Your new brand is approved and now it’s time to update (or create) your website. It’s a momentous occasion! But it’s also one you shouldn’t take lightly.
Assuming your new brand has the right foundations — a clear strategy and the right visual and verbal directions to guide it — now’s the time to ask: Are you going to redesign your website or refresh it?
Let’s get clear on how these two approaches differ.
Website redesign
In short, a website redesign is more comprehensive than a refresh. It’s more than a new paint job and updated copy. In fact, a redesign might result in a site that behaves entirely differently from the one before it, including completely new ways for audiences to navigate and interact with it.
Website redesigns are about more than looks, and they go deeper than surface-level tweaks to design and messaging. They’re more strategic, considering (or reconsidering) the very structure of the site — the stories you’re trying to tell, through words and images, across each page.
You might opt for a redesign when you realize that your ideal customer profile has changed and you want to highlight features differently across the pages you currently have — or that you need entirely new pages to do that. A redesign approach can also help if your brand architecture has changed (perhaps through a merger or acquisition) and you need to explain this new relationship across your site.
In short, a website redesign is a (sometimes) complex answer to an often complex challenge.
Website refresh
Generally, a website refresh is less comprehensive than a redesign. It isn’t reconsidering every aspect of your website from the ground up but rather which of those aspects require revision.
That doesn’t mean brand should fall to the wayside during a refresh. Quite the contrary, in fact. Your brand is just as important and should be just as influential in guiding your approach.
So, when might you consider a refresh over a redesign? A refresh tends to make sense if your website is already working for the most part. You feel good about its structure and how it aligns with your brand, your audience, and the products or services you offer, but you might need to add a new feature page or cascade a small brand update across multiple points on the site. For instance, if you’ve recently undergone a brand refresh including an updated color palette, you’ll want to ensure that your website reflects these new colors — but that might not mean tearing the whole site down and rebuilding everything from scratch.
Ultimately, there’s no hard delineation between a redesign and a refresh. In both, the common thread is brand — that's where they start, that's where they end. And that's the only way they'll succeed.
