The internet provides you with the best tool out there to promote your business and make sales. But if your tech and website are outdated, it can end up having the opposite effect to the one that you intended. So, if you have been umming and ahhing about whether now is the right time to update your website, this blog post will talk you through a few of the main reasons why now is the time to take action to make some improvements. In the world of business, you are facing a lot of stiff competition. If you do not take steps to stay one step ahead of them, you risk falling behind the crowd. And updating your website doesn’t have to be a hugely expensive job, but it is one which can end up paying off massively. So, let’s run through some of the top reasons why it is time to update your site right here.
Design
From a design perspective, it is very obvious when a site hasn’t been refreshed in a long time. And it simply looks unprofessional. Not only this, people may end up not trusting your website in the way that they put their faith in others which look state of the art and developed. It could be the case that your site is simply poorly designed and now is the time to refresh it. The design needs to have a sense of harmony and flow which runs across your site, and your business brand as a whole. Perhaps there is some content which has become out of date, and now is the time to take an axe to this to get rid of it.
You also need to think about the responsiveness of your site. If you have not optimised it for mobile and tablet use, you are missing out on a major trick. The smartphone is the most commonly used device to access the internet and you could be losing a whole host of customers who use this as their preferred device. For some businesses, they are deciding that they are going to design their site from a ‘mobile first’ perspective.
Perhaps it is the case that your design is causing navigational issues. If your customers can’t find what they are looking for quickly, there is every chance that they will switch off and look elsewhere. So, you could plan out a sitemap to begin with, and a product like Slickplan can help out with this. Good planning is more likely to lead to a positive result.
Finally, if your site suffers from an overreliance of stock photos, now may be the time to hire a professional photographer so that you have some of your own taken.
Marketing
We have already talked about what an effective marketing tool a website can be, but without proper calls to action which are helping to convert users into customers, you could be missing out on many potential sales. You also need to ensure that it is clear what your business is doing from the offset, and your unique selling points should be visible throughout your site.
Modern websites are much more ready and able to measure effectiveness than ones from the past. Just some of the modern tools out there include heat mapping, conversion tracking & user recordings. If you don’t have these tools, it is much harder to adapt your site to the needs of your customers. But if you do have them, you can work out what is popular and what isn’t to make any changes as necessary.
A site redesign also gives you the opportunity to reassess your written content. Remember that you have to get to the point quickly to capture the attention of the modern user, especially on your homepage. You may well want to have a more detailed account of your business that you put on another page so that people who want more information can read and digest it as they like.
Your SEO could also be in need of an update. Remember, it is all well and good having the fanciest looking website in the world, but if no one is able to find it, it is not going to do you much good at all. As well as keyword targeting, you also have the opportunity to think closer about the overall conversion rate of your site. The ways that people discover websites have changed rapidly – particularly since the development of the smartphone.
Usability
We have already covered navigation, which is one of the cornerstones of a great website. People should be able to find the information that they are looking for with as little fuss and difficulty as possible. You can get a pretty good idea of this by looking at your bounce rate. If people are simply logging onto your site, but shooting away again quickly, this is a serious problem which needs addressing as early as possible. This is also a good opportunity to test the speed of your website. As we have already mentioned, people have less and less time on their hands these days, and they don’t have forever to wait as a website loads up.
Time
You will want your redesigned site to be updatable by yourself if possible, rather than having to go through a third-party web developer each and every time. There are new platforms coming out all the time, and these are gradually becoming more user-friendly, allowing your average user the ease of update that they are looking for. This is also the time that you can address any security issues that you may have been having, as modern websites tend to be built with greater defences in place.
As you can see, there are a host of advantages to be enjoyed if you decide to take the step to update your website at some point in the near future.
