7 Signs Time to Redesign Your Website

An eye-catching, convenient website serves as an effective marketing tool and brings a high return on investment. Your website is one of the key elements of your marketing strategy for your business and it deserves your uttermost attention.

Here are 7 reasons why you may want to consider redesign your website:

1. Your Website is Not Up-To-Date with Today’s Advanced Technology

Today even not web-savvy users have high expectations for the website. New technologies, properly implemented, help to find information faster and view it in a simpler format across multiple platforms. For example, updating your existing content management system or, for some, adding it will enable you to expand your editing options, make website less vulnerable to various threats and help you maintain greater security.

For example, editing older sites built in HTML or Flash is largely an inaccessible and intimidating venture for those who lack knowledge of the programming language. By using newer and more approachable WordPress-based websites, you can easily edit content yourself and publish blog posts without any specialized programming knowledge.

Furthermore, if your third-party tools are outdated, you should consider replacing them with newer updated versions or removing them altogether because they can contribute to a negative user experience. Old tools of questionable quality may slow down your website, suffer its usability, reduce security and limit you from getting more orders, leads and inquiries.

2. Your Website Design is Overly-Complex and Not User-Friendly

Principles and technologies in website design dramatically evolved over the years. Things that were appropriate 5-10 years ago may not be relevant today.  With an explosion of all kind of information sources and media formats, our attention span to assess the message  reduced even more. Google’s material design concept simplify format focusing on the content.

For this reason, content is ultimately powerless when it’s surrounded by an outdated, ineffective and awfully complex design. Consider capturing the user’s attention by opting for simplicity and usability.

Uncluttered, easy to read content, decorated with nice graphics or photos, will not only make it easier to read and understand, but also engage interest and call for action. Stay clear of inconsistent fonts, poor quality photos, weird color combination, lack of contrast, background music and many other common flaws done earlier and proven to be ineffective by multiple usability studies

Functionality is crucial to a positive user experience. If you are missing the basics such as clear call to action, straightforward access to contact information, it is a clear sign that you should consider redesigning your website to prevent confusion and customer distrust, but improve website’s conversion rates.

High bounce rate is another important indicator that something is set wrong.

Above all, remember that you site should engage the user and look professional, original, and above all, modern.

3. Your Website is Not Mobile-Friendly

Last year mobile Internet usage was more pervasive than desktop usage, suggesting that having a mobile-friendly website is now absolutely critical. Ever since Google announced in April last year that it will be enforcing a ranking system based on whether or not your website is mobile-friendly, it has now become a prerequisite for an efficient website. After all, you don’t want to lose half or even more of your visitors just because it’s simply inconvenient to use the site on a smaller screens.

If your website doesn’t load properly on all mobile devices, you should consider optimizing your website for mobile usage to ensure an improved user experience. Moreover, a mobile-friendly website will enable you to prevent accessibility frustrations and increase your website’s overall search engine rankings on the Internet. If your website is dysfunctional and doesn’t work, it will have a negative impact on your business.

4. You Want to Optimize Your Website Performance to Help You Reach Your Business Objectives

In most cases older websites significantly lack in load speed, various compatibility (AODA, W3C), and search engine optimization. All those things that are highly important for the website to grow its ratings in search engines. Google, Bing, Yahoo made a number of updates setting a new standards for the websites over the last few years. In fact some of the older sites may even be completely excluded or banned by search engines for variety of reasons.

Best way to get it resolved is to re-design the website, implementing all the requirements and meeting latest standards.  

5. Your Content is Poor and Unoriginal

One of the main reason to re-design the website is to identify that current content is outdated. It can be either overly complicated or insufficient or simply doesn’t bring an up to date story. We’ve seen sites with content un-touched for years. Your potential clients can see that too and wonder if company is still in business with latest news from 2005.

Properly crafted content should be up-to-date, easy to read, engaging, and descriptive. It should be properly formatted and tuned up for cross-platform use. Last, but not least, it should be done with search engine optimization in mind.

6. You Don’t Have Social Media

Today it is exceedingly important to integrate social media on your website by including links to your social network profiles. Together, your website and social media accounts can efficiently work together to promote your brand. Take advantage of social media to maximize your online exposure and find new customers.

In order to do so more effectively, make sure that your website is modern and innovative. Maintain your online presence and make sure it is consistent with your website, business goals, and brand image. Ensure that you are making it easy for users to share their experience with your business and your content online. Stay knowledgeable about the new ways available to interact with your customers on the web.

7. You Want to Keep Up with Competitors

If your competitors changed their website, it is a good sign that it’s time for you to address your website design as well.  Some websites are just more effective than others, and it is important to keep yours in optimum condition especially if you see that your competitors are more successful in reaching their business objectives.

Never underestimate the power of competitive analysis! Make a list of features you would like to change, and make sure you are prioritizing your goals efficiently. Remember that your competitors can teach you a lot about web design. It takes time to properly research and analyze other websites that are similar to yours. Look at the potential desirable features that you find useful and remove the features you find mundane and of little use to your business.

Remember that by making the necessary changes to your website, you are vastly improving the your business credibility, user’s trust to your brand and satisfaction of using the site and therefore success of your business.