Essential tools and resources for a successful redesign

Undertake the website redesign is not an easy task. Often, it becomes necessary to keep pace with technological developments, market trends and user expectations. A successful redesign can transform your customers' experience, improve site performance and strengthen your company's brand image. However, it's important to choose the right tools for the job. This article will guide you through the tools and resources you need to carry out this complex but essential process.

Google Analytics provides detailed information on user behavior on websites, tracking their activities, pages visited and actions taken. This helps companies understand customer browsing patterns, device functionality and user experience, enabling them to make the best decisions for optimizing your website and business strategy.

Google Search Console is Google's free SEO monitoring and optimization tool. It allows you to monitor indexing, correct technical errors, analyze backlinks, and evaluate a website's overall SEO performance in search results.

Hotjar and Crazy Egg offer tools for creating heatmaps and session replays, essential for understanding how users interact with websites. They enable in-depth analysis of user behavior, making it easier to optimize and improve the user experience.

WordPress offers many advantages, such as ease of use, being free and open source. Let's not forget its e-commerce compatibility, forum support, blogging optimization and SEO-friendliness. However, it also has its drawbacks, such as the potentially high cost of customization, the need for frequent updates, and security issues linked to its status as an open source platform. What's more, managing the MySQL database and the PHP code on which it's based can be quite complicated.

PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce platform that offers a high degree of customization and requires some technical knowledge to set up and maintain. Shopify, on the other hand, is subscription-based, more user-friendly and offers integrated functionality, but with less flexibility. Consider that PrestaShop is best suited to medium-sized to large online stores, offering scalability and multilingualism. Shopify, on the other hand, is ideal for small and medium-sized online businesses, offering an easy-to-use user interface and interesting options such as abandoned basket recovery.

Adobe XD is a lightweight vector graphics editor and prototyping tool. It offers features such as Repeat Grid for replicating groups of objects and an editor for creating interactive prototypes without third-party plug-ins. It also includes an asset panel for managing styles. Sketch, on the other hand, requires third-party extensions for prototyping, but offers advanced document grid options and supports external plug-ins. It should also be noted that Adobe XD is available on different OSes such as Windows and MacOS, while Sketch is limited to MacOS.

Figma is a collaborative tool for imagining, prototyping, developing and collecting feedback on a single platform. It simplifies and makes transparent the creative process, enabling real-time joint modification and large-scale feedback gathering. As a result, it facilitates teamwork to move design forward faster, eliminating the difficulties of synergy and bringing designers together in a fluid, inclusive workflow.

InVision is a complete platform, offering tools such as Freehand for real-time wireframing, Studio for screen design and interactive prototyping, and Inspect for creative handover and collaboration with developers. It enables static designs to be transformed into realistic interactive models for mobiles and computers, without coding, and feedback to be collected directly.

Unsplash and Pexels offer beautiful royalty-free images and photos, available free of charge for any type of project. These platforms offer millions of high-quality images and videos, with no need to mention the author. All images on Pexels and Unsplash are free to use, even for commercial purposes, under their own licenses, promoting flexible, unrestricted use for users.

Adobe Stock and Shutterstock are stock photography services that offer high-quality premium images for creative projects. Adobe Stock stands out for its integration with Adobe Creative Cloud and its ability to deliver photos on demand, while Shutterstock is renowned for its more affordable subscription plans. Both platforms offer thousands of hand-picked images and illustrations.

FontAwesome is a popular, open-source Internet icon library used by many designers and developers. It provides vector icons and social logos for websites, functioning as a font composed of symbols and pictograms. Google Fonts, on the other hand, is a royalty-free font library that collaborates with foundries and the design community worldwide. It offers a wide range of free fonts for various projects, making high-quality typography accessible to all.

GitHub is the most popular distributed version control system used for open source and commercial software development. It offers significant benefits for individuals, teams and companies, enabling programmers to view the entire progress of their changes, decisions and progress on any project in one place.

BrowserStack is a renowned platform for cross-browser compatibility testing. It validates a website's responsiveness across more than 3,000 browsers and iOS and Android devices, ensuring that apps and websites work properly for every user, every time.

The W3C Validator is a service designed to help web developers validate the CSS of their websites. It checks CSS1, CSS2, CSS3 and CSS4 properties, pointing out errors and suggesting improvements. It can validate CSS by URI, file or direct input, and may differ from the HTML validator, which checks documents based on what works with real browsers.

SEMrush and Ahrefs are two popular SEO tools, each offering unique tools for keyword and backlink analysis. SEMrush is a comprehensive digital marketing software suite with a particular focus on keyword research, while Ahrefs is recognized primarily for its backlink analysis. Over the years, Ahrefs has added many new features, positioning itself as a direct competitor to SEMrush.

Yoast SEO is an SEO extension for WordPress, widely recognized for its ability to optimize sites for search engines such as Google, Bing and Yandex. It provides detailed SEO analysis, enabling or disabling features such as "Target Query" and "SEO Analysis", essential for improving publications.

GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights are essential tools for monitoring website performance. GTmetrix is a monitoring solution that enables users to track their websites in real time, measuring indicators such as loading speed, blocking time and user experience. PageSpeed Insights, meanwhile, is an online device that provides reports on web page performance and offers concrete suggestions for improvement.