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3 Tools to Use When Planning a Website Redesign

Written by Jasmine LeBlanc | 6/20/18 5:26 PM

When you are redesigning a website, that means you have new goals you want your website to accomplish. How do you accurately measure if your new website will hit those goals? Through analytics tools, of course! You should install these tools two to three months prior to redesigning your website so that you can collect data that will help you make informed decisions regarding your new website goals and its content organization. We are going to cover the top three tools to use and discuss why they are so valuable.

Top 3 Tools to Install

All three of these analytics tools will provide you with insight on how your website is performing and how your website visitors use your website.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that gives you a wide range of reports that provide you with deep insights into your website’s performance. The reports detail specific metrics such as what source brought your visitors to your website, how long they stayed on your site, what pages they viewed, and much more.

This is an essential tool to have linked with your new website so that you can see what’s working, and more importantly, what’s not. You can use the Goals tool in Google Analytics to set up your website goals and easily track them in one, easy location. By keeping track of these metrics, you will be able to track the success of your website redesign goals.

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2. Hotjar

Hotjar is a tool that allows you to see how users interact with your website by showing you heatmaps. These heatmaps will help you visualize how visitors use your site. Through this and other features, such as visitor recordings, you are able to understand what your users want. You can see what content they click on and what content they ignore.

With these insights, you can see if your new website is doing what you intended it to do, and if not, you can make changes.

3. Google Search Console

When redesigning your website, you need to consider what keywords and topics you’ll use on your new website to help your search engine optimization efforts. With Google Search Console’s detailed reports on search appearance and search traffic, you can optimize your content for search engine rankings as you plan your new design.

Through this tool, you can see what keywords and topics your website currently ranks for and what people click on and don’t click on. This information will help you optimize your content around your SEO strategy for your website redesign. And when used in conjunction with the two previous tools, you’ll be able to determine whether your new website is successfully meeting its goals.

 

These tools are essential to show how successful your current website is so that you ensure your redesign plan accounts for your past mistakes. Using these tools on your new site will give you powerful insight into how well your new website is tracking against your goals.

This means that when planning your redesign, be sure that you select a content management system that will allow you to add these beneficial tools. To narrow down your options, check out our blog post on choosing a content management system.

Good luck and happy redesigning! If you want to ensure your redesign process goes smoothly, then click below to download our free template that will help you stay on track!