In the technological day in age, your company website is your bread and butter. There is no doubt that websites make more than half of your business success. But what happens if your site gets outdated? Is its current state killing your conversions and hurting your online business and is it a time for a redesign?
These are just some of the questions we are going to address today and try and show you the signs your website needs some love.
If you have an online business or business that revolves around international sales and reach then your website is what makes you visible and present in places other than your domestic one. If your site is seriously outdated then you probably are having problems attracting new viewers and potential new customers. What you need is a redesign and a helping hand from someone like thesearchequation.com to help you get back on the right track and make you more visible and prominent than you have ever been before.
Instant benefits from the redesign and better SEO management will be noticed immediately, but first, this is how you can tell that your site needs these in the first place.
1. Mobile ready site
Having a site that can be opened on a mobile device doesn’t mean it is mobile-ready or friendly at all. Optimization of such a site is very important if you don’t want to trouble your visitors and make them leave before they even do anything. Thinking you have a mobile-ready site simply because it passes the test of working on a mobile device is a bad way of thinking The site has to be set up for a mobile conversion meaning you have to have tap targets in the right place, you have to have an easy process so your viewers can utilize your site and find what they need quickly and without much hassle. The best optimization is to have a little bit of info and several quick tap targets that will allow users to find exactly what they are looking for. Other, more detailed information can be available on a scale-down page where you can have other tap targets that can have accordions and other similar things. The best thing here is to create that amazing mobile user experience that will increase your conversion rate through the roof.
2. Slow website
This factor usually means you need some kind of redevelopment or a redesign of sorts to make it faster and user acceptance. When designing a website, you will implement a lot of features that may impact the site’s speeds, and to boost the speed you have to implement better scripts and better optimizations that will greatly help with your site’s SEO. Sometimes the redevelopment of the site helps to speed up the experience and sometimes you need a change in servers or your servers upgrade. It all depends on your current situation and the best advice on how to redesign and re-optimize will be provided by the site development team of your choice.
3. Bounce rate
Bounce rate is where you see how good the visitors or, what is even importantly aren’t, getting engaged in your site and its content. The bounce rate is measured by how many visitors visit your page and do nothing but leave the page. If your bounce rate is too high then there has to be a good reason for it. That should be a unique indicator that something isn’t right and that you should take some actions on rectifying the situation. This pretty much means you have to do the site redesign because you have visitors that don’t know what the next step on your page is. If you are currently unavailable or can’t afford a redesign of the site then there are several things you can do to smooth the overall experience by adding the buttons, pop-ups, and things like that. After all, this is probably your best indicator that you have a very poorly designed site and that you have to do something about it.
4. Looks
Besides all the important factors we already mentioned the change in your website can come from it simply looking old and dated. There is a time limit to anything and that goes for the websites as well. A site that was created 10 or so years ago didn’t have 90% of the things that we have available to us now. The absence of those things is easily visible to anyone and your poor site traffic and increase bounce rate could be because of it simply looking like an 80-year-old made it. You have to go with the flow and change with how the times and tech change. The best way for you to test this and confirm what we are talking about is to have two shops, for instance, selling the same things – one is around a decade old and one is recently opened and has all the flashy high-tech things attached to it. Where would you go in and do your business?
5. Industry evolution
The website for your business should also follow up with your industry’s evolution. Are there any new practices, is there an easy way to utilize your type of business model or portfolio? Is there anything regarding what you do out of date and is there a way to improve the designs and user experience to another level?
There is a simple way to determine if this is present on your website. Look at your competitors that do the same thing you do and check out their site and try and objectively score your experience over there vs the one you have on your site. Try not to copy what they do because originality is much more praised than a simple copy-paste job with your products instead of the competitor ones.
6. CMS
How good is your CMS or the platform you have built your site on? How quickly and efficiently can you change and update your content. Is your site built on static HTML or you have a CMS that is good and easily maintained? These are the question that will help you determine the way you should optimize your site once more. An investment in a good CMS is a no-brainer because with that you have a neat redesign that is sitting on a good development community which will, in the end, be very helpful for you when it comes to content update regularly. There are some things you shouldn’t cheap on, and a good CMS is one of those!