Redesigning a website can be a real pain in the neck – but sometimes it’s necessary to maintain the health of your business and propel it forward.
However, it’s not a decision to be made lightly, so we’ve put together a list of signs your business could benefit from a website redesign, to help you make such an important decision.
Your website is slow
People are impatient. They want the information they need and they want it now. If it takes all day to load your website, they’ll have already found a dozen other websites that load quicker in that time.
Just think of all those potential customers who want to buy from you but are turned off the idea because the website won’t load quickly. Websites that are old and slow don’t really inspire confidence, especially if your website needs to handle sensitive data such as credit card details.
Your navigation is clunky
Again, people are impatient. If your website’s navigation makes it hard to find things, your traffic will go elsewhere.
People should be able to find what they’re looking for within a click or two, so make it easy for them. Have a clear menu with internal links within the copy that encourage the visitor to keep moving e.g. at the end of your ‘about’ page have a link to your shopping page.
Your layout is outdated
Do you have sidebars on each side, walls of text, tons of tiny images or the Flash plugin for media? Congratulations, your website is stuck in the 90s.
Nowadays, less is more. People prefer clean, minimalist layouts with clear menus to find what they’re looking for.
It’s not about piling on all the information on one page, using every inch of space for something new. It makes your website look busy and like everything is fighting for attention. Where do you even look first let alone find what you’re looking for?
It’s hard to update
A lot of businesses face the same choice – keep adding new things to an old website, turning it into a website Frankenstein or start again from scratch.
If it’s becoming harder to maintain and update your website without running into 101 problems, it might be time to admit defeat and start again.
Starting again allows you to correct all the mistakes made on your first website and build on what you know will work this time around.
It’s not mobile ready
If your website is a dinosaur i.e. not built for mobile use, then you could be missing out on a lot of traffic and custom.
Nowadays, around half of website searches are done via mobile. People are buying more on their phones and that’s a market you could benefit from tapping into.
Make it easy for people to browse your website by paying attention to mobile functionality – which may be easier if you rebuild in some cases where the website is so outdated that it’s difficult to adapt.
You’ve got a high bounce rate
A bounce rate is the rate at which people come onto your website and leave without clicking on any other pages or posts.
If your bounce rate is high it can mean one of two things: 1) that they found all the information they were looking for immediately or 2) they didn’t like what they saw.
While number one might be a great thing (though unlikely), it also means that the page (however useful it was) didn’t inspire anyone to read on or find out more about the website.
Analysing your bounce rate is important to see which areas of your website aren’t doing well so you can do something about them.
If you can identify that there are several problems with your website e.g. poor navigation, slow loading, outdated design – then it might be time to start from scratch and build a website that people want to visit and come back to.
Are you looking to redesign your website? How about some SEO to get it ranking when it’s up? Get a quote here so your web design investment doesn’t go to waste.
