It is quite likely that your business ended 2020 with great victories and severe challenges. Make the right start to the New Year, get introspective about your business website and consider doing a website revamp. Who knows? A site overhaul might be just what you need to propel your business in 2021.

If you don’t have plans to redesign your website yet, take some time to read this blog and see whether your site could use a revamp.

Here are the top five signs your website is possibly overdue for an update:

Five Ways To Know Your Site Needs A Revamp

1. Your Website Looks Old & Outdated

Digital marketing has a huge impact on today’s business landscape. Most companies are now digital and have a website to reach and engage potential customers.

The benefits of a professional website are not limited to establishing an online presence. A website helps businesses look more professional, widen demographic reach, improve SEO rankings, and measure results, among other things.

For these reasons, having an old website with outdated design and content is a red flag that you should never ignore.

If you have not touched your company website for five to ten years, then it is time to update it. As a rule of thumb, website revamp or redesign is recommended every 3-4 years.

The Internet and search engines are constantly evolving. Google, for example, recognizes updated, quality content and treats it as relevant. As a result, a regularly updated website is more likely to have higher organic search engine rankings than an ancient one.

2. Your Website Has a Bad Foundation

A website overhaul offers a solution to several issues, including unresponsiveness, slow site speed, and security issues.

The above factors can lead to poor user experience and even result in subpar SEO performance and low conversion rate. (See Signs # 3 and #4)

Let us take a closer look at how redesigning your website mends these technical issues.

Unresponsive site.  According to Statista, mobile accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide. No wonder most mobile users expect websites to appear the same way on their laptops or PCs.

If your website is not responsive and mobile-friendly, you are missing out. Visitors will tune out and look for other options. This is why you must ensure that your website provides a similar seamless user experience on mobile devices.

Slow page loading time. Your site visitors and dine-in customers have one thing in common—they hate waiting. They will find alternatives that offer the same services and products but are more convenient.

Users cannot stand a slow website! The Forrester Consulting survey found that 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.

Other studies also reported the negative impact of slow site speed on business goals. For example, the BBC lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.

Security issues. Slow websites kill businesses, so does poor website security. Insidious software like ransomware, or a brute-force hack, can lead to websites being compromised, putting the company and its customers at risk of data breaches.

If your website often experiences security problems and you fear such malware attacks, you should implement a strategic web redesign ASAP.

3. Your Website Has Subpar SEO Performance

Savvy business owners build websites to increase visibility and grow their customer base. The thing is, websites with subpar SEO performance won’t deliver.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience (UX) go hand-in-hand. SEO targets the search engines while the UX targets your site visitors. If a website delivers a great UX, it can rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs).

An outdated website with a bad foundation deprives you of showing up in front of the right searchers.

The responsiveness of your website design and how fast it loads affects your SEO performance. If users exit your website after spending only a short time because it does not work on their mobile devices, you will see a high bounce rate on your landing pages.

Make sure that your business site works on mobile, especially because Google now takes mobile performance into account when ranking websites.

Website security also influences SERPs ranking. The lack of online security measures compromises your website’s ranking potential. While your website’s goal is to please the search engines, it is more important to satisfy the users.

To show users that your website is secured, your site should have an HTTPS domain distinction. Many top websites use HTTPS now, and sticking to the unsecured HTTP version can risk your company’s reputation.

Additionally, poor security puts your website at risk from hackers. For example, your website gets hacked and injected with links to malicious sites. Search engines will pick up on this spam and could blacklist your site.

4. Your Website Has Low Conversion Rate

Multiple factors cause a decline in leads and sales—and trust is one. The role of trust in UX is massive. It can influence customer behaviour, purchasing decisions, and loyalty.

When customers lose their trust in a brand it can mean big losses. The same thing applies to business websites. Dissatisfied users who left your site because of specific reasons are considered lost customers. Lost customers account for lost sales and low conversion rates.

When your conversions are down and your sales team frequently reports poor monthly sales performance, it is time to give your website a revamp because it no longer drives results and is not serving its purpose.

5. Your Website Is Difficult to Manage

A content management system (CMS) enables non-technically minded users to make instant updates and site-wide changes. This software eliminates the need for HTML or advanced coding knowledge to create, edit, and publish content to a site or blog.

Why is a CMS important? Because content is king! You need well-written content pieces to fuel your content marketing strategy.

With a CMS like WordPress, you can remain in control, and multiple users have access to work on your site remotely and simultaneously. A CMS gives you a preview of the status of all your content—whether it is published, scheduled, being reviewed, or a working draft.

The best part? Most CMS solutions come with an SEO plugin. In WordPress, there is Yoast, an SEO tool that helps you make your content meet the highest standards of SEO and overall readability.

Do you still call a web developer or someone with coding skills to make changes on your website and publish content? If yes, that is enough sign your website is overdue for a redesign. The problem with relying on HTML or CSS experts is that you don’t always get the job done right or on time.

The Website Revamp Process

Here are a few steps to ensure your website update runs smoothly:

Step 1. Perform Site Audit & Evaluate

Before updating your website, you must first evaluate your current website pages. This step will help you determine what content should be kept, updated, or discarded.

When performing a site audit, you should consider the goals you want to accomplish with the redesign. Below are a few examples of goals you could target:

• Reduce bounce rate
• Increase conversion rate
• Improve website navigation
• Boost on-site SEO performance

Google Analytics is a handy tool that will help you with your site audit. It provides you with the essential metrics and analytics that you can use to improve your web content. Learn how to use it effectively in this Google Analytics article.

Step 2. Create a Strategy

Outline a plan and align it with the goals you want to achieve. You should include things like:

• Decide on a website design with great usability and ease of navigation.
• Map out content optimization for all pages—look for new keyword opportunities, modify title tags, create meta descriptions, update old blogs, and so on.
• Update your current URL structure to improve user experience.
• Prioritize internal linking from one page to another page to boost SEO.
• Implement a tracking code to analyse the flow of site visitors and their behaviour.
• Invest in pay per click ads and scale up your email, content and social medial marketing efforts to increase engagement and conversions.

Step 3. Assess & Implement

Assess the deliverables that should be carried out for the website revamp. Examples of deliverables are web copy, articles, videos, graphics, call-to-action buttons, or survey pop-ups.

Once everything is ready, prepare for strategy implementation. Deconstruct the existing website—start with the homepage, identify the main categories and subcategories, and look for database interactions. Then, complete the sitemap for a redesign.

Building the wireframe and mockups is also an important step to take so you can visualize your site before it goes live.

Step 4. Review & Launch

At this stage, your web design and development team takes a final look at your revamped website and tests its functionality and accessibility. If your business site is error-free and meets the essential requirements, then you can sign off on the website launch.

New Year, Newly Redesigned Website

The past year has changed the business landscape and driven a new wave of digital transformation.

To make sure you do not fall behind your competition, look into your website and see whether it helps strengthen your online presence and deliver your digital marketing objectives.

If it does the opposite, your website needs a fresh look and updated content.

Are you planning to embark on a website overhaul? 2Stallions got your back! We offer web and app development services from Shopify to WordPress, CMS development, and more. We can also help you create a UI/UX web design that delivers results.

Learn more about our host of digital marketing services here.