When Do You Need to Consider Redesigning Your Website?
Technology
A business website is not just a place to promote your products or services. It is the 24/7 PR of your brand; therefore, it must be appealing and, more importantly, functional – every visitor, whether a lead or a faithful client, should effortlessly find a way through it.
You should regularly review front-end and back-end performance to ensure your website is up to the task. The front end is the website elements that users can see: content, copy, menus, color scheme, and graphics, while the back end is the technical structure of the website.
In this article, we are talking about ten issues that can happen on the front or back end that require website redesign. Let’s start.
Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash
Why Should You Redesign Your Website?
The reasons you’d want to redesign your website vary. Still, some of the most common include increasing website traffic, attracting more leads and converting them, and providing a better user experience (UX) by improving website loading speed and mobile-friendliness.
Should you redesign front-end or back-end elements? It depends on your needs – maybe you’ll need both.
If you want to change the color scheme and modernize the website’s looks, minor changes will do the job. But if you want to integrate external software to improve website features, you might need to change the content management system (CMS), which requires extensive work.
1. You Don’t Like the Look of Your Website
Website design trends are ever-evolving, as are the technologies designers use. Your website might have looked modern ten years ago, but if looks outdated today, it’s time for a change, especially when you compare it to the competition.
For example, trends for 2022 suggest using minimalistic or nostalgic design followed by oversized typography. In the 2000s, sites had glossy buttons, round edge boxes, and music backgrounds, even if they weren’t selling them!
If a customer comes to your website and finds it old-fashioned, he might conclude your products or services are outdated, too, and leave for your flashy-looking competitors.
You shouldn’t follow trends blindly, but experts suggest refreshing the website design once every two to three years to keep it up to date, with a modern visual aesthetic.
2. Your Business Goals Have Changed
You must set business goals before working on aesthetic and website features.
Generally speaking, websites usually have three purposes: to provide information, sell goods, or promote awareness. Choose a website design depending on the purpose, because a design that boosts sales will be less efficient in promoting awareness or information.
If business goals and website design aren’t complementary, your investment will surpass your income. Poor traffic, low rankings, an alarming retention rate, and reduced revenue are all signs that it’s time for a redesign.
3. Your Site Doesn’t Drive Enough Traffic
To attract more traffic to your website, you’ll have to produce quality content and optimize it in order to become visible in the search engine results pages.
Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash
The content revolves around keywords – terms and phrases relevant to your industry. After conducting keyword research, you should choose the ones you have the highest chances of ranking for.
Write helpful articles and interlink them so users can quickly go through your content. A blog is the best place to put content, if your website has this feature. If not, you must incorporate it into your website’s design.
If your website is built on one of the outdated publishing platforms or website builders, redesign and move it to a more advanced CMS, such as WordPress, HubSpot’s CMS Hub, Joomla, or WooCommerce.
If your brand requires something different and unique, you can consider a modern web design that will provide you with a website that perfectly fits all your business needs and goals.
4. You Want to Generate More Leads and Boost Lead Conversion
Generating quality leads is essential for every business’s success. When interested parties come to your website, they should realize its purpose.
There should be no misconception about your brand, its offer, and your mission. Website design is essential in that process – it passes all vital information about a brand. If it needs to be more convincing, it’s time to redesign.
A website redesign will leave you with an improved, modernized website that can meet your leads’ needs and help convert them into paying customers.
5. Your Site Lacks Functionality
When you acquire a solid number of customers, integrating additional functionalities will make job management easier.
For example, add a chatbot that can unburden your customer service. Or you’ll want to add multiple languages to improve the user experience. Your business will grow over time, and your website should, too.
When you expand your website features, you’ll want a robust platform that can support plugins and external software integration. If your current platform needs help handling all the necessary additions, it’s time to change it during the website redesign.
6. Users Have Trouble Navigating Your Website
The main goal of every website is to attract visitors, make them leads, and convert them into customers. To become leads, visitors must become interested in learning more about your brand.
Even the best content strategy won’t succeed if your site doesn’t have proper navigation, because users won’t find it.
Confusing navigation is among the leading causes of user frustration. It is irritating and makes people lose patience and leave. Hidden navigation menus, many drop-down subitems, links that don’t come to attention, or too many distracting links on one page are some of the most obvious signs of poor navigation.
No one has time to lose – redesign your site and make moving around it flow. Proper navigation will increase visit duration, reduce bounce rates, and provide a good user experience. Users will clearly see your call to action (CTA) and be more likely to convert to customers.
7. Loading Speed Is Poor
Page load time is one of the most crucial ranking factors. As the Google Webmaster video states, your website should be loading in less than two seconds. Do you think that is too fast? Google loads in half a second!
The poor loading speed can occur due to unoptimized images, incorrectly implemented Java Script, too much bulky content, code with unnecessary elements, non-caching, lousy hosting, too many ads, and many other reasons.
You can quickly resolve some of these factors – image optimization or ad reduction, for instance, while others demand redesigning your website.
[Source: Pixabay]
8. You’re Struggling Every Time You Need to Make a Change
Depending on the dynamics of your business, you might need to add or remove data from your website daily. For example, you might need to add new products, upload or edit blog content, take care of typos, and announce a promotion.
Your website should follow all brand changes, but if every update requires a lot of time and effort, your website is probably built on outdated software, and it might be time to change the content management system.
9. Your Site Isn’t Mobile Friendly
According to Oberlo, in August 2022, 53.74% of the total web visits were conducted using mobile devices, compared to 46.26% from desktops and tablets.
Since mobile users make up more than half of total web traffic, it doesn’t wonder that mobile-friendliness is one of Google’s ranking factors.
If your site isn’t mobile responsive, you’ll experience serious consequences: mobile visitors will have a poor user experience, bounce rates will increase, and conversion rates will drop.
Here are some of the indicators that you should work on the mobile-friendliness of your website:
- The site loads slowly
- Images aren’t loading
- Users have to scroll horizontally to see all the content
- The content looks like one large block of text without any formatting
Google prefers mobile-optimized sites and ranks them better. If your content loads poorly and appears as extensive walls of text, your rankings might drop quickly.
You don’t have to choose between desktop and mobile-friendliness. If you change the content management system (CMS) platform, aka redesigning your website, you can have both.
10. Your Rankings Are Dropping
Dropping rankings are a sign that something is wrong with your website. It could be poor quality or outdated content, slow loading, confusing navigation and structure, poor usability, audio landing pages, or other factors.
Google penalizes websites for two main reasons: using manipulative techniques to achieve higher rankings or providing a poor user experience. If visitors abandon your website after a few seconds, you must detect the problem and solve it as soon as possible.
You can fix some of these issues with an adequate SEO strategy, for example, through content, but others require a website redesign.
Takeaways On Website Redesign
Before reaching out for a web developer’s help, ask yourself these questions:
- Does your website support your business goals and brand image?
- Does it provide a smooth user journey?
- Does it attract traffic and bring a return on investment?
If you answered “no” to any of these questions, it’s time to make a move and talk to someone who can help, especially if you want a custom web design that perfectly fits all your business needs and desires. A team of web designers and programmers will create a unique, scalable, and fully optimized solution to get your business website back on track.
Author bio
Travis Dillard is a business consultant and an organizational psychologist based in Arlington, Texas. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for SEO Thugs.
When Do You Need to Consider Redesigning Your Website?
Technology
