In this article, we explain what agencies and freelancers should bear in mind for a successful website relaunch with WordPress.

In addition to the creation of new web projects, the revision and improvement of existing websites in the form of a website relaunch are important aspects of everyday agency and freelancer life. There can be many reasons why customers want to and should revise their outdated website.

Many websites no longer meet the constantly changing technological standards or current web design trends. Their effectiveness can be significantly limited due to a lack of user-friendliness, slow loading times or neglected SEO optimization, meaning that customers do not benefit from their online presence. The task now is to analyze the various aspects of the website in question and identify potential for improvement in order to optimally prepare and subsequently execute the relaunch. 

In the following, we look at different levels that are particularly relevant for a website relaunch. 

Our recommendations for your optimal relaunch process

1. the preparation of your website relaunch

Goals and target group

Before you start the website relaunch, you should define precise goals with your customers. Define what you want to achieve with the relaunch so that the success of the website can be measured.

• Should the design be updated?
• Do you want to generate more traffic?
• How should the site be optimized for mobile devices?
• Should functions be added to the website? 

When determining the exact goals, it also makes sense to define a target group for the website. According to the well-known marketing slogan, it must be to the fish's taste, not the angler's, the communication, appearance and content should always be adapted to the users who visit the site. This is particularly important in the B2C business, the interaction with the end customer. Here, so-called personas are created to define the target group, which are examples of potential customers and are used to analyze purchasing/user behavior. However, it is also important in B2B business to define a precise target group and adapt the site to this.

Analysis

Before you design a new website, you should take a detailed inventory of the old website. This requires a detailed analysis of the current website by taking a close look at the structure and navigation, the page performance and content and the design. Together, these aspects should be critically and openly scrutinized. This step will give you a clear idea of what is already working and what needs to be improved. 

• Are the page structure and navigation intuitive to use?
• Are all pages easy to find?
• Which content is still relevant and which needs to be adapted?

Analysis tools can be used to analyze which content is primarily viewed and is therefore particularly relevant. This content should be retained and presented more prominently. It also makes sense to check whether content that is rarely viewed is simply not findable rather than irrelevant. The same applies to posts, images and plugins: Which are still up to date and fit for purpose? Which ones should be adapted or even replaced or deleted? 

Loading speed is also particularly important. It is important that the website loads quickly and is therefore easily accessible for visitors. Once again, various tools such as Google's PageSpeed Insights can be used to check loading times. The results of the analysis can then be used to define specific tasks during development. 

In addition to analyzing your own website, it always makes sense to observe the competition. The SEO tool Sistrix can be helpful in this analysis. This makes it possible to make the most important search terms in the Google ranking more transparent and thus find out what the competition is doing right. In comparison with others, the unique selling proposition (USP) of the website to be renewed can also be better highlighted and emphasized.  

Schedule and project management 

After you have defined the goals and target group with your customers and analyzed the existing website in detail, we recommend creating a precise schedule. Good project management is the linchpin in the course of a web project. In a project plan, you set out tasks, define milestones, deadlines and personnel responsibilities.

It is important to allow enough time for extensive testing, change requests and a buffer for customer feedback. A precise plan will help you keep track of everything and complete the website relaunch on time. It also allows you to provide your customers with more precise reporting, give a continuous outlook on the further course of the project and thus improve the predictability of the project for your customers.  

A thorough website relaunch checklist can also help to provide additional structure to the process and ensure that all important aspects are taken into account during the relaunch. This gives you a clear orientation of what needs to be achieved and makes it easier to measure the success of the relaunch.

Inform customers

After creating the project plan, it is important to inform your customers about it in detail. The general schedule, detailed process and personnel responsibilities should be communicated and discussed in detail. You can also inform customers directly about what needs to be delivered. This includes texts, images and access points. 

It is essential to involve customers at an early stage in order to identify any misalignments at an early stage. Unnecessary work and delays due to different ideas or late content deliveries can be avoided at best. 

Development environment

Once the tasks have been defined and the customers have been informed, there is one last step to take before development can begin: preparing the development environment. In order not to interrupt the current website operation and thus prevent a loss of revenue, the development of the new website should take place on a domain set up specifically for this purpose or in a staging environment. Good web hosting providers offer corresponding development domains whose content can then be easily transferred to the original domain. This enables a smooth transition from the old to the new website without any downtime.

2. the development of the website

Once the preparations and detailed planning have been completed, the next step is to develop the new website. The following aspects are particularly important: technology, design, page structure, content in the form of text, articles and images, plugins, permalinks and SEO optimization. You can find out what needs to be considered in detail in the following sections. 

Technology

A website should be built to the latest technological standards so that it is fast and secure. For the relaunch, you should therefore use the latest version of the systems used, such as the CMS. This also includes using the latest PHP version. The web space and database should also be cleared of unnecessary content, as this superfluous data could slow down the site. 

In addition to the website, the hosting should also meet the desired technical standards. Hosting with inadequate performance can significantly reduce the loading times and therefore the performance of the website. Although high-quality hosting providers are usually more expensive than well-known shared hosting offers, they pay off with more consistent and better performance as well as continuous support. 

Finally, in addition to the speed and security of a website, accessibility is also particularly important. Reliable hosting can be helpful here, but we also recommend making sure that the site is displayed correctly on different browsers. This can be checked by testing the website on different browsers and devices. For this purpose, modern browsers also offer developer tools with which the resolution of the website can be set responsively in order to test all screen sizes in the browser.

Design and page structure 

The design of a website should always be based on the corporate identity (CI) of a company. The CI defines various specifications under corporate design with regard to logo, claim, color spectrum, typography, visual language and other design elements, which you use to develop your new web design. This should represent your customers' company in the best possible way and fit in perfectly with it. For example, an up-and-coming streetwear fashion label needs a more unusual and less classic design than a long-established law firm. It is therefore advisable to discuss with your customers what they value, while at the same time making sure that the site is modern and appealing to the target group. 

The website should not only be easy and intuitive to navigate on mobile devices. The general page structure should be designed in such a way that users immediately understand how to use it. It is also important that all pages can be found easily and that the menu presents them clearly. Too much hierarchy and nested submenus should be avoided so that the navigation remains understandable. The findings from the preparatory analysis can help to identify problems with the previous page structure and adapt it accordingly. 

Optimization of texts

Even if the website is technically up to date and has been completely redesigned, the result cannot achieve the desired effect if the content is not optimized. A good website relaunch should therefore include content and text optimization. 

During text optimization, attention is paid not only to the structure and grammar, but above all to the relevance of the content. Texts must be kept up to date and information that is no longer relevant must be removed. In addition, new content can be added that contains references to new services or products that the company now offers your customers. 

It should not be forgotten that the language of the content should also be adapted so that the target group can find their way around it. Furthermore, texts should contain relevant keywords that are important for search engines. This text optimization from an SEO perspective is discussed in more detail in the SEO optimization section. 

Optimization of contributions

If there are posts, for example in the form of a blog, on the existing website, these must also be considered in the course of content optimization. Here it is important to check whether they are up to date, delete them, revise them or publish new, adapted posts. 

If the relaunch does not take place in the same CMS (e.g. WordPress) as before, the posts can be exported from the previous CMS and re-imported to avoid a manual transfer. Various tools can help with this, such as WP All Import when using the WordPress CMS. 

Optimization of the images

Last but not least, the visual content of the website, such as images or videos, is also considered. Here it should be checked whether they are of sufficient quality. As screens today have a higher resolution, outdated images can be displayed blurred and pixelated. During a relaunch, it is therefore advisable to replace them or, if possible, to edit them. 

In addition, the content shown in the images or videos should be up-to-date. This means: Are the objects or technical devices shown up to date? Are the people depicted wearing modern clothes and hairstyles? Appropriately modern images should be selected, recreated and integrated.
Once you have selected suitable images for the new website, you should check their compression. As images without compression take up a lot of data capacity, a lack of compression can have an impact on the loading times of a page. We therefore recommend recompressing old and new images before they are implemented on the page. 

Plugins

Plugins help to implement important functions of a website. At the same time, they contain a lot of program code that is loaded when the individual pages are called up. If too many plugins are activated, this reduces the speed and performance of the website. Therefore, the preparatory analysis should be used to identify and deactivate or delete plugins that are no longer required.

Newly used plugins should also be selected carefully. It is important to ensure that they are compatible with other plugins, do not require too many resources and are continuously developed by developers. The rule is: the fewer the better. We explain how you can further speed up your customers' new WordPress website in our article: How to improve the loading times of your WordPress website.

Permalinks

Google uses the URL to index all pages of a website and evaluates them. The pages identified as relevant in the analysis should therefore also be accessible on the new website under the same URL. This means that these pages can still be accessed by Google and are indexed accordingly. 

There are two options for pages that are no longer integrated on the new website after the website relaunch. Firstly, these pages can be deleted and Google can be notified of this deletion. Secondly, it is possible to set up a redirect to another page on the new website. The redirect code 301 can be used for this. Raidboxes offers an integrated function for this in its dashboard. There are also various plugins, such as the WordPress plugin Redirect, which initiates redirects in WordPress. However, you do not need this with Raidboxes. 

SEO optimization

Nowadays, search engine optimization is one of the essential tools for achieving a good ranking in search engines. You should therefore ensure that the new website is SEO optimized so that it ranks better in the search engines and thus generates more hits. 

An important part of this is content and text optimization from an SEO perspective. For visual content, the meta and alt tags should be checked and adjusted if necessary. These tags enable barrier-free use of the website and help search engines to classify an image thematically. The short text of the alt tag should reflect the content of the respective image and contain the keywords. For further search engine optimization of an image, the following aspects should also be considered: the file size (not too large), the file format (typical formats such as PNG, SVG, JPG or GIF) and the file name (integrate relevant keywords). 

In addition to visual content, it is important to adapt the texts on the website for more conversions. To do this, it makes sense to formulate the texts in such a way that they appeal to both search engines and people. For search engine optimization, you should therefore use specific keywords to ensure that the page appears in search results when users search for certain terms. 

Suitable keywords that should be included in texts and image tags can be found using various tools. Many of these tools are chargeable, but offer a variety of options and search settings. A simple Google search can also provide an overview of relevant keywords.

3. tests and improvements

Once development is complete and before the website relaunch can begin, we recommend a test phase to ensure that everything is working properly. All important functions as well as navigation and responsiveness should be tested. We also recommend checking the website on different devices and browsers to ensure that the functions work properly for all users and that the design looks the same on all devices. 

Relevant questions in the test phase can be:

• Is the navigation intuitive and easy to understand?
• Do all links work?
• Are the new pages displayed correctly on all devices and browsers?
• Are there still errors in the content?
• Are the plugins working properly?
• Does the page load with sufficient speed?

Testing and improvements should be carried out in close contact with your customers, as it makes sense for as many people as possible to visit the site and test it thoroughly. The test phase also provides time for final customization requests and content changes before the site goes live.

4. final announcement and live walk

If no more problems can be identified, the go-live can be planned. Your customers should be informed in good time about the imminent launch of the new website. Targeted promotions on the old website and additional incentives, for example in the form of a competition on the new website, are particularly useful in this context.

The actual publication, the go-live, should then ideally take place at a time when there is not much traffic on the website. Depending on the industry, this could be in the evening or at the weekend. This guarantees a smooth transition. 

5. monitoring and feedback

Once the new website has been relaunched, the work is not yet done. In the first weeks and months of the launch, you and your customers should monitor performance and user activity closely.

• Is everything running? Are there any sources of error that need to be rectified?
• Can traffic to the website be increased and sustained?
• Are there any subpages that are not yet performing well enough?

We also recommend regular WordPress maintenance so that your new website is always protected against security vulnerabilities and hacker attacks. We explain further reasons that will also convince your customers in our article on WordPress maintenance.

It can also be useful to obtain feedback directly from users. Surveys can be set up on the website or in the form of a newsletter for this purpose. Together with the findings from the monitoring, further potential for improvement can be identified and the website can be continuously optimized.

Conclusion on your successful website relaunch 

A website relaunch is a worthwhile investment for your customers that can help them achieve their goals and strengthen their online presence. From the selection of the technical platform to the optimization of content and texts to search engine optimization, there are many aspects that should be considered during a website relaunch. 

With the help of the tips in this article, you can ensure that you don't overlook anything and that the website is relaunched successfully and satisfactorily for your customers. You can use the individual sub-items as a checklist to keep a better overview and achieve an optimal result. 

Because the more successful the website relaunch, the more satisfied your customers will be and the more likely they are to place follow-up orders.