Your website is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy and your company’s most important sales and marketing tool. It’s important to update it regularly to ensure it provides the information current and prospective customers expect. After all, if your website isn’t converting visitors to customers, it’s costing you money. Here are 9 signs it’s time to redesign (or at least update) your website:
1. Your website isn’t mobile-friendly or responsive
Recently, Google’s John Mueller gave an update about the new Mobile First Index. Mueller confirmed that desktop-only sites will be completely dropped from the index in March 2021. Meaning, only the content that exists on the mobile version of the website will be indexed and ranked in search results.
The reason for this update? Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day with 63% of searches originating from mobile devices. Today, it’s not enough to have a mobile-friendly website. Your website needs to be responsive to all types of browsers and devices through adaptive design.
2. It doesn’t reflect your brand
It isn’t uncommon for a company’s branding or mission to evolve over time. Your brand identity acts as a filter to ensure that your image is both cohesive and consistent across all print and digital media platforms. If your brand has evolved but your website hasn’t evolved with it, it’s time for an update. It’s important that your website reflects the story your business is currently trying to tell.
3. Your website is more than 5 years old
There is no set expiration date for a website, but a good rule of thumb is every three to five years. That’s because technology changes quickly including the best practices and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies needed to be successful.
If your website is more than five years old it’s time to start thinking about a redesign. At this age, it’s easy to the value of website redesign because it can have significant impacts on your business. Especially if your competitors have websites that look and function better than yours.
4. Your site is not delivering the traffic, leads and conversions you expect
If you’ve seen significant drop-offs in traffic and leads, visitors to your website are clearly not finding what they’re looking for, and you might want to consider a site upgrade to bring them back.
Declines in traffic, leads and conversions are often the results of poor user experience. To provide a great experience you must ensure easy navigation, valuable and engaging content, and clear calls-to-action all while maintaining a visually clean design.
5. It’s difficult to make minor updates
Making minor changes to your content, adding a blog post, or updating small elements of your website shouldn’t be difficult. If your website platform makes it difficult or time-consuming to make these minor changes, you may want to consider building a new website using a new content management system (CMS). There are many open-source CMS options to choose from such as WordPress that make adding, creating, and updating simple.
6. Your website is lacking functionality
For a restaurant, this may mean integrating a reservation system or for retail upgrading your website to include eCommerce so customers purchase online or select in-store pickup. If you’re a service-based business, like a doctor’s office, features like online appointment scheduling, a patient portal and HIPAA-compliant forms can increase the number of website visitors that convert to new patients. Maybe these aren’t features you needed when you first launched your website, but as your business has grown and you’ve learned more about your customer base, think of what improvements you could make to your website to help serve them better.
7. Your website is slow
Aim for a loading time under 5 seconds. If you’re not sure how quickly your site loads, Google offers a page load speed test that will pinpoint areas for improvement. Slow loading speed could be caused by a number of reasons: heavy unoptimized images and videos, underpowered hosting, overuse of plugins, and even an old, poorly performing theme. Depending on the causes and age of your website, it may be more cost-effective to redesign your site than to fix critical issues.
8. Your bounce rate is high
Your bounce rate is extremely important. If you’ve been pouring resources into blogging, SEO, and marketing to drive traffic to your website – yet the second they access your homepage (or any other page), they bounce right off of it – you have a problem. You’re losing leads and potential clients.
A high bounce rate indicates that you’re doing something wrong, either with content, with the navigation, or the overall look and feel of your website. On average, a bounce rate between 40-60% is considered to be okay although this varies depending on your industry.
You can check your bounce rate via Google Analytics. Log in and go to Acquisition >> Overview tab. If it’s high, start with following these tips to reduce your bounce rate. If it doesn’t help, it’s time for a website redesign, and we do suggest seeking some expert advice in user experience and user interface design. UX and UI.
9. To improve security and protection
We’ll be honest, new or old, any website can be hacked. The experience is stressful and painful, especially when you lose information, and/or have to build everything from scratch. However, older websites rely on older technology, therefore chances of a security breach are higher. Taking steps to improve security and protection is increasingly important if your website processes any type of financial transactions or transmits personal health information (phi) such as birth dates, social security numbers, addresses, and account numbers.
Request a Complimentary Website Audit
The experienced team at TargetMarket starts every website design project by examining what is and is not working effectively for each and every business we work with. Click the get started button below to request a complimentary website audit to learn more about how investing in an updated website could positively impact your business’s bottom line.
