6 Key Steps for a Successful Website Redesign + Inspiring Redesign Examples
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Can you be-leaf we’ve finally made it to Fall? 🍂 I’m excited to transition into sweater weather and PSL season (any warm spiced drink is a must for Fall. Sorry, I don’t make the rules).
On the topic of transitioning, today’s edition delves into a different type of transformation that continues to challenge many SaaS brands: a website redesign.
With a smooth website redesign process, a business can shed outdated design elements and introduce new features that better serve their goals—whether that’s reflecting a new brand identity or increasing conversion rates (just to name a few).
Keep reading to uncover a successful 6-step website redesign process and inspiring website redesign examples!
Six Key Steps For a Successful Website Redesign 💡
A successful website redesign doesn’t happen overnight, and it certainly isn’t accomplished without a well-planned process that aligns with a SaaS company's business goals and needs.
So, what are the proper steps to create a successful website redesign?
It's a common question for SaaS brands aiming to enhance their online presence and user experience or address declining conversion rates (among other reasons.) Luckily, our team has a solution.
Today, we’re sharing the secret sauce behind a redesign process that has transformed the websites of leading SaaS brands like Retool, Calendly, and ServiceTitan. Keep reading to discover how the redesign process goes from the perspective of a B2B SaaS web design agency. 👇
1️⃣ Discovery workshop
A website redesign should start with a collaborative meeting to align all stakeholders on the brand's current state and project goals.
During the discovery workshop, a UX audit should be carried out to identify desired changes for existing pages. Create mood boards to refine the website's brand identity and align teams on the redesign’s direction.
It’s helpful to include a word association exercise in the final step of the discovery process to understand the personality of the new website.
Stakeholders rate adjectives such as playful, futuristic, or fancy on a scale of 1-5 to assess their resonance with the brand. Designers will use this feedback to establish a clear direction for their creative experimentation.
2️⃣ Design vignettes
After the workshop, designers create three vignettes of a landing page that showcases a unique design approach.
Vignettes display the building blocks of the website redesign, like colors, typography, and buttons. Although the vignettes do not reflect the final designs, they are a step in gathering feedback from stakeholders and refining the project’s direction.
3️⃣ Atomic design system
Once there’s approval in the previous step, it’s time to create the design system for the new website using atomic design principles.
An atomic design system breaks down a visual interface into the smallest, reusable atoms that can be combined to form molecules, organisms, templates, and pages.
This approach ensures the SaaS website’s redesign prioritizes scalability and consistency across the entire website.
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4️⃣ Component development
Once the overall design system is in place, it’s ready to be handed off to the development team, which manages the entire frontend of the website.
At this phase, developers take the atomic design system and build the website’s structure at the component level. When it comes to frontend development, we recommend utilizing modern React frameworks like Gatsby and Next.js to build the fastest and most secure website.
5️⃣ CMS development
To empower marketing teams to continually build website pages, we suggest using a modular design methodology.
This begins with the content modeling process, which involves constructing content types–from field text to media–to create reusable components. With those components, customizable page templates are assembled and can be implemented to build and publish pages at scale. Think of it as putting together web pages like Lego blocks.
Now, content editors have a strong foundation for efficient content personalization and distribution, as well as the flexibility to build endless pages without the need for development resources.
6️⃣ Enablement and training
The last step of this redesign process is providing resources that teach a client’s teams how to autonomously edit and build new web pages.
This includes walking through the benefits of a headless CMS, such as Contentful, that allows content editors to update website content across multiple channels and scale content production.
Explore More of the Best Website Redesign Practices 💡
And there you have it: 6 essential steps for an effective website redesign! Now that you understand an agency's process of redesigning a SaaS website, here are 10 examples of successful SaaS website redesigns to bookmark for future design inspiration!
Looking for more UI/UX design tips and tricks? 👇 We got you covered in the next edition. Until next time, happy designing!
Hannah Espejo
Marketing Coordinator @Webstacks
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