Whether you are looking for reasons to redesign your website, or you are trying to convince a potential customer that they need one, these five signs can help.
Website that is responsive was built to respond to various screen sizes and display content correctly with minimal friction to users browsing through any device type.
How to check if your website is responsive?
There are multiple ways to do this and probably the easiest one is to use online testing sites. For example:
Google Mobile Friendly Test - A straight forward test. Results will tell you if your website is mobile friendly or not.
Responsive Web Design Checker - Great tool if you would like to dive deeper in potential responsiveness issues. After loading your website in this tester, you are able to see what it looks like across various devices and screen sizes. If there’s anything that looks cut-off or overlapping, your website is not fully responsive.
Why is website responsiveness so important?
According to a research conducted by Statista.com:
“Mobile accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide.”
With a fast-paced lifestyle of today, many website visitors try to access important company information on their phones. Making it hard for people on the go to quickly find information they need, will most likely result in a lost conversion.
To make things even more critical, since 2015. Google is putting more emphasis on websites that are mobile friendly. This means that a non-responsive website, will rank much lower in google search results.
I have seen a lot of websites that no longer match their company branding. If a website has an old logo, different branding colors or just an overall disconnect between website look and your brand, your potential customers are not getting a right introduction to your company. Especially because nowadays, the website is the first contact with a brand that potential customer gets.
Some of the brand misrepresentations don’t require a complete overhaul of the website. If you’ve made a simple logo update or slightly adjusted your brand colors, you might get away with just updating those on your website and not needing a redesign.
When was the last time you added new content to your website? Was it during the last redesign project? I am not talking about changing your phone number. I am talking about important content updates, such as new services or programs for your customers, new products, news, blog posts.
Redesigning a website is a time-consuming process and one part of that process teams often dread the most, is writing content pages. Once a redesign is complete and a website launched, most feel that the work is done, but it’s far from that. If you haven’t updated your website content in years and your company is still operating, you probably have new products, programs or services that are not available on your website and you are missing a lot of opportunities.
At the same time, forgetting about new content hurts your organic traffic from search engines. You’ve probably seen a spike in website visits right after your launch. That traffic slowly died down over time and you’re back where you’ve started. Search engine crawlers, like the one from Google, constantly scans the internet for new content. This makes sense, since google wants to deliver most up-to-date and relevant results to their users. If the crawler sees a new website with unique content, it will scan it and decide to re-crawl it after some time. If by the next time your site is crawled, you haven’t had a lot of new content, the crawler will decide to wait a little longer before coming back. That will happen less and less frequently as time passes and there’s nothing new to scan, resulting in your website loosing traffic and relevance.
This ties into the previous sign more often than not. Your website is your broadcasting station. To make it easy for your marketing team to communicate news and updates with your customers is incredibly important. If updates are complicated and take long time to process, teams responsible for customer communication will not bother posting at all.
Your website has to have an easy content management system (CMS). This allows your employees to update content pages, news and blogs directly on your website, opposed to having to reach out to a developer to post it for them. A good CMS system will allow management of texts, images, meta information and social platform sharing options.
If updating your website content is a pain, you need a new website and a new website platform.
I am not saying this is bad, but it’s outdated. Phone calls are hard to track and record. Unless you have sophisticated systems with speech transcription, you are most likely missing out on valuable customer intel that can be used to close those leads.
If people are reaching out to you over a phone number they found on your website, it may indicate a broken process. A good website structure, takes a visitor through carefully designed steps, from learning about your business, to a conversion. A conversion may be a purchase or filling out a contact form. But that’s not where the journey stops. Throughout these steps, your website should be collecting information such as lead interests, what pages they visited, how much time they spent on each and finally, why they converted.
If you are not collecting such information on your website, you are missing out on re-marketing opportunities and increased sales.
Conclusion
Redesigning a website is a fragile process. These five signs are just an early warning, if you see any of them on your website, you need to start thinking about a redesign. Such projects should be based on a lot of research and previous website metrics. I will try to cover that process in a series of posts in future.
Even More Signs!
If that wasn't enough, here are some worthy mentions.
Let me know if you can think of more signs!