How to upgrade your website?

Do you want your website to be easily discoverable by the right audience? Once potential customers reach your site, do you want them to stay engaged? How about if your goal isn't just to attract visitors? What if you want to get them to take action?

There’s really just one solution to this problem, apart from creating a whole new website from scratch, which is going to cost you tons of time and money. The solution is to just make your existing site better. 

Website upgrades that directly lead to improved design, more intuitive navigation, fresh content, and underlying technical enhancements are needed to nurture customer trust and sustain the growth of your business. 

Today, we’ll teach you what those are, how to approach them, and what to do if you want to improve your metrics.

Reasons for upgrading your website

Why upgrade at all? The Internet evolves. New technologies appear. Customers evolve, and their preferences shift. Even the humblest of your competitors may find themselves rising in the search engine rankings through regular digital investments.

A website upgrade means better serving the people who arrive there and, in turn, serving your goals as a founder. On the surface, upgrading can mean more modern graphics, cleaner code, and streamlined content. 

But look deeper, and you’ll find that the process is about evolving your online identity. Your business might have changed since the site was first built. Perhaps you’ve discovered new customer needs or expanded your offerings.

A website upgrade brings your online presence up to speed. It reflects your latest value proposition and ensures that every visitor’s first impression is true to who you are now.

There’s also a strategy with this upgrade process. A website that has become slow to load may be silently frustrating your audience. A navigation menu that forces them to hunt for information can send them away, never to return. 

Upgrading addresses these friction points by enhancing site structure, improving load times, and refining how your message is delivered. Over time, these subtle shifts accumulate into a more engaging experience, more loyal users, and stronger brand perception.

The most important website metrics

A website exists to serve a purpose, whether that's generating leads, selling products, or disseminating information. If your current website isn’t achieving these objectives, an upgrade is not just desirable but necessary.

Any decision to upgrade a website should be guided by metrics. Those are the clear signals of how real people use (or don’t use) your site. 

Metrics distill countless human interactions into more understandable patterns. Tracking them helps you see where improvements are most needed, measure the impact of changes you make, and chart a more confident course forward.

Look at the five most important metrics you can check right now to see if you need an upgrade:

1. Overall site traffic. The most basic measure – the total number of visits to your website over a given period. Traffic growth indicates growing brand awareness. Stagnant or decreasing traffic could be a sign of underlying problems.
2. Bounce rate. This metric reflects the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate suggests that users aren't finding what they expect or that something's causing them to quickly abandon your site (poor design, slow load times, unclear content). Lower is better.
3. Time spent on site. If the average duration visitors spend on your website is high, that means you have engaging content and a positive user experience. Lower time can suggest that users are struggling to find information or find your content irrelevant.
4. Click-through rate. If you have calls to action on your website (buttons, links, ads), CTR measures the percentage of users who click on a specific element compared to the number of users who viewed that element. A low CTR means that your calls to action are ineffective and/or that you're targeting the wrong users.
5. Conversion rate. This measures the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action. Depending on your business goals, this could be a purchase, a sign-up for your mailing list, or a form submission. This metric is vital for understanding how well your website drives your key objectives.

The website upgrade process

A website upgrade is not just a cosmetic exercise. At Merge, our process typically involves:

1. Analysis. This step involves a thorough evaluation of your current website metrics, coupled with competitor analysis and a clear articulation of your business objectives. It’s similar to having a business plan before launching a new product.
2. Design. Creating a visually appealing, user-friendly layout that aligns with your brand and matches your business goals. The design must be both attractive and functional.
3. Development. Implementing the design with the appropriate technology and adhering to best practices, particularly in terms of SEO.
4. Content. Refining existing content or creating new content to provide value to your target audience.

Let’s go over the design and development sections.

Design improvements

When visitors reach your website, their initial impression shapes their entire experience. When design feels cohesive and approachable, it guides them naturally toward what they came for. 

For that reason, every piece of the layout, color scheme, navigation menus, and headings should be clear and purposeful. The visitor needs to understand at a glance where to find the information they’re looking for and should never feel lost or overwhelmed.

A good starting point is making your website look just as good on a smartphone as it does on a laptop. If visitors browsing on their phones find the text too small or the images poorly arranged, they are less likely to stay. 

Clear headings, logical menu structures, and simple color palettes help users move smoothly from one page to another. Visual clutter, however, slows them down or makes them leave altogether.

Content also matters for design improvements. High-quality articles, blog posts, and well-placed calls to action add depth and value to a site, while testimonials, customer reviews, and examples of your expertise lend credibility and create a sense of trust.

Overall, design improvements focus on fixing navigation, responsiveness, helpful content, and thoughtful use of visual elements.

Development improvements

Once the design is in place, it’s time to refine the technical stuff. Development improvements involve streamlining the site’s underlying code and resources so it loads and runs as efficiently as possible. The objective is to present your users with content without delays or frustrating waits.

One approach is to make your code as clean and concise as possible by reducing the size of each file that needs to be downloaded. Faster load times improve the visitor’s experience and can lead to better rankings in search results since performance is a factor that search engines value.

Images should also be carefully optimized since they often account for large portions of a page’s file size. Redirects and unnecessary API calls should be minimized to avoid slowing down the browsing experience. 

Additionally, hosting content on a content delivery network (CDN) can make users around the world receive data from the nearest server, which shortens their wait.

All these improvements work together to create a website that feels responsive and reliable. 

The technical underpinnings are harder for visitors to notice directly, but they will appreciate the difference when pages load quickly, links work properly, and resources are delivered effortlessly.

Free website metrics improvement checklist

What if we told you that you can sort out all the most important design and development improvements right now? We have created a Notion checklist that will guide you through website metrics improvements and is completely free of charge.

This checklist will serve as a structured guide to guarantee that all aspects of user experience are addressed during your design, development, or redesign phases. 

It is segmented into various categories, each representing a crucial aspect of UX design, such as accessibility, navigation, responsiveness, and visual design.

Each item on the checklist represents a specific usability or design principle, accompanied by:

1. Descriptions will highlight the importance of the principle and how it contributes to overall UX.
2. Tips will provide actionable advice for implementing the principle effectively.
3. Examples will offer practical illustrations of how the principle can be applied.

Wrapping up: look beyond the data

Numbers matter, but they are not the end of the story. Behind every metric is a human being. Upgrading your website is about making it more inviting, more intuitive, and more aligned with the truth of what your business or brand offers. 

The essence of a website upgrade is simple: know your visitors, understand your goals, and use metrics as a compass to guide your improvements. In doing so, you transform your online presence into a space that welcomes everyone to stay a while, learn something new, and become part of your ongoing story.