How to Know When It’s Time for a New Website
Your company website is the online face of your business and it’s crucial that it not only accurately reflects your brand, and company values, but also provides a pleasant experience. Afterall, a website is often the first point of contact with potential customers, it’s important that it makes a positive impression. But professional life is busy and demanding with higher priorities. Over time, while our competition is updating their websites, we ignore ours. Afterall, working on it is tedious and slow. As a result, because of everyone else adopting new technology and design, our website becomes outdated, sometimes cluttered, and slow, which can lead to poor user experience and reduced conversions. This is usually when it becomes time to assess the performance of your website and determine whether a complete rebuild is necessary.
The frequency with which a business should update its website depends on several factors, including the type of business, the level of competition, and the pace of technological change. On average, it’s a good idea to review and update your website at least once every 2 to 4 years. If that sounds frequent, think about how quickly everything has been changing lately, with more people working from home, using larger and multiple screens, mobile devices, and tablets when on the go, and now there’s AI driving the technical evolution even faster than ever before. Still, you might wonder, what are the signs to reassure it’s worth the investment?
Here are the 10 key signs to look for when considering a complete rebuild of your company website:
1. Your website is outdated
This is the number one reason most businesses new a new website. An outdated website can make your company look unprofessional and out of touch. As your business evolves, it’s important that your website evolves with it. If your website no longer accurately represents your business, it may be time to consider a complete rebuild.
Sometimes, businesses want to change their marketing approach and for example, change the website from a brochure style to a truly interactive style website. If your website is more than a few years old, it’s likely that it is missing important features, such as responsive design, good search engine optimization which can help to improve its visibility and reach a wider audience, ease of use for content creators, and many of the reasons listed below.
2. Your website is slow to load
Website speed is a critical factor in user experience and search engine optimization (SEO). If your website takes too long to load, visitors will quickly lose interest and move on to your competitors. Also, a slow website negatively impacts your search engine ranking, which makes it harder for potential customers to find you.
There could be several reasons why a website may be slow to load its pages. The most common reasons that would justify a rebuild include:
Complex or Poorly-Coded Website: A website with a lot of poorly optimized or complex code can take longer to load and render.
Plugins or Add-ons: If a website relies heavily on plugins or add-ons, these can slow down the page load time as they add additional resources that need to be loaded.
3. Your website is not mobile-friendly
In today’s world, more people are using mobile devices to browse the internet than ever before. If your website is not optimized for mobile devices, it can lead to a poor user experience, reduced conversions, and lower search engine rankings.
One example of a site that is not optimized for mobile is a site that does not have a responsive design layout. Response design is a term used to describe the design process of creating user interfaces (UIs) that provide an optimal experience for users, regardless of the device or screen size they are using by dynamically changing their size and configuration of information spaces. If your website doesn’t look good on mobile devices, you’re missing out on a huge portion of internet traffic. A complete rebuild can ensure your website is fully optimized for mobile viewing.
4. Your website offers a poor user experience
If your website is difficult to navigate, visitors are likely to leave and never come back.
There are several reasons why a website might have a poor user experience, many relate to the other issues in this list, but typically they include:
Confusing Navigation: If a website’s navigation is confusing or difficult to understand, visitors may struggle to find what they’re looking for and quickly become frustrated.
Slow Page Load Times: If a website takes too long to load, visitors may become impatient and leave the site before it has even finished loading.
Poor Mobile Experience: With an increasing number of users accessing the internet on mobile devices, it’s essential that websites have a responsive design that provides an optimal experience on all devices.
Unattractive Design: A website with an unattractive design, or one that uses colors, fonts, or images in a way that makes it difficult to read or navigate, can be off-putting to visitors.
Lack of Content: If a website doesn’t have enough content, or the content it does have is of poor quality, visitors are likely to quickly lose interest and leave.
Non-Functional Elements: If a website has broken links, missing images, or other non-functional elements, this can quickly lead to a poor user experience and discourage visitors from returning.
A complete rebuild can ensure your website is intuitive and easy to use for visitors.
5. Your website has a high bounce rate
A high bounce rate means that visitors are quickly leaving your website without exploring it further. This can be a sign that your website is not providing the information or user experience that visitors are looking for.: If your website is cluttered and visitors can’t quickly and easily understand what your company does and what you offer, a redesign might be enough to resolve the issue, if this is the only problem.
6. Your website is not converting visitors into customers
If your website is not converting visitors into customers, it may be time to consider a complete rebuild. A well-designed website should be optimized for conversions, with it’s user flow so carefully mapped out that a redesign would require so many changes to the backend it would be more efficient to rebuild the entire site based on a better plan. Your new website would include improved messaging for clear calls to action, easy-to-use forms, and a streamlined checkout process.
7. Your website is not search engine optimized
Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for improving your website’s visibility in search engines, such as Google and Bing. If your website is not optimized for search engines, it will be harder for potential customers to find you.
Low search engine rankings: If your website isn’t appearing on the first page of Google search results, a complete rebuild can help improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and increase your rankings.
8. Your website is not secure
A website that is not secure can be a major liability for your business. Visitors are more likely to trust and engage with a website that uses an SSL certificate and implements proper security measures.
9. Inconsistent design and messaging
If your website has multiple subdomains and they all have different designs, branding and messaging, functionality, and content management systems, it’s a clear indication that it’s time for a complete rebuild. Having multiple subdomains can make it difficult for users to understand what your brand stands for and cause confusion. Moreover, having different subdomains with different CMS can result in increased maintenance costs, as each subdomain needs to be updated separately. By rebuilding your website, you can create a consistent experience for your users across all subdomains and simplify your website management.
10. The backend is difficult for your content creators to use
If the backend functionality has been comprised because the developer used custom code to override many of the automatic options or the page layout options are limited so creating new pages is difficult, this is a serious issue that will cost a business significant time and money, and often goes undetected by high level managers. I have seen this issue frequently over the years. If it’s difficult to update your website or add new pages, it usually leads to compromises in quality. People become frustrated and discouraged. Your marketing team should be constantly releasing new content and making updates to older content so it’s essential to make their job as straightforward as possible.
Sometimes it’s a different issue – you no longer find value in the third-party platform you pay for on a monthly basis. You find yourself paying for technical support you’re not using. Of, because the backend is complex and quirky, your content creators reach out for support too often, driving up your monthly costs. This is also very common.
By rebuilding your website, you can install a new, reliable backend system and provide your content creators with a user-friendly interface.
In conclusion
The frequency with which a professional company should update its website will depend on several factors, but on average, it’s a good idea to review and update the website at least once every 2 to 4 years. It’s also important to note that websites should not only be updated for aesthetic reasons, but also for functional and technical reasons. Regular website updates can help to improve website performance, enhance security, and add new features that are essential for providing a positive user experience. Generally speaking, attempting to just redesign the website is not the best option because it only addresses half the issues that typically arise.
This may well sound obvious but there comes a point with a website when the cost to redesign is outweighed by the cost to start again from scratch. It’s a little like the cost of repairing a crashed car. It is usually first worth at least investigating the price to rebuild your current site using the latest technologies as this may sometimes come in cheaper than the hours needed to reconfigure an existing site. We believe, if you’ve identified four out of the ten issues outlined above, it is time for a new website. You may as well pay to ‘write-off’ the current version of your website and invest in all the latest developments for a more affordable cost. If done right, the new website should pay for itself in a short period of time.
