Tell-tale signs that it’s time for a website redesign

Websites can make or break a business, from building credibility to driving leads and sales. But knowing when to redesign and improve what you already have can be tricky, so here’s some of the most trusted signs that mean you should seriously consider an upgrade.

1. It’s not delivering traffic, leads or conversions – Drop offs in traffic and conversions means your visitors clearly aren’t finding what they’re looking for or are disengaging at some point in their journey. The user needs to be number one when designing any website, so consider your most visited pages and how your customers find these. Can any of the steps be removed and the journey simplified in any way? Browsing a website shouldn’t be hard, work with clear calls to actions, better internal links and a reduction in distractions. This can be solved with small revisions but may require an entire upgrade.
2. It doesn’t mirror your marketing and sales strategies – Strategies evolve over time but failing to reflect these in your website means you are doing your business a disservice. Your website needs to be an extension of your business, representing your personality, ethos and values, in addition to what it is that you actually do
3. You aren’t ranking for the most important keywords – Immediate action is to try refreshing the text and reworking your most important landing pages to present them in a way that’s search engine friendly and engaging for the user. When a prospect lands on your site, it should be clear what your business offers and how it can solve their problems, be that seeking growth investment or the season’s hottest new clothing trends.
4. It doesn’t work on mobile – Regardless of whether your site attracts a higher level of desktop traffic, considerations must still be made to ensure its mobile responsive. Smartphones and tablets make up a rapidly growing percentage of web surfers and research now suggests that 60% of customers who reach a non-mobile optimised site never return.
5. Tweaks are impossible – Adding a blog or updating a product description should be an easy task, but if your website is built on a complicated platform then consider the longer term benefits of moving onto a new content management system (CMS), such as the reduction in admin time.
6. It’s too slow – Best practice loading times for a web page is less than two seconds, with Google setting itself a target of under half a second. People are more likely to abandon sites that take too long to load.
7. It just doesn’t look nice – A poor design can be an immediate turn off, even for the most basic of website needs.

Refresh or redesign?

Simple page optimisations can be a cost effective way to generate improvements yet depending on the severity, then a full redesign and rebuild may be the only answer. Yes it costs more, but starting over gives you full control of the look, feel, journey and content, enabling you to present your target audience with the perfect user experience.

If your website needs to work harder for you, then we can help. Contact us today for more information on our website design and build services.