In 2020, people’s lives will be (still) busy, the web will be browsed on different devices, and the information to be retrieved will be immediately visible to the eye. That is why the design of your website should take into account search engine visibility, intuitive user interface, fast loading time and responsiveness. What exactly your home pages look like is also related to what they are used for.
Even though businesses update their website frequently, whether it’s changing a few photos or graphics, updating their product offering, or redoing their logo, in some cases, a wide-ranging overhaul is required. Obviously, depending on the size of your website and the ambition of your goals, this project can be very substantial.
Unlike a simple website update that requires only a few changes, a complete overhaul involves modifying one or all of the following:
- The way the information is structured and presented on your site
- The general look of several website pages
- The CMS that makes your website work
- How visitors use your website
Due to the complexity of a redesign, it is often seen as a real burden for small business leaders. It can be expensive and time-consuming. In addition, if your website has an online store and/or other advanced features, it will be difficult to do it yourself if you do not have the technical skills.
How do you know if it’s really time to redesign your website or if an unscrupulous webmaster is trying to sell you services you don’t need?
When should you consider redesigning your website?
Here are a few things that suggest the need to rethink the site and talk about good SEO design. Don’t forget the bounce rate. The design of a functional site will never happen overnight. Modern design takes time, energy and an investment of some money. Like other technologies, the internet is evolving rapidly. Users use different devices to view sites. In order for users to maneuver and work with your website efficiently, you need constant SEO design updates.
Besides, Google constantly changes its algorithms, and the user experience of the site also influences its ranking. In short, you may not notice that your site needs a major overhaul or resdesign.
Although your site does not need to meet all of the following criteria before considering a redesign, the number of items you check in the list gives you an idea of the urgency of your redesign. Checking an item from the list below constitutes a “worrying” item, checking several means that the overhaul is a necessity, and checking all the items requires an emergency overhaul.
Here are some signs that all point to the need to rethink your site.
- It takes more than a couple of seconds to load the site.
Modern technology and fast internet connections have made people used to quick website responses. Visitors tend to leave a website if it does not load very quickly. If a page on your site does not load completely in less than 2 to 3 seconds, you know that it is slow. According to an Akamai survey, 49% of consumers expect a site to load in two seconds or less. Only 51% of people claim to “wait patiently” for a web page to load. In other words, if your site takes more than 2 to 3 seconds to fully load, you can assume that some potential customers are missing you. You run the risk of missing leads and sales.
Manually test the speed of your site by opening and browsing it on mobile devices and desktop computers (remembering to clear the cache otherwise the test is not conclusive). Your website pages should load speedily on all devices. You can also use PageSpeed Insights or Google’s mobile speed test tool to check load speed and find areas for improvement. If you find your website slow, then it’s time to speed it up.
- Your social media posts don’t do well.
Social Media has taken the world by storm. Having a great presence of your brand on social media is an essential part of the 21st century business management. To make your brand great, you have to create a large social media presence. When you share your site on social media, the links should look good. The thumbnail of the link has to be attractive. The link title and description should also have a useful copy that gives readers an idea of what you are sharing.
If you share a link from your website on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook and you don’t see any presentable thumbnails, titles or descriptions, then it’s time to review your site for an update. On average 30% of your website traffic could come from social media, this figure is significant enough to pay attention to it. Make a good first impression by presenting the pages of your website well.
- Some of the content or features are not displayed properly.
If you haven’t visited your own website in a while, you may notice small display issues on your next visit. Your logo and other images may not display properly, interactive features may be faulty, or your content may not display as you expected.
While some of these anomalies can be corrected with a simple update, in other cases it is a symptom of a larger problem. Your site may be running on scripts or other software components that are no longer supported. If the current design of your site is several years old, it may no longer be compatible with new devices or browsers. If you’re not sure what is causing the problem, contact a professional web developer to resolve it and advise you on developing a more modern design probably makes sense.
You’ve probably heard that the hardware is obsolete and it is time to get a new model. Internet technologies are the same. Although you update the site, after a few years, the heart of the site becomes old and obsolete. Do you remember sites from the 90s? Do you recall the link buttons, gray and neon colors and little graphics? Although some of these websites still work, most users do not wish to use these websites.
- Your site is problematic to open on mobile.
Check the appearance of your website when loaded on different types of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets.
- Is the text of the site legible?
- Do the images appear correctly?
- Is it easy to navigate the site on a smaller screen?
If you want additional advice or don’t have a wide variety of mobile devices at your disposal, you can also use the Google Mobile-Friendly test to check your website. Having a mobile-friendly site is very important! In 2016, mobile devices overtook the desktop as the device that people use the most to browse the web. So, do a real analysis of your own website for users on mobile devices. What fraction of your users come from mobile devices? If it is a significant percentage, it is worth redesigning it taking into account mobile users.
Responsive design has become extremely important. It is now an obligation. It ensures the ranking of your site in search engines. Google and Yahoo will take into account, for example, mobile load times. Thus, if you do not have a site suitable for mobile or it takes too long to load, you may see your search ranking suffer. And your business will hurt as well.
In addition, with Google’s mobile-first indexing, the way your mobile website is created can greatly affect the appearance of your site in search results. You can ask your web agency to develop a site for you or the design for mobiles is designed specifically according to your customer journeys, or you can use ready-made templates for mobiles (be careful to test them beforehand).
- Your website does not generate business results.
Does your website bring you sales and leads? Does it benefit you to accomplish your business objectives? If the answer to both questions is “No”, it’s time to consider a redesign that contributes to your business.
If a visitor likes what they see on your site, they may want to know more from you. A good website can be the source for your marketing campaigns. By offering visitors the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter, you are creating new sales opportunities. Be careful, however: poorly designed email marketing campaigns can leave a negative impression on your customers. If, however, you contact them with interesting emails and offers, you could create many regular and loyal customers.
Just be clear about the data you will use to measure your goals:
- The number of prospects or sales?
- Your conversion rate?
- The abandonment rate of the shopping cart?
- The increase in the value of each order?
- Better qualification of your prospects?
By choosing specific key indicators (KPIs), your redesign will have more targeted objectives and you will be able to know if they are working or not.
- Visitors leave the site quickly.
For some websites, the customer journey requires that users visit multiple pages or stay on the site for a long time. If you are blogging, you probably want users to read and share your articles. If you have an e-commerce site, you want buyers to browse your product catalogue, choose several of them to fill their basket and continue until the order. If this is the case for your site, users should stay longer than a few seconds.
There are a few measures you can use to determine if users are leaving your site too quickly:
Bounce rate: Simply put, a bounce occurs when a user visits a page on your site and does not visit other pages. Your bounce rate indicates the number of bounces divided by the total sessions on your website. Google Analytics provides more information on bounce rates. Keep in mind that if users leave your site quickly but still reach your business goals, you don’t have to worry about anything.
Pages/Session: This number indicates the average number of pages viewed by visitors in each session on the website. The higher the number, the more pages the average user visits when they visit your site. Google will at all times rank the best quality pages for users to view. According to Google’s algorithms, faster sites are more likely to get higher rankings. A fast website is not only more powerful for Search Engine Optimization, but it also has a progressive impact on users to view more pages. Users usually leave a site when they see a very slow site.
You can test the speed of your site with a variety of tools, such as the PageSpeed Insights tool. If the speed of your site is not properly evaluated in this tool, there is no reason to redesign the site. Most of the time, small alterations can increase the speed of the website. But a low loading speed can be an effective factor in the redesign of the site.
Flow Behavior: This will give you a better idea of how users are browsing your website, especially if the above settings are not as relevant to your needs. For more information on behavioral flow, see Google Analytics help.
- Internet users cannot find what they are looking for.
When potential customers visit your site, they should be able to quickly determine what to do. If they are looking for specific information, they can find what they are looking for in a matter of moments. If they try to buy, subscribe or get information, they should be able to do so without outside help. Otherwise, you need a revision to facilitate your navigation.
Are you on a site where you cannot see the main content of the page due to the large volume of pop-ups? By this experience, your user will leave the site immediately. Google penalizes these sites and users leave the site if they cannot find the content. This may be due to poor site navigation, and inaccessible menus and poor access to other parts of the site can be an issue and can increase the bounce rate.
Do you receive a lot of calls, emails or do you have a lot of customer feedback about what information is already on the website and how to access it? If so, it is a sign that visitors are having trouble finding what they need on your website.
- Your main competitors have redesigned their websites.
Unless you design websites for a living, it’s not always easy to tell if your website looks outdated. One way to find out is to check the websites of other similar companies in your industry or your competitor’s. Elements of reflection:
- Have they recently changed their design?
- Are their designs very different from yours?
- Note the size of the text, the colors and the graphic styles they use. If they have been recently redesigned and these elements are too different from yours, consider consulting the advice of a professional designer.
Outdated design is not only a question of aesthetics; they are also subtle signals for your audience. The new design lets them know that you have kept pace with the times and that your business is thriving.
SEO and content marketing are vitally important. Indeed, they guarantee you the good quality of the customers who visit your site. By having engaging and informative content targeted by the right keywords, you can be sure: your website will be ahead of your competition. A good way to see if you’re lagging behind is to do a simple Google search for your site. If, for example, you are a web agency in Texas, do a search for “web agency” or “web agencies in Texas”. If you find that some of your competitors are ranked higher than you, it may be time to think about a new content marketing strategy.
Generally speaking, if the current appearance of your website was created over 5 years ago, the design trends have probably changed enough to make your site look outdated.
- Your services, products or brand have changed.
It is also possible that your site is no longer representative of your business. Here are some signs that this could be the case:
- Company photos on your site no longer showcase current staff or facilities (or are archival photos).
- Your target market has moved to another market since your current design was made.
- Your best selling products or services have changed.
- Compared to your site, your printed marketing material is more recent, contains new information or has a different look.
If any of these statements turn out to be correct, you should work with a designer who has some rebranding experience.
- Your site is not secure.
Many visitors leave a website immediately if it is not secure. Due to the evolution of modern hacking techniques, website security is now essential to protect your customers’ data. Some websites are particularly vulnerable to attack, such as those running on content management systems (CMS) or e-commerce sites that send or receive payments. In the event of an attack, customer data could be stolen, your website could be taken hostage, or strange content such as advertisements or unwanted links could start appearing on your site.
These types of attacks are costly for small businesses. After an attack, 60% of small businesses are unable to survive for more than six months. Although a redesign will not solve the problem, it is usually an indicator that you need to redo your site from scratch. Otherwise, existing vulnerabilities could still be present.
How often should you redesign your website?
Strictly speaking, there is no hard and fast rule about when an overhaul should take place. It largely depends on your industry, the number of pages on your site, the functional characteristics of your site and your business objectives.
For “showcase” type websites that only have a few pages and no e-commerce functionality, you can do a routine review every six months. But if your site is more advanced – with e-commerce features or a frequently updated blog, or if it receives tens of thousands of visitors per month – then you should consider having a monthly check-up.
In order to conduct a regular review of your website design, this checklist will help you understand if a major change is needed or if you only need a few changes.
Conclusion
Think of your business as your home. If your house is either very old and the roof collapses, no one is going to want to come and visit or worse yes will away as quickly as possible. Sometimes the house can be repaired with minor modifications, but in many cases, the work is obsolete and needs to be demolished and rebuilt. Of course, it is difficult to go past your old house without some emotion attached to it. But to attract people, you have to remodel the house.
Having a website is similar to that. Sometimes you don’t know how to fix and update your site (site redesign), and when you look at the site analysis data, you can identify problems and find solutions. Keep your site up to date with internet changes and don’t forget mobile users. Whether your website design is lacking in imagination or your content is not engaging … there are several signs you should take into consideration to make sure your website works exactly as it should.
Today, companies are becoming more and more involved when it comes to optimizing their sites. So, it becomes crucial that yours stands out.
Above all, don’t be afraid to look outside the box and always put yourself in the shoes of the users. Sometimes trying new techniques on the site. Changing the image of the site can be intimidating, but taking the risk can be worth it.