With a business website being one of the most valuable tools in a company’s arsenal these days, you need to ensure your online offering is the best it can be. Today, customers are quickly turned off by sites that aren’t up to scratch.
Whether your business is a place where you directly make sales or try to engage consumer interest and get them touching base with you, give yourself the best chance of success with a quality website that meets expectations. Here are some signs it’s time to redesign your online web presence.
You Feel Embarrassed By the Site
Focus on changing your website entirely if the current version makes you feel embarrassed. The last thing you want is a site that doesn’t feel representative of you, your wares, and the look and feel you’re aiming for. Similarly, if the current product doesn’t accurately convey your business brand and can’t be easily changed, it’s time to redesign the site as a whole.
The Site Loads Slowly
In this day and age, people have zero patience when it comes to slow-loading websites. They expect pages to be ready to read within a couple of seconds and won’t wait around to see the information they’re after. Search engines, such as Google, also don’t see slow sites favorably, which can damage your SEO results. If your current website doesn’t load quickly and you can’t change this due to the platform it’s on, the layout you’ve chosen, or other factors, consider a redesign.
It’s Not User-Friendly
One of the most critical factors in a quality website is that it’s user-friendly. Consumers should find it quick and easy to find the information they’re after and see how to logically move from page to page. They should be able to use the checkout without issues and not get turned off from finalizing a transaction due to laborious processes or confusing steps.
You’ll need to redesign your website if the current version has poor navigation and turns people off. Looking at cart abandonment rates is one indication of this, as is high bounce rates (where people click away from your site without barely looking at it) and low conversion numbers for sales or calls-to-action such as making an inquiry or signing up for a newsletter.
You’ll also get a good idea of how user-friendly your site is by using a website heatmap tool. This enables you to see how consumers behave once they arrive at your digital offering. For example, use a heatmap to see which pages and areas shoppers look at and how long they spend browsing. Discover where they are on your website when they click away and how far into the checkout process they get before becoming frustrated and moving on without finalizing transactions. This information will clarify if you can save your current site with a few minor tweaks or if a whole redesign is necessary.
The Site Doesn’t Work for Mobile Devices
Today, millions of people use mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to browse and buy online. Thus, if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you’re shorting yourself out of not just sales but also customer engagement and other interactions. People expect websites to present appropriately on smaller screens and the functionality to be there when they use mobile devices, just as it is on larger gadgets.
If you’re using an old website platform, you may notice it doesn’t convert your pages well for mobiles and can’t be optimized, either. If so, you’ll likely need to redesign the site to make it a well-rounded option for all device types.
Lacking Search Engine Results
To get the best results from your website and lower your advertising costs, you need a digital presence that ranks well on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. However, not all platforms, layouts, and designs optimize for this, especially older ones created many years ago when search engine algorithms operated very differently and weighted criteria in other ways.
If you find that no matter how many steps you take to do all the right things for search engine optimization (SEO), your site still doesn’t move up the ranks, this indicates that the only way to get SEO success is probably to create a whole new website.
It’s also time for a redesign if it’s too hard or costly to fix issues because you need to pay a developer to change things or if your site’s security is minimal. You may also need to develop a new online presence if your current site can’t scale when you want to add new features and handle more traffic.
Any one of these things means you’re probably very frustrated with your site right now. If you have multiple issues going on, you’re sure to find the decision to redesign an easy one.