Is this the year you finally rebuild your old site? Your answer should be yes. With every passing year, the market becomes more and more competitive. If you want your website to drive traffic and make sales for you, you’re going to need to do what it takes to impress the modern consumer. For a lot of brands that means rebuilding their site.
Here are 4 signs that you need to rebuild your website.
It isn’t responsive
Responsive web design has been a hot topic since 2012. During this time Google began discussing shifting towards mobile-first everything which means that many websites were left with terrible load times and even worse looking design when it came to visitors viewing from their mobile phone. If you’ve made it to 2019 and your website still isn’t responsive, here’s the sign you’ve been waiting for to redesign.
According to vox.com, mobile phones are accountable for 68% in web traffic in the United States alone. You can expect that number to increase. Eventually, your website will be nothing more than a listing online if you don’t make it a place where users want to spend their time.
Nothing on your website is consistent
From the fonts to the colors, nothing on your website is consistent. There is no strategy behind your call to actions and no intent behind your navigation. Altogether it’s a headache to look at and an even bigger headache to use. Sound familiar?
If you answered yes to my last question, it’s time for a redesign. A lack of correlation between your website elements will leave users feeling confused and disorganized. This is especially true for brands who have rebranded their logo colors or storefronts over the years.
Your customers need to know what they can expect from you. Clean and consistent branding leaves a lasting impression on consumers. In fact, branding can have a lasting impression on our language. After all, we call it a Kleenex and not a facial tissue.
Your conversion rate is low and you’re not ranking well
If your website isn’t getting any traffic from search engines, it’s likely that your website isn’t ranking for anything. There’s a whole lot that goes into ranking for your target keywords online so we won’t get too deep into that. But generally speaking, you’ll notice that websites that rank for a lot of highly searched keywords get a lot of traffic. What comes next is on their web design.
What’s more important than website traffic? Customers that spend money on your website. If your website isn’t bringing you qualified leads, then no amount of traffic you receive will do anything for the bottom line. The experience visitors have on your site needs to be able to convince customers to buy.
An experienced web design company will have strategists available who have literally made it their job to understand what makes consumers click. If you can’t seem to keep your brain on track or simply can’t handle the lift yourself, find experienced web designers who can help.
Your website is slow and the back end is a mess
As years come and go, a site left to fend for itself becomes slow to load, hard to use, and even harder to update. Nearly 50% of consumers expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. If you’re honest with yourself, it’s likely that you’ve left a site because it wasn’t loading fast enough. Why should your customers do any different?
For modern websites that are built by experts, page speed can easily be improved with a few updates. The same cannot be said for websites that haven’t been updated in the last 5 years. At a certain point, the backend gets a little… Messy. If you can’t navigate through your plugins and your WordPress dashboard takes an eternity to load, you’re better off rebuilding your site. Though it can be tempting to try and salvage what you’ve built you’ll find it equally as expensive to fix an outdated site as it is to build a new one.
Conclusion
If you made it this far through the article, you can rest assured that you need to rebuild your site. Reaching back to my point about conversions, users don’t stick around for what doesn’t serve them. If your website serves the needs of your customers, you’re going to grow as a business.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the digital business world is how much a good website can help and how much a bad website can hurt. Direction Inc. can help you achieve the dream website you’ve always wanted. When did you know it was time to rebuild your website? Did it take convincing or did you know it had to happen?
