Seven signs it’s time for a website redesign

By Alexandra Gavril - March 12, 2019

When you’re working on the same website every day, it may difficult to tell when it starts to become less effective at selling your products and services, and promoting your business.

Here are a few hints. If your site hasn’t been updated in years, if it takes too long to load, and if visitors can’t find what they’re looking for with ease, then you should seriously consider upgrading your website.

Why? Because it’s hurting your brand image and wasting your marketing efforts and money. In other words, it’s losing you business.

So if you haven’t touched your site in a while, here are seven signs that you should take a closer look at and consider a complete makeover.

1. Your site looks outdated

The internet is a visual medium, which means that appearance and first impressions matter. If your site feels and looks like it was made in the 90’s, it’s definitely time for a website redesign.

Things like font styles, background textures, images, and content layout can be a dead giveaway to how old your site is and make your online presence feel outdated. That tells your prospects that you are out of touch with current trends. More importantly, it shows that you don’t care.

Not only that, but it makes it difficult to position yourself as an expert in your field with a website that dictates otherwise.

Take a look at your competitors’ site. If yours feels out of date in comparison, it’s a good sign that it’s time for a complete redesign. You owe it to your visitors and customers to catch up, stay current and rebuild your site so that it’s up-to-date, relevant and visually appealing.

2. It takes too long to load

The human brain has an attention span of about eight seconds. This means that once a visitor lands on your site you have up to eight seconds to capture their attention.

Whether you’re showing them a special offer, a new product or service that you’ve recently launched or a useful guide that you want them to download in exchange for their information, those few seconds are crucial.

But what if your website doesn’t load? How long do you think a visitor will wait for? Eight seconds? It’s even less than that.

Research shows 47% of people expect a website to load in two seconds or less, and 40% of people give up on a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Even a small delay can have a significant impact on your business’s bottom line – the same study found that just a one second delay in loading can lead to a 7% decrease in conversions.

So, if your website takes too long to load, you can kiss that prospect good-bye. They will quickly hit the back button and spend their money with your closest competitor.

To make matters worse, a slow site can also make it harder for people to find your business in the search engine results pages. Why? Because Google penalises sites that take too long to load.

So what can you do? Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your site’s speed score. Marks are out of 100 and anything over 90 is ideal, while a score under 80 indicates you have speed issues that need to be addressed.

If it turns out that your site has a low score and the suggested changes are just too many and too time-consuming to resolve, it’s likely you need a new website.

3. It’s not mobile-friendly

The quickest way to make your audience feel like you’re behind the times and out of touch is to have a website that looks the same on a smartphone or a tablet as it does on a Windows 95 desktop.

Today, having a site that’s mobile responsive is a requirement, not an option. More and more people are searching for products, services and businesses using their smartphones. So if your site doesn’t work on mobile, they’ll just leave and move on to your competitors.

That is if they can even find your business in the search engine results pages. In case you didn’t know, Google also penalises and downgrades sites in its search rankings that aren’t mobile-friendly.

Not sure if your site is mobile-friendly? Here are three quick ways to find out:

Take Google’s Mobile-Friendly test
Visit your website using your smartphone. If you have to zoom in to be able to read the text or tap on call-to-action buttons, then you don’t have a mobile-friendly site.
Again, visit your website using your smartphone. If you find it difficult to navigate through the site and perform simple actions with just your thumb, then your site isn’t mobile-friendly.

So what’s the solution? A complete redesign that allows you to upgrade your site using web technology that makes it display properly on all devices.

With our Website Builder, for example, you can build a site with ease without having to worry about learning to code. More importantly, all templates are responsive and mobile-friendly, which means your site will works and look great in all devices.

4. Your website is broken

As your business grows, so does your website. You add a few more pages, and change, move, and remove others.

The problem is that if you’re not careful and don’t do proper URL redirections (and many site owners don’t), in time your site will have more broken pages than actual working pages.

These broken links are toxic for a great user experience. They drive prospects away, they hurt your reputation and revenue, and they can also harm your rankings in the search results. You can learn more about broken links and how they hurt your website by reading this post.

If that’s the case with your website, and you discover that you have too many broken pages that need fixing, save yourself the time and the effort and treat yourself to a new website.

5. It doesn’t offer a great user experience

A successful website is all about pleasing your visitors. If your site is confusing, difficult to navigate and users can’t quickly find whatever it is they are looking for, they’ll leave.

After all, they came to your site for a reason. If they’re not able to quickly find the page, product or information they need, they’ll return to the search engine results page and go to your competitors instead. That not only translates into a loss of customers and revenue but also a high bounce rate, which can hurt your rankings in the search results.

So if you want to have a successful website, you need to make sure that visitors have a pleasant experience with you, one where they can find what they need with ease, and one where they actually enjoy spending time on your site.

Sure, there are lots of small tweaks you can make to improve the user experience on your existing site. However, if there are too many, it might be best to do a redesign with user experience at the forefront.

6. Your site doesn’t show up in the search results

You can be sure your prospects use Google to search for your business. If they can find your competitors but not your business on the first page or two of the search results, that’s a problem.

Here’s the thing: algorithms and the way search engines rank websites have changed dramatically over time. It’s no longer just about writing great content and using relevant keywords to optimise it. There’s so much more that goes into determining how search engines find your site and where you fall in the search results.

So if your site isn’t showing up in the first few pages of the search results, it’s likely because it doesn’t adhere to web standards, it’s not mobile-friendly, speedy, or it just isn’t set up in a way that search engines can make sense of the content enough to properly rank you.

If you’re doing everything you possibly know and can to boost your rankings and are failing, then it might be time to rebuild your website from the ground up.

7. You can’t update a thing without the help of a web developer

Content management systems have come a long way in the last few years. These days, it’s easy to build a website, add or remove pages, update content and make lots of other changes with just a few clicks.

So if you find yourself having to reach out to your web developer to change the title of a web page, replace an image or add a paragraph of text on your homepage, then you’re long overdue for a website redesign.

Is it time to redesign your website?

Use your best judgement to decide. Hopefully, the information and advice in this post will help you to determine whether you can do with a facelift and a few fixes, or if it’s best to just rebuild your website.