When was the last time that you had your website updated or redesigned?
Gone are the days where you create a static site and forget all about it. For you to stay ahead of the competition, your site should be redesigned every 2-3 years.
Just like with all things digital, trends and users’ expectations are always changing. Your site serves as a portal for your business, and first impressions do count for your customers.
In this post, we will talk about the top eight reasons why your website needs a redesign:
You Have Updated Your Brand
To keep up with the ever-changing times, you have to update your brand. Mind you, the last thing that you want to happen is to be stuck in the past.
A website design that was made three years ago will less likely resonate with your current audience. Hence, you might need to update your brand, which includes redesigning your website.
This ensures consistency with your branding, as well as making that you are not out of touch with your audience.
It also provides you with an opportunity to modernize your site. We, at Sytian Productions Web Developer Philippines, advise our clients to update their site navigation, visual elements, and overall design. That way, they can create a site that is more visually appealing.
Ideally, your website should reflect your business. Otherwise, you risk losing quality leads.
You Want To Generate More Leads
If your marketing activities are constant, yet you still see a decrease in your leads and online sales, it could be a surefire sign that your site is not connecting with your target audience.
A site that has streamlined call-to-actions or CTAs lets you better optimize your site for lead generation.
By incorporating call-to-actions on each site page, including your blog, you’ll have a greater advantage of converting your site visitors into leads. This can significantly contribute to your bottom line.
You Want To Improve User-Experience
Your site’s user experience is crucial to your website’s success. In a nutshell, it’s the emotional experience a site user has when navigating your site, and how it aligns with their intentions.
But do you know that 88% of users are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience?
A site that’s difficult to navigate and has slow loading times can lead to users’ negative impressions. This might even cost you valuable leads.
So, if your site is guilty of practicing poor UX experiences, you need to take a closer look at your site design. Ideally, you should focus on the following to creating a more positive user web experience:
- Understand your site visitors’ behavior
- Establish what actions you would like to accomplish
- Constantly improve your website’s UX.
You Are Losing Mobile Visitors
If your website is not mobile-friendly, then chances are you are losing out a significant portion of site visitors that are using mobile devices to access your site. As a result, your site will experience a higher bounce rate than average.
This can have a negative impact on your bottom line because it will cost you leads that are valuable.
Effective site design will help address this issue, significantly reducing your bounce rates and improving your conversions.
You Need To Make Changes To Your Content Strategy
The strategy that you came up with five years ago might no longer get you as many inquiries as before.
Maybe you are building your authority with email subscriptions and blogging. But is your site geared up for a change in approach?
Whether it is an outdated content management system (CMS) or poorly designed call-to-actions, lacking essential website features in your site will hinder your growth and marketing efforts.
While you could still “bolt-on” a couple of plugins here and there, you can get better results by updating your content strategy. Here’s the thing: Your existing strategy should evolve and progress, but that does not necessarily mean that you will need to make drastic changes.
You Want To Optimize For Search Engines
It’s common for outdated sites to have headers, metadata, or images that aren’t optimized. Hence, they aren’t ranking on Google.
So, if your site isn’t optimized or you aren’t implementing updated strategies, major search engines will find it difficult to crawl and index your website.
Some of the outdated strategies are using flash graphics, implementing poor site architecture, and keyword spamming. This is a common problem that plagues other websites, and therefore, hinders you from reaching your true potential.
These problems can plague poorly-built websites, although this is more common on older website platforms. Hence, you should avoid doing these tactics. And in case you do, might as well fix it as soon as you can.
The key here is making sure that your website is receiving the love and care that it needs to stay relevant.
You Need To Improve Your Website Security
Perhaps one of your main concerns is your website security. Take note that most small businesses and entrepreneurs are more susceptible to viruses and website hacking than bigger businesses.
So, if your site is built ages ago, and wasn’t updated ever since, you’re at a higher risk for malware and hacking.
Your Website Is Terribly Slow
According to a survey, 49 percent of website visitors expect a site to load within three seconds or less. So if your site takes more than three seconds to load, then it can be considered slow.
Keep in mind that your site visitors will not wait around for your website to load. After all, they are busy people and most likely visited your website to finish a task. So unless you optimize your website’s page load speed, your site visitors will simply bounce back.
Ideally, your site should load fast in all kinds of devices. You should also run your website on Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check for your load speed and check for other areas of improvement.
Conclusion
Having a site that is fresh, modern, and intuitive is the key to success.
While you do not need to redesign your site every few months, taking an objective look at your site will help you understand whether your current design is helping you hit your goals or if it is in dire need of an update.
Doing so will help you maximize your ROI and lower your cost per acquisition.
