What to consider when undertaking a website restructure
Website restructures can be daunting for marketing teams. However, if managed well, they can deliver a significant uplift in engagement and conversions, often without having to re-write all your content.
Websites reflecting internal team structures underperform
We typically work with enterprise websites and knowledge-based organisations. These companies have particular organisational challenges that show up in their content structure.
What we observe in websites over 3 years old, is organic growth. As the company has evolved, so has the website resulting in content silos, confusing user journeys, and inconsistent messaging.
Crucially, their website mirrors the internal business structure. This is particularly typical of companies with silos and multiple sevice lines and business units.
Internal structures don’t make sense to customers
Websites built around internal structures typically focus more on ‘what we do’ rather than ‘how we can help’ solve customers’ problems. The ‘what we do’ approach makes customers work harder than necessary to understand your offer and decide whether you are the right fit for their needs.
There is a further complication when a journey spans more than one service and/or team. In this scenario, we often observe inconsistent messaging and design due to departmental priorities overriding customer needs.
Case studies and customer stories, of course, help. However, the customer must still join their own dots to understand how you can help them solve their problems, which is why they visited your website in the first place.
Departmental silos show up as closed customer journeys
No business wants to admit that it has departmental silos, but let’s face it, this is still the case for many large corporations. When a website mirrors the internal org structure, we see closed customer journeys.
A closed web structure doesn’t facilitate organic discovery. A customer may arrive on your website looking for one thing, find it, and then leave. While they’ve achieved their goal, you’ve missed an opportunity to engage that customer more deeply by exposing them to other customer challenges your organisation could help with.
Your company may not realise that the website reflects the internal structure and that this is contributing to poor website performance.
The first step is to visually map the existing website structure. If a website is built around internal structures, this is evident in the mapping, and this can be used to build a business case for buy-in and budget for fixing it.
Key considerations
While not an exhaustive list, here are a few key considerations when embarking on a website restructure.
- Use content / structure mapping and analytics to uncover opportunities to realign content to business objectives, fill content gaps and refresh (or delete) under-performing content.
- Gather information via stakeholder interviews to understand and align different parts of the business to common goals.
- Update your personas to be more solution or task-based, as these are more useful for website restructures.
- Re-working your website is the ideal opportunity to assess and fix website accessibility issues.
There’s almost always a performance upswing following a website restructure
A restructure addresses how your website is organised and how users get to your content, which almost always results in a performance upswing.
Better linking of services: Restructuring and linking content according to user needs will fix around 80 per cent of the issues with your website. Better linking enables users to navigate your website more easily, increasing engagement and conversions.
More explicit service offering: In our experience, the restructuring process creates greater clarity and alignment internally and, therefore, better communication of those services to customers.
Relevant and valuable customer journeys: Better structured content is easier to navigate with and without accessibility tools, resulting in more satisfied customers.
Get in touch if you would like to know more about assessing performance, mapping content, rebuilding for users, and ensuring accessibility at every step.