Veteran Owned & Operated
Taking the time to review how your business website is performing is crucial in this day and age. After all, your website is most likely the first encounter a customer has with your business.
If your website is not up-to-scratch, this could leave a lasting impression on your customer and quickly drive them away in search of other business.
But how do you know whether your website is relevant or in dire need of an upgrade? These simple pointers should help you decide when it’s time to redesign a website.
Table of Contents
Obvious Signs It’s Time to Redesign a Website
How do you measure the success of a website? Quite simply, your site should be showing traffic growth year-over-year.
If your website traffic begins to stagnate and then dip over time, this means your website is getting lost in the abyss of the internet. In other words, it’s no longer relevant.
This is all-the-more important for an e-commerce website, where your sole purpose is to convert visitors into paying customers. If your traffic numbers are not up-to-scratch, this could point to a poorly designed website, not just an unpopular product range.
In order to increase website engagement, a redesign could be in the works. Here are 7 tell-tale signs it’s time:
Your Website Takes Three or More Seconds to Load
Not sure if you’ve heard, but time is money these days and a website that takes longer than three-five seconds to load is a time-waster in the eyes of your customer!
It’s important to regularly test the speed of your website using tools such as pingdom.com or gtmetrix.com. If it takes longer than three seconds, it may be time for an update.
Research has revealed that for every additional second of load time, this leads to 7% fewer conversions across your mobile site or website.
Your Website Has a Higher-Than-Average Bounce Rate
A bounce rate is measured by how many visitors spend time on a single page on your website during their browsing session.
Bounce rates always vary from one day to the next, but if your bounce rate is coming in at over 55% per page, this is not a good sign.
A higher-than-average bounce rate points to a poor user experience. This means that they’ve had such a negative experience on just one page of your website; they cannot be bothered with the rest.
If this is the case, a website upgrade could be well overdue!
Your Website Content Is Outdated
Back in the day, you could simply create a website, load your content onto each web page, and that was it. Nowadays, SEO has completely changed everything. Fresh, up-to-date content is an incredibly powerful tool for a relevant website.
Without fresh content, your website is most likely to fall behind the rest and will struggle to attract and retain visitors.
Up-to-date content helps to boost your website’s appearance in search engine results, improving its search engine popularity rating over time.
Make sure your website features three-four new pages of high-quality, keyword rich content each week for best results. Starting a business blog is the best way to do this!
Your Website Lacks On-Page SEO
Remember what we said about SEO before? Yep, it’s changed everything, and on-page search engine optimization is where it all begins.
In order for your website to rank on popular search engines such as Google, each page must have a strong on-page SEO set-up. This means that your website will always appear in Google search queries when your customer looks for you.
On-page SEO consists of basic elements such as a unique title tag, meta descriptions, H1 header tags, internal links to other pages, and more.
In short, you should take the time to set up each individual page on your website with these relevant SEO elements. Without it, your website is not likely to rank when customers search for it.
Your Website Is Not Mobile-Friendly
Research has shown that three out of five interest users use their mobile phone when performing a search query on Google. This means that your average customer will be viewing your website on their mobile phone more often than on a desktop computer or laptop.
The long and short of it is this: if your website cannot be navigated on a mobile phone, it will be abandoned, which only increases your bounce rate.
When it comes to time to update your website, always opt for responsive web design. This allows the frame and structure of your website to adjust to the size and capability of most mobile phone screens.
Your Website Is Difficult to Navigate
The importance of website navigation is often underestimated as an element for success. Ultimately, this affects your search engine rankings, webpage bounce rates, conversions, and user experience.
If your website is cluttered, complicated, or even a little too garish in design, it can quickly drive away your customers. The same goes for excessive pop-up advertisements, help, and chat windows.
Make sure your website is simple and sleek, while each page is easy to find, read, and understand. If your customer cannot find what they’re looking for in a few clicks, consider your website a lost cause.
Your Website Design Is Not In-Line With Your Brand
Finally, if your business has undergone an upgrade in terms of branding, your website needs to change, too. From the logo, header, font, formatting, and images, everything should match in terms of your business branding.
Consistent branding across all aspects of your business helps to build consumer trust and recognition. Without it, your message and reputation could get lost in the mix!
Find Reliable Web Design With Jordan Smith
If you’re looking to redesign a website, Hire Jordan Smith is your answer to honest, reliable, modern, and high-quality web design, development, and SEO.
Visit the Hire Jordan Smith work portfolio for recent web design projects, and more!
