Website Redesign: How To Redesign A Website In 2025 (Ultimate Guide)
Updated Apr 16, 2025 | Published Apr 10, 2025 | 26 min read
A well-designed website gives potential customers a great first impression of your business. Like a physical storefront, your online presence needs regular updates and occasional overhauls to stay current, functional, and aligned with your goals.
A website redesign might be just what you need to improve user experience, increase conversions, or refresh your brand’s online identity.
Website design moves quickly, with new trends, technologies, and user expectations always emerging. What was modern and functional a few years ago may now appear dated or fail to deliver a seamless experience.
Understanding how to redesign a website is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Our guide walks you through everything you need to know about redesigning and building your new website.
A website redesign completely overhauls your existing website beyond simple cosmetic changes. It’s a strategic process that involves rethinking and rebuilding significant aspects of your website’s layout, functionality, content structure, and underlying technology.
The goal is to create a more effective online presence that serves your business objectives and meets your users’ needs. When you undertake a website redesign, you’re essentially reimagining your digital presence from the ground up.
It could involve rebranding with a new color scheme and typography, restructuring your navigation and user pathways, implementing new features and functionality, or even migrating to an entirely different system.
Unlike minor tweaks or updates, a website redesign addresses fundamental issues with your site and positions your online presence for future growth and success.
Drive your website redesign with strategic goals rather than just aesthetic preferences. Has your business direction evolved, did your target audience change, or is your original website failing to convert visitors into customers?
Whatever the reason, a redesign is an opportunity to create a powerful marketing tool that aligns with your current business needs while laying the groundwork for the future.
It’s important to distinguish between a website redesign and a website refresh, as they involve different levels of commitment, resources, and changes to your online presence.
A website refresh is like painting your home and updating the furnishings. The underlying structure remains the same, but the appearance is improved. A refresh is ideal when your site’s fundamentals are sound but starting to look outdated or require minor improvements that reflect your brand identity.
On the other hand, a website redesign is like a complete home renovation, where you knock down walls, rewire the electrics, and reconfigure the entire floor plan. It involves significant changes, not just to the appearance but also to the structure, functionality, and often the underlying technology of your website.
A website redesign project addresses deeper issues like poor user interface, outdated technology, ineffective conversion paths, or a web design that no longer aligns with your business goals or audience needs.
Determining whether your website needs a complete redesign is a crucial first step before investing time and resources.
Here’s a quick checklist to help you evaluate if your site is due for a complete overhaul:
The timeline for a website redesign varies depending on the size and complexity of your new web design, your redesign goals, and your resources. For example, redesigning a small business website with 5-10 pages can take 4-8 weeks.
Medium-sized business websites with more complex functionality require 2-4 months, while large enterprise sites with extensive content, custom features, and complex integrations might take 6 months or longer.
Several factors can influence these timelines. The clarity of your initial vision and goals, the creation of new content, the number of stakeholders involved in approvals, and whether you’re working with a project manager or handling the redesign in-house will affect the project’s progress.
Planning for e-commerce functionality, custom applications, or complex integrations with other systems will also extend your timeline. It’s essential to be realistic about timeframes and build buffer time for unexpected challenges or changes in direction.
A rushed website redesign strategy can result in mistakes or compromises that undermine your goals. Remember that the redesign process doesn’t end at launch; plan for a post-launch phase of at least a month to address issues, make adjustments based on honest user feedback, and ensure everything is functioning.
Understanding what to expect can help you navigate a website redesign process more effectively and ensure a successful outcome.
A redesign process begins with the discovery and planning phase, which helps to establish website redesign goals, analyze current performance, and research user needs. The foundational stage is crucial as it informs all subsequent decisions and creates a roadmap for the website redesign project.
Following planning, the redesign moves into the information architecture and wireframing phase. Here, your new site’s structure and user flow are mapped out, creating blueprints for how users navigate the content.
The framework allows you to focus on usability and conversion pathways before visual design elements come into play. Wireframes allow for early testing and refinement of the user experience, potentially saving significant time and resources by identifying coding issues before they’re in the final product.
The design and development phases bring your new website to life, transforming wireframes into visually engaging, fully functional website pages. During this time, you’ll review design concepts, provide feedback, and see the site evolve through several iterations.
Content migration and creation happen in parallel as development progresses, populating your new structure with updated messaging. The final stages include thorough testing across different devices and browsers, training your team to use any new systems, and launching your redesigned site to the public.
First, clearly articulate why you’re redesigning; what specific problems are you trying to solve, and what outcomes will constitute success?
Having well-defined, measurable objectives will guide decision-making throughout the process and provide a framework for evaluating the redesign’s effectiveness.
Be realistic about resources. Do you have the expertise to handle the redesign, or will you need to partner with professionals? Have you seen a website you like and want to emulate? There are ways to find out who designed a website.
Consider how your website fits into your broader marketing strategy and user journey:
Who are your most valuable visitors, what are they looking for when they visit your site, and how do they prefer to interact with your site’s content? Gather data from analytics, conduct user interviews, and create detailed buyer personas to inform your design decisions.
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A successful website redesign requires a strategic, methodical approach. The following 12-step guide will walk you through the entire process, from initial planning to final website launch, ensuring your redesign achieves your goals and creates a positive user experience.
Establishing a specific redesign strategy that aligns with your overall business objectives is the foundation of any successful website redesign.
Start by asking fundamental questions:
Having well-defined goals will guide every decision throughout the redesign process and provide clear metrics for measuring success afterward.
Document your objectives in specific, measurable terms. Instead of a vague goal like “improve the site,” aim for something quantifiable, such as “increase lead generation by 25%” or “reduce bounce rate on key landing pages to under 40%.”
Consider the stakeholders in your organization and incorporate their input. For example, your sales team might prioritize search engine optimization, while your customer service department might emphasize self-service resources.
Remember to prioritize your objectives, as you may not be able to achieve everything in a single redesign. Identify which goals are must-haves versus nice-to-haves, and be prepared to make trade-offs based on your budget, timeline, and resources.
Establishing clear priorities will equip you to make better decisions when facing compromises during the redesign process. This goal-setting phase may seem time-consuming, but it’s an investment that pays dividends by providing a framework for the entire website redesign project.
Before moving forward with your website overhaul, conduct a thorough analysis of your current website’s performance to establish a baseline and identify areas of improvement.
Start by examining your analytics for website metrics such as traffic sources, visitors, user flow, bounce rates, and conversion rates.
Tools like Google Analytics provide valuable insights into user behavior and can highlight both strengths to preserve and weaknesses to address. Gather user feedback through surveys, interviews, or usability testing to understand their experience with your current site.
Your sales representatives might share common questions or objections from prospects, while customer service can highlight issues that repeatedly frustrate users. Technical aspects, including page load speeds, mobile responsiveness, accessibility compliance, and SEO performance, should also be part of your assessment.
Document all findings to create a picture of what works and needs improvement, so you don’t eliminate aspects of your original site that are performing well.
Competitor research provides valuable context for your redesign by helping you understand industry standards, identify opportunities to stand out, and gain inspiration for practical approaches.
Start by listing your direct competitors, which are businesses offering similar products or services to the same audience. Then identify indirect competitors, who offer different products or services that still solve the same problem or meet the same need.
Study the best business websites and evaluate design aesthetics, content strategy, functionality, user experience, and messaging. Note what works well and what doesn’t from your audience’s perspective.
Social listening tools can also help gauge audience reaction to competitor websites, highlighting positive features to emulate and negative aspects to avoid.
The goal of competitor research isn’t to copy what others are doing but to identify gaps in the market and opportunities. This insight will inform your design decisions as you create a website that meets industry standards and exceeds them in ways that matter to your audience.
Before making changes to your website, it’s crucial to record key performance metrics that will serve as benchmarks for measuring the success of your redesign.
Start by documenting analytics data, including monthly visitors, high-traffic pages, low-traffic pages, average time on site, bounce rates, and conversion rates. Pay special attention to your most important website pages, such as your homepage, key landing pages, and highest-converting product or service pages, and record their performance metrics.
Beyond basic analytics, capture SEO performance data such as domain authority, keyword rankings for essential terms, organic traffic, and backlink profiles. These metrics can be significantly impacted during a redesign, and having baseline data will help you monitor and address any negative changes quickly.
Don’t limit your backup to performance data; create complete archives of your website content, structure, and design. Take screenshots of key pages, export your site map, and ensure you have copies of all assets, including images, videos, downloadable files, and custom code.
By methodically recording these metrics and assets, you establish a solid foundation for evaluating the impact of your redesign. This documentation also ensures that no valuable aspects of your current website are accidentally lost.
Establishing a realistic budget is critical in the website redesign process as it will influence your project’s scope, approach, and ultimate success. Begin by considering the size and complexity of your entire site and your goals for the redesign.
Redesigning a simple brochure-style website might cost between $5,000 and $20,000, while complex e-commerce sites or those with custom functionality can range from $20,000 to $100,000. Your budget should account for all project phases, from strategy and planning through design, development, content creation, testing, and post-launch support.
Content-related expenses include copywriting, photography, video production, and infographics. Remember to budget for testing across browsers and devices, as well as staff training for those who will manage the site. Additionally, include a 10-15% contingency fund to address unexpected challenges or scope changes that inevitably arise during complex redesign projects.
If user experience is your primary concern, allocate more of your budget to UX research, wireframing, and prototyping. If your content needs a complete overhaul, prioritize spending on professional copywriting and multimedia production.
Be realistic about what you can achieve with your available resources—executing a smaller scope well is better than spreading your budget too thin across many objectives.
Creating detailed customer personas ensures your redesigned website speaks directly to your audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors. Customer and buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data and research.
Buyer personas include psychographic elements like goals, challenges, objections, and decision-making factors. Well-developed personas provide a human lens to evaluate every aspect of your website, from content to design to functionality.
Analyze your current customer database to identify patterns and segments. Conduct interviews with existing customers to understand their buying journey and what influenced their decision to choose your business.
Speak with your sales and customer service teams, who interact directly with prospects and customers daily. Supplement this data with market research, industry reports, and social media analytics to create a comprehensive picture of your audience segments.
For each persona, create a detailed profile that includes:
Once developed, share these personas with everyone involved in the redesign to ensure you make all decisions with the end user in mind.
Content is at the heart of your website, conveying your value proposition and guiding visitors toward desired actions. The redesign process offers a valuable opportunity to evaluate and enhance your content strategy.
Begin with a comprehensive content audit of your existing website. Document every page, blog post, case study, and downloadable asset, noting metrics like traffic, engagement, website visitors, and conversion rates.
Identify high-performing content to preserve or refresh, underperforming content that needs significant revision, and gaps that need to be filled in the new site.
With your audit complete, develop a strategy aligned with your business goals and buyer personas. Map content that aligns with different customer journey stages, ensuring you have appropriate materials for the awareness, consideration, and decision phases.
Review your messaging for clarity, consistency, and alignment with your brand pillars.
Consider readability by creating scannable content with clear headings, bullet points, and meaningful subheadings, which are essential for engaging online readers. Produce a detailed content plan outlining what needs to be written or revised, who will create it, and when.
Consider whether you need professional copywriting support or if your internal team can handle content creation.
Don’t limit your focus to text; evaluate your visual strategy, including photography, illustrations, infographics, and video. High-quality visual content significantly impacts engagement and helps communicate complex information efficiently.
Related reading: Trends shaping the future of blogging.
A website redesign project presents opportunities and risks for your search engine visibility. Thoughtful SEO planning helps preserve your current search rankings while creating pathways for future improvement.
Start by conducting comprehensive keyword research to identify your audience’s terms and phrases when searching for products or services like yours.
To get started:
Beyond technical SEO considerations, factor search performance into your content and architecture decisions. Structure your site with a clear hierarchy that helps search engines understand the relationship between website pages. Plan for content that comprehensively addresses the questions and needs behind your target keywords.
Creating clear, logical site architecture is fundamental to the user experience and SEO performance. It defines how your content is organized and interconnected, guiding visitors intuitively to the information they seek while helping search engines understand the relationship between different pages.
Begin by mapping your current site structure, then critically evaluate it against your goals and user needs.
Most effective websites follow a “shallow” architecture where essential pages are accessible within 3-4 clicks from the homepage. Consider implementing a hub-and-spoke model for content clusters, with comprehensive pillar pages linking to more specific related content. This approach helps users find relevant information and signals topic authority to search engines.
Create a visual representation of your planned architecture using a sitemap diagram that shows all pages and their relationships. This diagram will serve as a reference document for both design and development teams.
Be clear about the best layout for your website and consider the user flow through the structure. How will visitors transition from awareness to consideration to decision? Are there logical next steps at each point in their journey?
A strong site structure improves navigation and sets the foundation for how users engage with your content and how search engines rank it. Get this part right, and everything else on your site becomes easier to build and grow.
Wireframing is a step between architecture and visual design that focuses on page structure, content hierarchy, and user flow without the distraction of visual styling. Wireframes are like architectural blueprints for your website; simplified representations that show the placement and priority of elements on each page.
Begin by creating wireframes for your most important pages, including the homepage, main landing pages, product/service pages, and any pages with unique functionality or complex content requirements. Good wireframes prioritize function over form, using simple boxes, placeholders, and labels to indicate where different content elements will appear.
They should clearly represent the information hierarchy:
Include annotations to explain functionality that might not be obvious from visuals alone, particularly for interactive brand elements. Consider creating desktop and mobile wireframes to ensure your design works effectively across devices.
Wireframes provide an invaluable opportunity for feedback before investing in design or development. Share them with stakeholders and team members to gather input on the proposed structure and functionality.
Conduct user testing with wireframes to validate assumptions about how users interact with the layout.
Refine your wireframes before moving to visual design to address any issues identified during testing. This methodical approach saves time and resources by resolving structural problems early, when changes are relatively easy and inexpensive to implement.
With your wireframes approved, it’s time to bring your website to life through visual design. This phase transforms your blueprint into an engaging experience that connects with visitors while guiding them toward your business objectives.
Remember that effective website design isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about creating intuitive experiences that help users accomplish their goals efficiently. Ensure your visual layouts adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes while maintaining usability and brand consistency.
Throughout the design process, collect feedback from stakeholders and, if possible, conduct usability testing with representative users. This input helps refine the design before moving into development, potentially saving significant time and resources.
Before launching your redesigned website to the public, thorough testing is essential to identify and address any issues that could negatively impact user experience or functionality.
Begin with comprehensive functionality testing across all interactive elements; forms, buttons, navigation menus, search functionality, filtering options, and custom features should work flawlessly.
Test all form submissions to ensure data is appropriately captured and directed to the right destination. Verify that all internal and external links lead to their intended destinations and open appropriately, whether in the same window or a new tab.
Test your site on multiple browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge) and various devices (desktop computers, tablets, smartphones) to ensure consistent performance and appearance.
Pay special attention to responsive design elements:
Pay attention to your website loading speeds across network conditions. Page speed significantly impacts user experience and search rankings. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to identify optimization opportunities.
Don’t overlook content review and SEO verification in your testing process. Proofread all text for spelling and grammatical errors. Check that images are correctly optimized with alt text. Verify that meta titles and descriptions are correct and use header tags according to your SEO plan.
Test 301 redirects to ensure old URLs properly direct to their new destinations. Finally, conduct user acceptance testing with representatives from your audience to gather real-world feedback on the site’s usability and effectiveness.
Testing may seem time-consuming, but it’s far more efficient to resolve issues before launch than fix problems after they impact real users. Once the build is complete, you will also need to continue managing your website.
The redesign cost of a website varies significantly based on several factors, including the size and complexity of your site, your specific requirements, and your approach to completing the redesign project.
To give an estimate:
Pricing reflects different approaches to the redesign process. At the lower end, you might work with a freelancer or small agency using pre-built templates with customization. Mid-range budgets typically include custom design, more extensive functionality, and professional content creation.
Higher budgets involve comprehensive strategy, custom development, advanced integrations, and extensive user testing.
Beyond the initial redesign, consider ongoing costs like hosting, maintenance, content updates, and eventual future redesigns; websites are investments that require continuous care, not one-time projects.
If you’re working with budget constraints, consider a phased approach to redesigning your website. Based on your business goals and user needs, prioritize the most critical aspects and implement changes incrementally.
Before embarking on a redesign project, whether you are making a website yourself or have given the work to a professional, ensure you don’t overlook any critical aspects of your website redesign plan.
Want to transform your online presence without the complexity and expense of traditional web development? If you want to learn how to design a website, Friday offers an intuitive, robust platform that makes website redesign accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Whether you’re a small business owner looking to refresh your digital storefront or a marketing professional tasked with updating your company’s online presence, Friday provides the tools to create a stunning, effective website without coding knowledge.
Our platform combines ease of use with professional results, featuring drag-and-drop editing, responsive templates, and built-in optimization tools. Friday’s template library offers diverse starting points for your successful redesign, each professionally designed and fully customizable to match your brand identity.
Our platform includes integrated hosting, security, and performance optimization, so your redesigned website loads quickly and stays protected. Built-in SEO tools help ensure your new site gets found in search results, while our analytics dashboard continuously provides insights to improve performance.
Redesigning a website is a significant undertaking that requires careful planning, strategic thinking, and methodical execution. Still, the potential benefits to your business make it well worth the investment.
A thoughtful website redesign can dramatically improve user experience, increase conversion rates, enhance brand perception, and provide a stronger foundation for digital marketing efforts.
Whether you work with professional web developers or utilize a platform like Friday, approach your redesign as an opportunity to align your online presence with your current business goals and user expectations.