might encounter on your way to increasing your website’s bottom line:

At IT Craft, we use the value-based approach to redesign websites. The assigned experts help you identify and implement solutions that target your business goals and keep you competitive in the long term.

Soggle manufactures customizable protection tools for ski goggles and microfiber tissues. Its website enables customers to choose from a catalog containing 100+ goggle designs or create their own.

The client had a one-page website. They wanted to redesign the website to display all available offers through a catalog and provide visitors with customization tools.

With our long-term partner with NINE brackets, IT Craft developers improved the website’s structure, expanded functionality, and enhanced UI/UX while increasing responsiveness. The redesign resulted in sales growth.

Every business running a website will eventually face a redesign. Even if you have managed to create a perfect UI/UX and love your website’s look and feel, many factors will inevitably affect its perception in visitors’ eyes. 

Do not consider redesigning a task. Instead, incorporate it into your business development strategy as a process that allows you to meet technological advancements, changing user preferences, and new UI/UX trends.

Last but not least in this website redesign guide. Find and keep in touch with an expert website development team who can help you implement envisaged improvements. It can help you save both implementation and overhead costs.