Redesigning a website is a long and complex project, in which web performance doesn’t always have the right place. In this article, we’ll look at how to integrate web performance into your redesign project.
The redesign of a website can be broken down into 3 main areas:
- analysis (of its ecosystem, strengths and weaknesses),
- action plan (objectives, tree structure, content, etc.)
- and measurements (are there variations in the KPIs monitored?), with the corrections they imply.
In fact, web performance is a subject that all too often arrives at the end of the cycle, when it comes to implementing measures.
Yet it’s useful to reposition web performance earlier, to avoid it becoming a pain later on. The result would be more work for technical teams and a lower conversion rate for the business.
How to integrate webperf into a redesign project?
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- Continue optimizing the current site
As we wrote above: redesigning a site is a long and complex project. As a result, the launch date of the new site is very often postponed (from a few weeks to several months).
While waiting for the new site to be launched, the site in production serves as a showcase for users. It must continue to live and be optimized so that it continues to generate sales. Otherwise, there’s a risk that the site will fall into disrepair and that users will move on to a competitor’s site…
Obviously, no matter how good your technical team is, maintaining the current site and developing the new one at the same time is a very difficult task.
It’s therefore necessary to get organized and define the investment required for each of these sites.
Many of our customers, for example, have chosen to plug Fasterize into the “old” site, in order to concentrate the efforts of their technical teams on the launch of the new one.
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- Banish preconceived ideas about the new site’s performance
It’s often assumed that “new site” is synonymous with “high-performance”.
Often, poor site performance is the reason for migrating to a new platform. But this is not always the case: migration alone is not always enough to achieve good performance!
That’s why it’s so important to apply webperf best practices throughout the entire project, to ensure that your site performs at its best.
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- Think “webperf” from the start of the project
When we say that webperf best practices must be applied throughout the project, we mean right from the start.
Each feature must be evaluated in the light of its added value and impact on the site: is it relevant to display an advertising zone there? Don’t widgets add too much weight to the page?
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- Abandon the idea of doing everything yourself
Despite the importance of webperf, it’s common not to see all the best practices applied when redesigning a website. There are 3 reasons for this:
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- time: redesigning a site requires a great deal of work and involvement on the part of all teams. It’s therefore understandable that technical teams don’t think of all the best practices and/or don’t have the time to apply them.
- expertise: webperf evolves on a daily basis, and applying it requires in-depth knowledge of the subject.
- budget: certain best practices represent a significant development cost. It is sometimes more economical to call on outside partners. You wouldn’t dream of redeveloping a CDN, would you? 😉
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- Maintaining performance
Web performance is an issue that runs through the entire redesign project, but it doesn’t stop when the new website is released. To maintain good performance, the subject must be addressed on an ongoing basis. Just like the web in general, performance rules are constantly evolving and need to be applied on an ongoing basis to keep a site up to speed.
A concrete example: Celio.com
As part of its redesign project, celio.com chose to take up a major challenge: improving its web performance.
Julien Debray, front office IT manager, and Thibaut Duteil, technical architect, share their experience in this article.
