5 Reasons Why You Should Redesign Your Website
Your website needs to adapt to new technologies, new understandings of user behavior and simply start with a new base which aligns with how your business has grown over time.
Once your website goes live, it’s quite common to add the content, products and descriptions of services, and then stop updating it for months and even years. But at least from a technical standpoint, your website needs to adapt to new technologies, new understandings of user behavior and simply start with a new base which aligns with how your business has grown over time.
Things change faster than ever. Your marketing objectives shift as you introduce new and different products and services. The platforms that you are using advance and evolve to remain competitive. Even the industry itself transforms all the time. So to keep up, you have to adapt your website to all these changes.
These are the 5 common reasons why you should redesign your website:
Redesign for better user experience
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to buy something on a website that just won’t let you do it. User experience has to be smooth and seamless - otherwise, a customer will find a better place to purchase the product or find the information they need. It sounds cruel, but it’s true.
Dead-end links, clunky redirects, confusing sitemap all lead to horrible user experience. It’s doubtful that any customer would come back after a bad session. Run occasional tests to see how your website responds to different inquiries and adjust what needs to be fixed.
Website navigation is not intuitive
The structure of your website should be crystal clear to customers on their first visit. Shoppers shouldn’t spend too much time looking for a page or a product they need, or you risk losing them to a competitor.
Navigation should be simple and intuitive, don’t overcomplicate it. You don’t need too many drop-down menus that look confusing and occasionally have trouble loading. And I’m not only talking about the main menu up at the top but also to strategically placed CTAs (“Call to Action” buttons) throughout the site that help guide the visitor to where you want to him/her to go. For product pages, you should set up a healthy combination of categories that will sort them into the right place.
Get someone to look at your website with fresh eyes once in a while. How easy is it to navigate it for someone who’s completely unfamiliar with your business? Sometimes the first impression is really the most important one! You should also look deeper in Google Analytics to see current user behavior to see what can be corrected or improved.
Pages take too long to load
Everyone loves great photography, but heavy and large images take forever to load. And while some think that great visuals are still worth putting up with the lag, many will disagree. When the page loading takes between 1 to 3 seconds, the average bounce rate increases by 32% - that’s a third of the people leaving the site.
To remedy your load time, resize or drop the quality of some images. If it is not an option (for example, if you have an image-based portfolio website), you can always contact a professional to help you out by reducing server response time, fixing CSS, loading Javascript correctly and recoding your website to load faster.
Your website is not optimized for mobile traffic
Advice to optimize a website for mobile traffic sounded like a mere recommendation just a few years ago. In 2019, it is a must. More and more people shop on their phones, so make sure that your website is properly designed for it. Also, Google is now actively dropping the SEO ranking of websites that are not mobile-friendly. At this point, it is an ultimatum - redesign your website or lose some of the search engine traffic.
Most of the pre-built templates on popular platforms such as Shopify or Squarespace are already optimized for all kinds of traffic, but some older Wordpress themes might be outdated in that respect. If you’re not sure, try loading your website on various devices and see how website pages look like. Make sure that the whole width of the page fits comfortably on the screen. Usually, you’ll see a “hamburger icon” (three horizontal lines) in the top corner which signifies opening the main menu. Also, no weird side-scrolling bars should ever pop up, the only scrolling you should be doing is down or up and the text should be properly sized and easily read.
Website performance does not align with your marketing goals
Having a beautiful website is great, but it is not your end goal. Your website is only a tool that helps you run your business. Take a closer look at your analytics page. Does your website generate enough leads? Do you succeed in capturing e-mails for your mailing list? Do you have everything you need to convert visitors to customers?
As a business owner, it is your responsibility to know what works and what doesn’t work for your website. And if you struggle with the design of your website, have little experience coding, or simply have no time to keep up with the website’s maintenance, there are professionals who are eager to help!
It is critical to redesign your website once in a while to make sure that it looks modern, serves your company well, and makes your customers happy. It should be beautiful and reflective of your brand, pages should be responsive to different screen sizes and quick to load. And most importantly, align with your goals so that you get a positive return on your investment. If you need a good guide to preparing your RFP, click here.
If you’re interested in redesigning your website, we offer an initial website audit so that we can check the state of your site and offer recommendations on how to improve it, contact us today!
