Your website is an integral part of your business. Essential to any digital marketing strategy, your website helps you build online credibility, create brand awareness, and often serves as your online storefront or marketplace.
But if you never update your website, what should be a boon to your business becomes a bane instead. A poorly designed website can be just as bad as no website at all. Worse still is a website with amazing potential being held back by outdated design or the wrong platform. Here are some signs to look out for that show that it may be time for your website to undergo a redesign.
Customers can’t find info on your site
Do you find that you keep getting the same questions over and over again, even though you’re pretty sure you’ve answered them on your website? Have you noticed that even though you have an FAQ section, you keep having to answer those questions, too? If so, it’s probably a sign that you need a website redesign.
Chances are good that your visitors are looking for the answers, but due to many factors, they can’t seem to find them on your site. This could mean that your FAQ is hard to find or that the information they need is scattered over multiple web pages. This problem can quickly happen if you’ve had your website for a long time and have added information bit by bit as you’ve grown.
With a redesign, you can move your FAQs to a place that’s easier to find and consolidate what could be years worth of information down into fewer, more focused pages.
Customers have a poor mobile experience
According to Google, more than fifty percent of all web traffic now comes from mobile. That means that potentially half of your customers use their phones when they visit your site to make a purchase.
Unfortunately, that also means that if your website hasn’t been optimized for mobile, your customers may get a frustrating and potentially deal-breaking shopping experience.
By redesigning your website with mobile in mind, you can create a more pleasant browsing experience for your customers. Simple designs, large buttons, readable fonts, and clear calls to action are the kind of website redesign that makes it easy for customers to get what they need from your site, all right from their phone.
Your platform is holding you back
When you’re a small business owner, using a builder platform like Wix or Squarespace can be a lifesaver, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience or a dedicated web developer on your team. But these platforms have their limitations, especially for growing ecommerce.
As your business scales up, these builder platforms may not be able to handle your growing needs. You may eventually run into the limitations inherent to each builder, such as a lack of support for blogs or the inability to add custom payment options for customers. Because these platforms aren’t scalable, you’ll struggle to create a deeper ecommerce experience for your customers as you grow.
If you’re struggling to put up new content, having trouble making edits, and constantly running into brick walls no matter what you do, these are all signs that it’s time to say goodbye to your old platform and move to a new one, complete with a website redesign.
Your site no longer visually represents your company
Your website acts as a salesperson for your company and is likely the first thing people see. If your site looks like it was built ten years ago, people will notice. And while it seems obvious, you’d be surprised by how many companies change their business strategies or launch new products and services without reflecting those changes on their website.
At LimeLight, we find that it’s good practice for companies to overhaul their websites every three years to avoid looking dated. This not only allows your site to keep up with the times but also enables you to stay agile and adapt to current business and ecommerce trends.
Technology and what constitutes good design are constantly evolving. So if it looks like your website is old enough, remember AOL chat rooms (like some of us do), your website is probably long overdue for a redesign.
Your website is an essential part of your business and one you should absolutely not neglect. If your website is hard to use on mobile, looks like it partied like it was 1999, doesn’t have the functionality to grow with your company, and visitors can’t find the information that they need when they need it, then you may be long overdue for a website redesign.
