Redesigning your website can be a big undertaking. Even if you’re not doing the actual redesign yourself but are trusting that technical aspect to someone else, preparing yourself and your business for this redesign can be a lot. So if this is something you’ve got on the books, it’s wise to think through things properly before getting too far into the process.

To help you with this, here are three things to consider when redesigning your website.

Why You’re Considering A Redesign

The first thing you’ll want to pin down is why you think you need to do a redesign in the first place.

While having a fresh website can offer great benefits to your business, it can also cause some friction as well. Because of this, you’ll want to check in with yourself to ensure that the reasons you’re wanting a redesign are legitimate.

According to Matt Ellis, a contributor to 99Designs.com, some of the best reasons to redesign a website include getting rid of out-of-date technical aspects, you’re not able to meet your business goals with what you currently have, you’re doing an overall rebrand for your company, or the website you current have is too restrictive to what you need or what you want to do. If any of these reasons ring true for you as to why you’re wanting to go through the process of a website redesign, then it’s likely that a redesign is the right move and will prove to help propel your business forward in the future rather than just being a stumbling block.

Emerging Design Trends

If it’s been a while since you’ve designed your website, you might be tempted to go with something that looks a lot newer and takes advantage of some emerging design trends.

Although this can be a good idea for your redesign, it could also prove to be not a great idea, too. According to Jenny Traster, a contributor to Business2Community.com, some of the emerging web design trends will work great for almost all websites. But you should also be careful when following trends, as they can go out of style and appear dated very quickly as well. And the last thing you want to be doing is redesigning your website too often because you chose a design element that couldn’t stand the test of time.

How To Improve Usability

As far as how your website will now be designed, Cadabra Studios and Medium.com share that your overall objective should be to have your website be easy to use for all of your visitors. This means that your navigation is easy for people to follow, the web design is compatible for mobile devices, and you’re employing all other positive UX design principles.

If you’re thinking about redesigning your website, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you make the most of this project.