Why fix something that isn’t broken? Redesigning your website can seem like a daunting task and you need to ask yourself if it’s benefiting your company, or just bogging things down. Below we’ve listed some signs to be on the lookout for. If you notice these things, it might be time for a redesign.
Your website isn’t responsive
A big must-have these days is a responsive website. This means that all the elements of your website responds to the device its being viewed on, and still look great on a phone or tablet. Check the images, text, and navigation. Is the user experience still relatively easy? Mobile web browsing has been growing since 2009, and last year in 2016, it overtook desktop browsing for the first time.
A tool we’ve found helpful is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. To run this simple test, just plug in your URL, wait for it to run through your website, and voila – it will tell you if your website is mobile-friendly or not.
You should also consider Google’s ‘mobile-first’ indexing because the way your mobile website is created can affect how you appear in search results.
Looks outdated
Your website is your first impression in many cases. There’s nothing worse for a user than getting to a website and immediately being turned off by the unresponsive design and then hitting the back button to get away from it. This is what you need to consider if you might be feeling that your design is outdated.
81% of consumers research online before buying and 90% of your prospects will visit your website before calling your business.
Go ahead and look at your competitor’s websites. Are they crisp, clean, and fresh looking? If you feel like your competitors are hundreds of steps above you, it might be time to invest. The market is extremely saturated with hundreds of companies doing the same thing you’re doing – you need to find a way to stick out, or at least look more professional than others.
In addition to just the look and feel of your website, your content might be outdated. It wouldn’t hurt to take a fresh slate, clean up your content, and get everything nice and tidy, and organized for a new relaunch.
Hard to navigate – can’t find what they are looking for
User experience is all the rage these days. Having a clean and easy to navigate path throughout your website is critical. “If your target user can’t figure out your website in less than 20 seconds, they’re likely to search elsewhere. Imagine you were in the grocery store shopping for milk and couldn’t figure out where the dairy section was. You would leave feeling incredibly frustrated and probably never return.”
Visitors want to quickly find the information they are looking for. When you’re looking at your website, try to do it from the perspective of someone who has no idea what your company does. What would I want to know? Where would I look for it? Is it on the Home page, or do I need to navigate to another page? Don’t over complicate the navigation – simplicity is key.
Lacking SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is another biggy. Did you know? Only 6% of people who search for something on Google make it past the first page of results. I believe that alone shows how important it is to get your website ranking as high as possible on search engine result pages.
Since Google keeps updating their algorithm, they recommend in their SEO starter guide to improve the structure of your URLs so that they convey more content information. This allows for search engines to better crawl your pages to pull content for users.
Make sure you keep away from these common mistakes, and you should be alright!
You’re not seeing business results
At the very least, your website should be bringing in leads. Hopefully you’re getting sales too, but some sort of conversion is important. Does your website contribute to your business goals? If you have key metrics in mind, it will be easier to redesign your website because you have a good understanding of what your goals are, and you’ll be able to measure the success or failure.
Click here for some examples of hilariously terrible web designs – hopefully you’re not at this point. And if you are – or you just need help to refresh your existing website, get in touch and we’d love to help design the website of your dreams!