With online businesses, your website is the heart and soul of your marketing efforts. Unfortunately, website owners tend to get lackadaisical in their efforts of maintaining their businesses, leaving them to become outdated and an overall digital eyesore. Your website is ultimately the identity of your business, and because of that, it requires the most attention and investment efforts.
There are several different reasons as to why a business might need a complete redesign but one of the biggest reasons is due to lack of knowledge or expertise in building a website. This particular reason is actually no excuse for a bad website because there are tons of website builders that show you step-by-step how to build a website. Even, if you wish to build an ecommerce store, tools like Shopify offers an impressive website builder.
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But no website is perfect, and just like investing in a house, both are going to need continual improvements and maintenance to stand the tests of time. But when your site has exceeded the limitation of small improvements, it’s then advanced to a complete web redesign. This will not only require an overhaul of website aesthetics but also changes in your site’s overall functionality processes to create a better user experience.
It’s actually recommended to update your website every three to four years simply because the internet is always changing and so are search engine guidelines so it would be in your website’s best interest to stay up to date. Most business owners know this while others choose to ignore it, but there are obvious signs that your website needs a redesign.
The longer you wait to get these issues taken care of, the longer it will be before your business can get back on the pathway to success.
1 – Your Website Takes Too Long To Load
Users hate websites with slow loading times, in fact, they hate it so much that users only give websites two seconds or less to load, but prefer 1.3 seconds. According to dotcom-tools.com, anything longer than that, users will leave, which, in turn, has a negative effect on your site’s bounce rate.
A slow website is a telltale sign that your website is poorly developed or that the hosting service you used from the very beginning was slow. If you notice this happening with your website, you want to make a point to start fixing this issue immediately. Not doing so will not only cost you visitors but it will also negatively impact your site’s SEO.
2 – Your Site Isn’t Responsive
Just as consumers hate slow-loading sites, they also hate it when websites aren’t accessible across multiple devices. Unfortunately, most site owners are afraid to implement responsive design for fear of losing SEO value. What they don’t realize is that responsive design is great for both the business owner and customers.
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Lots of website owners are stuck in only building websites that are only accessible on desktops, but according to research, mobile devices are how websites are accessed the most. To further that, smartphones are the mobile device of choice to conduct their internet queries. So the takeaway is that you want potential customers to be able to access your website no matter what type of device they’re using.
3 – Outdated Branding
Your brand is ultimately, your company’s identity, therefore, it’s a direct reflection of your website as well. Maybe your company has undergone a rebrand. If your company underwent a rebrand, why wouldn’t your website need to be representative of that?
Just bear in mind that when it comes to updating your site, your rebrand includes every facet of “new,” and so should your website. It’s not just about colors and fonts. There’s so much more to it than the aesthetics of it. You have to also incorporate consistency among language, content, and tone as well.
4 – Navigation is Challenging
One of the quickest ways to have visitors to your site leave is to present a website that’s too difficult to navigate. You should know by now that consumers want what they want when they want it. That reason alone is why you want to make sure your website is user-friendly and whatever customers could be looking for is easy to find.
To do this, you’re going to want to test your pages to see how easy it is to find information. Before opening your business up again, you can test this by having family members or close friends visit your site to see how easy it is for them to navigate.
5 – Your Site Isn’t Meeting Your Initial Expectations
When you first made the decision to start your own online business, you had these wonderful ideas and plans; and with those wonderful plans, you also had expectations too, right? Like results.
Upon the launch of your site, according to the business plan you drafted, you were supposed to have a certain amount of sales by a certain timeframe, and other business goals were supposed to be met by a target date. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen when your site needs to be redesigned.
The key is to get to the bottom of why your site isn’t responding well to visitors.
Is your site not producing results from an aesthetics point or a functionality point? At what point are customers getting on to your site to make them leave? Do you have enough CTA’s?
These are all questions you need to stop and think about as it pertains to your website. Also, try to think back to if you were experiencing these same problems then that you are now.
6 – Content Isn’t Getting Views Or Comments
The content you have on your site plays a vital and crucial role in how your site ranks in search engines. Knowing that, you want to make sure that the content you produce is fresh, relevant to your industry, and is of high-quality. When users conduct internet searches, the search engines will index the most relevant and helpful information and display it in the results pages to better answer those inquiries.
