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Beware of This Prior to Redesigning Your WordPress Membership Website (Checklist)

Sep 15, 2022

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If you're thinking about changing your membership website's design This checklist for redesigning your site can help you plan for the redesign and ensure that you successfully finish the work.

When trends for web design are constantly changing so it is important to ensure that the layout of your site for members updated. This will ensure that keep your site relevant and appeal to your target audience, and continue to work on the latest gadgets.

There's plenty to take into consideration before beginning work on redesigning a website. When you've read this article and are ready to make a successful change to your membership site with no hiccups in the process or harming your customers.

Ready? Let's get started!

Get Help or Go it Alone?

This means there's no need to become a professional web designer to successfully carry out a revamp.

But, regardless of whether you pick a non-shelf template, you might want to find a freelance developer you can turn to in the event of a problem or you require a specific coding to be done with the theme. There are freelancers who suit a range of budgets through sites such as People Per Hour as well as Upwork.

If you've got some knowledge of the development and design aspects of designing your website for members it isn't the only thing to consider. For instance, search engine optimization.

You might want to consider employing an SEO specialist to ensure that your new website design will not cause problems in the visibility of search engines and also a drop in organic website traffic.

The Site is being planned for Redesign

If you are considering designing your membership site, planning is vital. Planning is probably even essential for a redesign as opposed to creating a brand new website completely by the ground up.

This is mainly because there are your current members and audience to consider. If you don't have a strategy there's a higher chance of something getting wrong is higher so if you don't want to lose your members then you must make sure you have a strategy prior to starting with your redesign of your membership website.

If you're planning to redesign your website, it is important to examine your data from analytics to determine how your visitors are interacting with your existing website, and what pages are most sought-after. If you notice that certain websites that are attracting a significant number of visitors, or there's some content with higher conversion rates than the other pages Be sure to figure out what's so special about the pages. Try to incorporate these features to your new design.

Alongside services such as other Google Analytics, heat map tools will give you a good insight into how visitors interact on your site. When you can see where customers are clicking or scrolling on your site, you can see whether anything is in need of changing, such as images that look like buttons or even buttons that nobody is clicking on.

It is also recommended to

Create a list of the plugins you're currently using

Check the list of plugins that you plan to install.

Find out if anyone is available who will be helping you in your site's redesign.

If your site's membership is busy during certain seasons, try to avoid scheduling your redesign for these periods.

Select a Methodology for Redesign the Site Redesign

Another thing to think about is whether or not you wish to go through a full website redesign, or if you want to make gradual adjustments to your site in time.

If you've got an unassuming website that doesn't require a great deal of custom code You could carry out the full revamp in one shot in a brief amount of time. Alternatively, you might be a huge website, with many custom options and integrations that require a slower approach to being redesigned.

Make Sure You Test Your Backups

Before beginning making any changes, you must check your backup method for your website. Perhaps, you've been backing up your website every day. You must however, verify that you can restore those backups without issues.

If something goes wrong on the current version of your website, you need to know that it is possible to quickly go to your previous version with no issues.

Keep Your Members In the Loop

Prior to launching designing your new membership site it is important to do everything you can to let your audience and members know what to expect. Consider sending out a message to your email newsletter subscribers and putting a notice on your site or inside your member's space.

It is also worth thinking of putting up an coming soonor in maintenance page while you're redesigning your website. When you're working with WordPress, there are some maintenance mode plugins that can help to accomplish this.

Something else to think about is inviting some of your members for testing or providing feedback on your new style either before or once when you've launched the design.

Post-Redesign Tests

While you must test the new version of your website before you launch it however, it is also important to carry out rigorous testing after its gone live.

Alongside testing the user experience, and making sure that all is functioning according to plan, you should examine the information gathered from a tool such as Google Analytics to monitor key indicators like time spent on site, bounce rate, as well as your conversion rate.

Your new site might look great. However, if it's not connecting with your audience or isn't performing as well as the older site, you'll need to get involved.

Sometimes, the redesign could be so bad that you'll need to revert back to the previous site. However, it's more likely that you'll have to make a few modifications after it's launched in response to feedback from users and the data from your testing.

Do not stop monitoring

Final thoughts

Designing your own membership site could be fun and exciting. However, it can be an extremely risky undertaking when you're not properly planning the project.

While testing may not be as enjoyable than doing the design elements of website redesign It's equally important.

 Do you have any questions about redesigning your membership site? If so, then inform us in the comments section below.

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