Award-Winning Web Design for Credit Unions: How to Prepare for Your Redesign Project
As a credit union, your website is the digital front of your brand. Most credit unions go through a redesign every three years — optimizing high-performing pages, improving the user experience, and upgrading the aesthetic of their site. How do you know it’s time for a redesign? What can you do to prepare for one? And what can you expect from the process with an award-winning custom web design and development agency like CU CHAMP?
How to Tell if Your Credit Union’s Website is Outdated
Many credit unions have outdated websites. Whether it’s a poor user experience on mobile or an unappealing interface — an outdated site can get in the way of member sign ups and undermine your brand image. 83% of online users appreciate a website that looks attractive and up to date. While 42% of visitors say they’ve left a site because of poor functionality.
How do you know your website is outdated? Here are the signs to look out for:
Your metrics are underperforming — whether you’re seeing a dip in traffic or high bounce rates, your metrics tell a story about what is and isn’t working with your site. Your metrics also highlight where you should focus your redesign efforts.
Broken links — if specific pages can’t be found or accessed by your users then you could be alienating prospective members.
Poor user experience — signs to look for include: frustrated customers, high abandonment rates, confusing navigation, and a bad experience on mobile.
Slow loading speeds — speed is everything, 47% of users won’t wait more than two seconds for a website to load.
An outdated interface, images, or content — with so much competition in the form of cool neobanks and big-name banks with impressive branding, consumers have come to expect modern, sleek site designs from their credit unions.
Now you’ve reviewed your site, let’s take a look at how you can prep for a website redesign.
How to Prep Your Credit Union for a Website Redesign
There are several ways you can prepare for a website redesign. Here’s what you need to know:
Step 1: Note Your Current Performance Metrics
When considering a website redesign project, it’s always important to understand what is and isn’t working well with your current website. By mapping out your performance metrics, you can get a sense of your credit union website’s current strengths and weaknesses. Here are some key metrics to factor in:
Average time on page
Number of sessions per user
Bounce rates
Traffic sources
Conversion rates
Domain authority
By assessing your metrics, you’ll find key areas of focus and have the insights you need to create benchmarks that you can use to measure the success of your credit union redesign project.
Step 2: Identify Your Site’s Most Valuable Pages
Before you jump into a website redevelopment, you first need to pinpoint your most valuable pages (aka your MVPs). Your MVPs are the pages of your site that have the biggest influence on your business objectives.
Defining your MVPs helps you know which pages to prioritize during your project. By heading into your project with a clear view of your MVPs, you can focus on optimizing these pages to best serve your users’ needs and improve the impact on your business metrics.
Examples of MVPs for credit unions typically include:
Homepage
Services page
Rates page
Localized landing pages
Contact us page
Blog page
Step 3: Define Your Redesign Goals
A successful credit union redevelopment project depends on clearly-defined goals. The more concrete and measurable you can make your goals, the better — think “increase sign ups by 30%” vs “increase sign ups.”
Examples of goals include:
Convert more visitors
Improve visitors’ experience on mobile
Increase member sign ups
Improve SEO ranking
Improve the customer experience
At CU CHAMP, we work with you to map out the best strategies for helping you to meet your project goals.
What to Expect During the Redesign Process
The credit union website redesign process can feel overwhelming at first. That’s why it’s important to work with an agency with a clear process.
At CU CHAMP, we rely on a tried-and-tested roadmap to help our clients fulfill their project ambitions. We’ve used our five-step method to deliver hundreds of successful projects for our clients — scoring CUNA Diamond awards along the way.
Here’s what to expect:
Step 1: Discovery
Step one is all about mapping out your vision for your new website. We’ll talk about your goals, site needs, and client base. This step involves:
Idea exploration
In-depth discussions with you and your team
Market research
During this phase, we’ll brainstorm the best ways to meet your needs throughout the project. We’ll cover every aspect of your project to help best support its success – we’ll explore your marketing goals, user paths, design direction and more.
Step 2: Defining Your User Experience Strategy
In the second stage, we’ll take your insights and develop a clear user experience strategy. During this phase, we will:
Map out the varied paths your site users need to take to get to their desired action
Define the site structure, navigation and layout for each page on your site to support a seamless user journey for every visitor
Step 3: Design UI
Stage three is all about the aesthetics. During stage three, we’ll create hi-fidelity prototypes to help you envision what your website will look like once it goes live. We’ll break out our digital chisels to create a site with an engaging, striking interface that’s designed to accommodate the unique needs of your visitors.
Step 4: Development
Once you’ve signed off on your new site’s aesthetic, we’ll move ahead with development. During this stage in the process, we’ll take your design and build out a functional website in the WordPress CMS.
We’ll create custom-coded web pages — built to help you deliver a responsive, optimized, and user-friendly experience across every device and browser used by your visitors and members.
Stage 5: Deploy
Time to try out your new site with an internal launch. During this stage of the process, our team will test internally and send any required-edits back to development for refining. Then we’ll send the DEV site back to you for internal tests. Once you’re completely happy with your new site, we’ll take it live.
Why Trust Us
Since 2017, we've created hundreds of custom websites to exceed our clients' expectations. As specialists in web development and design for credit unions, we specialize in creating inspiring user experiences for credit unions. We’ve previously delivered CUNA Diamond award-winning websites for credit unions like WeStreet Federal Credit Union and Notre Dame Federal Credit Union. As a small but mighty team, we have over 15 years of combined expertise in design and development and have launched over 100 websites.
Web Design for Credit Unions: Site Features and Functions
From one-off projects to full website redesigns, we offer custom-made websites tailored to the unique needs of credit unions. Our deliverables typically include:
Flexible, stylish page layouts
Customizable rates pages and tables with automatic updates
Localized landing pages that are easy to create, edit, and search for
In-built ADA compliance plugins
Announcement ticker bars — for all your news and updates
Site-wide compliance fine print
SEO-optimized blogs
An integrated third-party online banking platform for all your members’ online banking needs
Partner with CU CHAMP for Your Credit Union Redesign Project
A website redesign as a credit union can feel daunting. But by partnering with an agency that specializes in web design and development for credit unions, you can get the support you need to help make your project a success.
Time and time again we've helped credit unions elevate their digital branch. As a multi-award winning design agency with expertise in creating inspiring user experiences for credit unions, we can help you create a striking website with impressive functionality.
