Is the spark missing from your relationship with your website? Where once you couldn’t stop yourself from obsessing over the best colour accents and font choices, do you now find the webpages feeling a little frumpy?
If it’s been a while since you last updated your website, chances are it could use some sprucing up. Given your website is one of the strongest marketing tools you have to promote your business, you’ll want to keep it updated with new technologies and design practices so it stays looking modern and fresh.
So if you’re feeling a little insecure about where your website stands, take a look at the following 5 signs to see if you’re due for a redesign.
Table of Contents
1) Compared to your competitors, your site looks like a thing of the past
Sometimes we don’t even realise how antiquated our website is looking until we take a walk around the neighbourhood to see what else is out there. Take a peek at how other companies lay out their homepage, introduce their business, or organise the purchase process. The point isn’t to make yourself feel bad in comparison. If done with objective intent, it’s a great way to get you calibrated as well as provide some visual inspiration.
One 2011 UK poll found that 70% of the people polled wouldn’t trust a poorly designed website. So it’s more important than ever to keep your web design up-to-date and keep your potential customers from going to the competitor.
2) Your site is taking forever to load
Try loading your website. Are you left staring down a blank white screen as your mind starts to wander to other tasks? According to Kissmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Luckily, there are a number of free tools out there that can help you find the root causes for slow speeds. Pagespeed Insights is one such tool provided for free by Google. Web Page Test does the same and lets you run the test from multiple location around the globe. Whether your site is overrun with large images or it’s buckling under the weight of unoptimised code, you can pinpoint the exact areas you need to work on to improve site speed.
3) It’s 2017 and your site’s still not mobile-friendly
If your website is not mobile-friendly yet, it’s time to get on it. And it’s not just because it’ll make for a better user experience. Google rewards mobile-friendly sites with higher rankings for people searching on their smartphones.
Mobile internet browsing outpaced desktop for the first time globally last October. Businesses that don’t cater to the mobile crowd are walking away from potential purchases.
4) It doesn’t rank well on search results
The first step to improving your search results ranking is to know where you stand right now. You can check sites like serps.com to see your site’s ranking on a keyword of your choosing.
Search engine algorithms have changed a lot over time so tactics that would have let you rank higher in the past may no longer apply. Some people think they can win the SEO game by tweaking things like keyword density. But Google’s recent updates specifically disincentivise behaviour like keyword stuffing by penalizing websites for it.
If you really want to rank well, there’s really no avoiding creating high-quality and original content. Keeping a blog where you serve up fresh content regularly can help. On top of that, you’ll want to cover some basic HTML housekeeping by making sure to fill out meta descriptions as well as title tags so search engines can do a better job of categorizing your pages.
5) It no longer reflects your business or brand
So your website is perfectly fine but what’s really changed is you. You’ve grown up and your business’s mission or product offerings have evolved. It’s important to keep your site consistent with your new business and brand message in times of change because your site is so often the very first place potential customers go to form their impression of you. Take care of your website like you would your physical storefront.
