Why Most Redesigns Fail and What’s the Solution?

“We hired this great web design agency to redesign our website completely, and it looks great, but it’s not performing well, and now we’re losing customers and money.”

“After the redesign, our website has many technical issues, and our in-house developers can’t resolve them. The number of unsatisfied customers is growing quickly, and the situation is going from bad to worse fast.”

Oops. Hopefully, you can’t relate. It makes me feel angry and embarrassed every time I hear it. After all, my company AirDesigns is part of this industry.

Unfortunately, you might be surprised to know how many companies have been in such a situation. A HubSpot.com study found that 1/3 of marketers who did a site redesign in the last 12 months were unhappy with the results.

Over the years, I’ve talked with (and helped a few) companies who asked for our help after launching new websites, and the results were far from plausible: conversion rates were down, SEO traffic shrink, and their customer service teams were overwhelmed with complaints.

Their websites looked great but lacked important elements that drove customer conversions or had critical technical glitches that prevent customers from completing the desired action.

These companies desperately needed help to recover from an awful website redesign and were looking for a magic wand.

They come to AirDesigns because of our excellent reputation and unique industry guarantee:

Our clients either get a remarkably good project delivered on time or take the code we’ve done for them to our competitors for free.

3 reasons why more redesigns fail

I am sure that the main question that comes to mind is why this is happening in the first place and what you can do to avoid it?

So let’s take a look at the three reasons:

#1 Reason: not having clear goals

The number one reason for website failures is not having a clear business objective. Setting the right goals could be the difference between website success and failure.

At AirDesigns we use the SMART methodology for setting goals.

Before setting website goals, it is important to interview stakeholders in your company to identify their needs and how the new website can improve their performance. You have to make sure that your website redesign goals are in line with the plan for the entire company.

To be more precise, here are a few examples of goals for different departments in the company:

• Marketing – common marketing goals are: attract prospects, generate leads, and most importantly, re-engage existing customers (CLV)
• Sales – pre-sell new customers, deliver sales opportunities to your phone, office, or inbox. Support communications of the sales team with CRM system
• Customer Support – improve customer satisfaction, support new and current customers, automate some orders and customer service tasks
• IT – meet security, performance, and scalability demands.
• Operations – streamline and optimize workflows, automate tasks and reduce costs
• HR – attract and recruit new employees, onboard new employees and support current ones
• Executives –increase profits

Before you embark on your website redesign project, the next step is to determine how well (or poorly) your current website is doing compared to where you would like to be. If your goal is to increase conversions, you should know what your current conversion rate percentage is.

Once you interviewed the company’s stakeholders and benchmarked your website, you’re ready to set the goals for the redesign.

#2 reason: not good enough web experts

Even the best-planned redesign, set with the right business goals, can’t be successful if it is done by people who do not have the right knowledge and expertise.

Many web agencies prefer to hire mediocre developers and can’t justify hiring really good, highly-specialized programmers. They are simply aiming at reducing the cost of developers.

They produce cheap (low quality) websites and then wrap it up in an overdressed interface and toss it over to you with a bill. 

The enchantment lasts only until end-users start using the website. And we all know that a bad user experience means poor reviews, unhappy customers, and constant troubles for your team.

The real trouble with using mediocre designers and developers is that they will never create the website, app, or e-commerce store you need to stand out on the web. You’ll get something average at best.

But average is not enough for you, is it?

You need a remarkably good website; people will love and visit frequently.

#3 reason: redesign process takes too long

Many website redesign projects don’t launch on time or never even get finished.

The same report from HubSpot.com cited above found that this happened to 49% of website redesigns. The percentage is quite disturbing, and it’s a huge problem.

I’ve talked to companies that complained how they’ve gotten stuck in the loop of “a few days away from launching” and couldn’t get out of it. That’s why at AirDesigns, we have a “Delivered on time” guarantee, or our clients can get the code we’ve done for them to our competitors.

Delaying means more than anticipated development costs and loss of potential revenue for the client.

Not to mention that some redesign projects take so long that they quickly get out of date again by the time they are ready for launch.

The solution

So those are the main reasons why your new website redesign won’t work. But what’s the solution? Simply put, go for incremental website improvements.

Using an incremental approach to evolve and improve your website over time is much better because your website is never truly finished! To stay competitive and up-to-date, companies need to make constant improvements and adapt quickly.

When your website suffers from significant technical issues or uses outdated technologies it is nearly impossible to avoid full redesign to overcome them. In this case, you will have to find the right web development company that will help you set up SMART website goals and have a team of highly specialized web designers and developers who can produce a remarkable project on time.

In all other cases, you should go with an incremental approach to constantly evolve and improve your website. This is the secret behind all successful companies – they never stop looking for better ways to serve their customers.

Depending on the scale of the project, a redesign may take approximately 3 months for a really small company website to 1-2 years for a huge ecommerce with many functionalities and integrations.

As a business, instead of launching major website redesigns once every 2-3 years, it’s much wiser to go for more frequent but smaller highly-performing changes. This approach allows continual website improvement, quick reaction to shifts in customer behaviors, and faster adoption of new technologies and trends.

Conclusion

A successful website can turn your company around. It can boost sales, build awareness, enhance customer experience, reduce costs, improve workflow and help grow your company.

If you want to ensure that you are getting the most of your web properties, you need to hire a professional web design agency. A company that knows how to make masterpieces rather than average products can guarantee that things won’t end badly for your company.

At AirDesigns, you get a remarkably good (deserving praise) website, app, or e-commerce delivered on time, or you can take the code we’ve done to our competitors for free (that’s how confident we are).

Write to elena@airdesigns.us to see how you can get the most out of your website.