This article will take you through the decision making process to help determine if a website redesign is a better investment for your institution, or if a refresh is a smarter use of your budget and time for your specific situation. By asking yourself and your broader team the following 10 critical questions – grouped by category – you should be able to narrow down your options so your choice is clear. Working closely with decision makers within each category to determine your next step is important for success.
Reviewing the below questions before approaching this topic with your team will help you prepare talking points for internal discussions and plan ahead to proceed with confidence.
Technology Considerations
- Is your CMS platform able to be updated with continued support from a security standpoint, and if so for how long before a rebuild or redesign is required?
- Do you want to move to a new CMS platform altogether?
When moving to a new CMS, there are some common considerations, including frustration about CMS features, lack of product support and security concerns.
Often institutions realize that their CMS is limiting their site management in some way and would like to consider a different CMS that better meets their needs. With so many CMS options and so much evolution in features in the last few years, it’s tempting to see what may be out there.
Some institutions may be on a CMS technology version that does not have longer term support from both a security and feature set standpoint. If you have another 2-3 years of technology and security support, then a refresh is still a viable option for you to make visual or content changes and still have the platform supported long enough to make the project worthwhile.
Other institutions may be faced with a CMS that is sunsetting by a certain date. Unless you have very recently redesigned, you’re likely better off considering a redesign as the replatform process is something that will happen as part of a redesign project anyway.
Moving to a new CMS platform without a redesign (often called a “rebuild” or “migration”) is an option if you don’t want to make any visual, feature or content changes, but if your site is already a few years old already it’s generally more efficient to handle moving to an updated CMS version or new platform along with a website redesign.
UX Considerations
- Are there issues with overall user journeys on your site that might be impacting conversions and overall user experience?
- Does your navigation and current menu structure generally work for the way your members or customers need to interact with your products and services?
Your website should be a digital branch – supporting conversions in every site interaction. A UX audit would reveal some of the concerns and either lead to the conclusion that a website redesign is your best bet, or reveal some quick wins that can yield results. For example, if it’s not immediately clear what the key action(s) are on the page, revamping the masthead section could be an easy solve without fully redesigning. If the issues are much greater, however, then a conversion-focused strategy and design will yield greater long-term results.
Likewise, institutions may struggle with their site architecture and related menus. Depending on the severity of the problem, this could be accomplished through a redesign or site re-architecture project.
- Changing menu labels and designs and moving pages around in the architecture may or may not be a large project depending on the site. Typically, this becomes larger than initially expected because considerations about menu design, SEO/GEO best practices and net-new pages/layouts need to be weighed.
- If your major pain point seems more specific to a section of your current site, then perhaps a targeted refresh focused on a single product line (think refreshing the mortgage section, for example), might allow for a strategy and design team to target a new layout for a product or category, perhaps weaving in financial literacy and calculators alongside product details by introducing a new component or two to a product page to enhance the user experience, or adding a solution finder to the home page to better surface content found elsewhere on the site.
- In contrast, website redesign projects include an audit of the entire site content to re-strategize your site architecture and navigation menus – balancing out UX and SEO/GEO best practices, scalability, content creation and overall project budget.
Content Considerations
- Has your brand tone evolved and you need to rewrite content on your website to align?
- Is your SEO/GEO strategy regularly maintained, or did you not consider SEO since before AI became a factor?
Bill Gates made the phrase “Content is King” famous when he attempted to emphasize the role of good content over the technology used to deliver it. If your content is dated or your content doesn’t match what people are looking for on search engines or AI agents, a fast and easy-to-navigate website becomes useless.
Full website copywriting is a large and tedious task, and if your content needs a total overhaul either to align with an updated brand or overhaul the entire site’s content strategy, this is most efficiently done as part of a redesign project. A redesign will include more modern content presentations – scannable for human users yet structured for search engines and AI agents to consume. A redesign will also consider best practices for headlines and types of content on each page to maximize the value of that content against user goals.
If you simply want to expand a section for better SEO (e.g. location pages) or rewrite a subset of pages to maximize their value, that work can be done as a smaller project with your current site. Be mindful of any technical considerations with your current site that may be inhibiting content scannability.
Design Considerations
- Have your logo, colors, fonts, or other brand elements evolved and you need your website to align?
- Does the underlying site structurally still work and the issue with the design is purely visual, or do the page layouts and site components no longer meet your needs?
Think of a kitchen – if the location of the oven, dishwasher, sink and refrigerator are in the right spot, the kitchen functionally may work even if you don’t like the aesthetic. The same is true for a website – if the underlying structure works and all you want to change are the visuals like a new color palate, imagery or font, then a refresh will give your site an impactful facelift with low effort. To scope this, an agency will need to closely review your brand and understand what can be accomplished through basic code updates (e.g. CSS changes) and where a designer may need to get involved to guide the refresh effort and ensure ADA conformance can be maintained with the new color palate, for example.
If, however, you want to make changes to the site’s overall layout and components, a redesign project will provide the strategic guidance to reimagine your website both visually and functionally.
Timeline Considerations
- How long do you have until you need the site updated?
- How often does your bank or credit union budget for a full redesign?
If you need to have the site updated for a brand refresh in a couple of months, or your CMS platform is ending support in a faster timeline than a redesign affords, you should consider a refresh or a rebuild (or migration) project to hit the shorter timeline. It’s rarely more cost effective to do these incremental updates, but by minimizing the scope to a smaller project the timeline will always be shorter. Note that your agency will put parameters around the project to ensure you successfully meet your deadline.
To maximize cost efficiency, consider the cadence with which your bank or credit union approves budgets for website updates or redesigns. If you are able to proactively budget for a redesign every 3-5 years, you might be able to plan ahead for timing your redesigns with the inevitable changes that accelerate the need to update your website anyway. Interested in learning how ZAG could help you plan a roadmap to keep your website updated more proactively? Reach out for a call with our team today!
