A bank’s website serves customers with different decisions to make. Someone opening a checking account needs to understand whether the account suits them and how to apply. Someone comparing savings promotions needs to understand the offer and its conditions before deciding whether to choose that bank.
Recurring barriers across an important customer journey can justify a website redesign. Other problems need a focused repair, a content refresh, or technical work rather than a full rebuild. The useful question is what needs to change so customers and your team can do the work the business needs.
Those tasks belong to broader buying journeys, which may include comparisons, conversations, and visits outside the website. Before deciding on a redesign, identify your customer profiles, the journeys they’re on, and the jobs your website needs to help them get done. Then look for where the site adds friction instead of helping.
Customers Repeatedly Struggle With Important Tasks
Start with the customer’s goal, then examine the site’s role in reaching it. For the bank’s prospective checking-account customer, the website might need to explain eligibility, costs, and the application process. A prominent “Apply” button is little help if the information needed to choose an account is missing or hard to understand.
If customers repeatedly struggle to open accounts because several connected steps leave them unsure or stuck, that is a serious reason to consider redesigning the journey. Include waiting and failures in this assessment: a stalled application interrupts the same customer goal as an unclear instruction. Ask the technical team to diagnose failures rather than assume new visuals will solve them.
Talk to sales and support about the questions they answer and the workarounds they explain. Ask which problems have become so familiar that nobody reports them anymore. The website team may never have heard about them, or an earlier report may have been forgotten or accepted as the status quo.
Collect specific examples of the task, affected pages, what the customer expected, and what went wrong. Where the cause is unclear, ask a researcher to observe relevant people attempting realistic tasks. An internal walkthrough can help identify questions, but it isn’t representative customer research.
A broken link may need an immediate repair. A journey that repeatedly fails across connected steps may need a larger change to its structure, content, and interactions. Before trying forms or other actions that could create real applications, bookings, or orders, agree on a safe test route and stopping point with the site owner.
The Structure No Longer Fits What You Offer
Businesses add products, expand services, and acquire other companies. A website that once made sense can become a collection of overlapping categories, inconsistent descriptions, or separate sites that customers have to piece together. The underlying business may have changed while the routes through its offers have not.
Look at the portfolio from the customer’s point of view. Can they understand which offer suits them, compare relevant options, and find the right next step? If acquisitions have left several websites serving overlapping needs, assess what should be consolidated and what still needs a distinct purpose.
Organize the experience around customer needs rather than reproducing your organization chart. Map the offers and customer needs first, then decide how the site’s structure should connect them. That may justify a substantial navigation and content redesign without requiring every visual element or the entire platform to be replaced.
The Phone Experience Doesn’t Support the Journey
In October 2026, about 60% of page views on sites tracked by Statcounter worldwide came from phones. That worldwide snapshot makes the phone experience worth serious attention, but it doesn’t tell you your own visitors’ device mix. Check the pages and journeys your customers actually use.
A phone visit can be someone’s first encounter with your business. Consider whether the site makes the offer understandable and helps them explore or act, rather than treating the narrow layout as a reduced desktop page. A bank customer should be able to find the information needed for their decision without fighting menus or losing essential conditions.
A considered purchase can also stretch across visits, devices, and channels. Someone might find you on a phone and return later on a computer, or do everything on the phone. Check whether customers can return to useful information or resume supported tasks without needless repetition, rather than forcing a device switch to finish.
NN/g’s guidance on a connected cross-channel experience offers useful ways to think about that continuity. If the current structure consistently prevents important phone tasks or makes returning difficult, a broader redesign may be needed. Establish the obstacle before choosing the solution.
Structural Barriers Make Accessibility or Compliance Difficult
If someone can’t complete an important task, such as using an application form with a keyboard, report the barrier now. Don’t wait for a redesign to address it. WAI’s guidance on interim accessibility repairs explains how to prioritize important tasks and high-impact changes.
Ask whoever maintains the site, with accessibility expertise where needed, whether a focused repair can resolve the problem. The same menu may create barriers across many pages, yet repairing that shared element may be enough. If the platform or site structure prevents necessary improvements, assess broader changes and check the result with appropriate expertise.
Regulated businesses also need to present applicable information in a way customers can find and understand at the appropriate stage. For a bank, ask the compliance team what an account-opening journey must disclose and when, rather than guessing where a notice belongs. If the existing design makes those requirements difficult to meet, document the constraint as part of the redesign case.
The consequences for customers, compliance, and reputation can make these barriers more urgent than cosmetic work. A redesign isn’t a compliance guarantee: it needs qualified assessment and can introduce new problems as well as remove old ones.
Your Team Struggles to Change or Maintain the Site
There are two sides to this problem. First, adding pages or changing the design may have become slow and brittle. If a routine change breaks several other parts of the site, ask the web team to document what is connected and why changes are difficult.
Second, content operations may no longer meet the business’s needs. Editors might struggle to keep essential facts current, reuse information reliably, or present updates in the forms marketers need. Ask for examples of failed updates and recurring workarounds, rather than a general complaint about the content management system used to publish pages.
Separate ownership, training, and workflow problems from genuine design or platform constraints. Clear responsibility may solve stale information, while inflexible page structures may need broader work. Define what the team needs to publish or change before deciding whether to repair components, redesign templates, or replace a platform.
Customers, Competitors, and the Business Have Moved On
Even a well-designed website can stop fitting the circumstances around it. Buying needs can change with the economy, devices can change how people explore an offer, and competitors can make useful improvements. The task is to identify which changes matter to your customers and where your site no longer supports them.
For a bank, interest-rate conditions might change the questions people bring about savings or borrowing. Review whether the products, explanations, and routes you emphasize still answer those questions. This is a reason to investigate changing needs, not to assume every customer wants the same product when rates move.
Competitors may become better at reaching relevant searches, explaining an offer, or connecting advertising to a useful landing page. Compare what their experience helps customers do with the obstacles on your own site. A newer-looking competitor isn’t enough evidence, but a meaningful gap across important journeys can justify a larger step forward.
Your business changes too. Brand identity, core messaging, and products may have evolved since the site was built. If the existing presentation can no longer convey who you serve, what you offer, and why it matters, the work may extend beyond replacing a logo or a few paragraphs.
Use results to help investigate, not to declare a cause. Falling inquiries could reflect a campaign change, different demand, or a measurement problem as well as site friction. Bring the analytics owner the affected pages, time period, and business changes so the redesign case rests on more than an unexplained dip.
Define the High Level Before You Commission the Work
Return to the bank example and define the jobs separately. The checking-account customer needs to decide whether the account fits and understand how to open it. The promotion-focused savings customer needs enough information about the offer and its conditions to decide whether to choose the bank.
Give your agency or internal team a short outline for each relevant profile:
- Who the customer is and what they need to achieve.
- What their broader buying journey looks like and where the website helps.
- Which obstacles add friction to that journey.
- What outcome you want to improve.
- What already works and should be preserved.
Those choices become the high-level brief the team needs before proposing the project.
Decide which problems need immediate repair and which call for changes across the journey. NN/g’s guidance on radical versus incremental redesign helps frame that scope judgment. The aim is to commission enough change to serve the customer and the business, with clear objectives rather than a request for a newer-looking website.
