Ten Signs It's Time For A Website Redesign

As the new year rolls around, the question will likely come up if you should make some changes to your website. And before diving deep, your website should function as a living and breathing marketing asset that’s always improving. Your website should always have minor changes to position your company for more massive growth. 

Here are the top ten signs it’s time for a website redesign.

1) Your Customers Are Telling You

The easiest way to know if you need a website redesign comes from conversations with your sales and success teams.

Do prospective customers enter into sales conversations lacking an understanding of your product? Or are they thinking your product does one thing when in reality it does something entirely different?

Are customers complaining about the difficulty of finding resources? Or are you not even seeing much communication coming from your website?

If your customers are telling you your website is difficult to navigate, and if you aren’t seeing the appropriate levels of engagement on your website, something needs to change with your website.

2) Poor Mobile Experience

The mobile experience is critical for digital marketing success. There are far too many reasons to exhaustively list here, but here are the main two.

Reason one: your buyers are on the go.

Sure. In B2B, they may not schedule their call or do their detailed research on their mobile device, but many are starting their research on mobile. Let’s paint the picture.

Your ideal buyer needs a new piece of technology. They have a friend who works in a similar space in the same role. The friend sends your company website over in an email.

Your ideal buyers on lunch so they pull up the website to feel if your company is the right fit. The mobile experience is a disaster, doesn’t load quickly, feels cluttered, and simply sets a horrible first impression. Your ideal buyer gets back to the office and just Googles your industry and explores numerous other websites.

Yes. Final decisions are made mostly on desktop. But your first impressions are most often on mobile. If you aren’t making a great first impression, you aren’t making it to the decision stages made on desktops.

Reason two: Google said so.

Want to rank in Google? Optimize for mobile. Google has made it clear that to rank high in search, you need to have a site built from a Mobile-First perspective. Mobile-First means you think about how it will look and feel on mobile before thinking through how it will look on a desktop.

3) Not ADA Compliant

ADA stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design. This bill was passed into law in 2010 and requires that websites maintain a reasonable level of accessibility to ensure that anyone with disabilities can navigate and enjoy your website.

Again, there are a few reasons you would want to maintain a level of accessibility.

Reason one: companies should strive for inclusivity.

For example, there are tools like website readers that can help with website navigation for those that are blind. If your images don’t have alt text, the website reader can’t interpret the images, and as a result, your website isn’t as accessible. Or, in an even more common occurrence, if your text size is too small or your color contrast makes your website difficult to read, your website isn’t as accessible.

Reason two: there are SEO benefits.

Have you ever Googled something and looked at the image results? How does Google know what images to share on a text search? Google scans the alt-text of images to serve as the image results in searches. That means when you create alt-text that could rank well for specific keywords, you have another opportunity to get more people to your website.

Reason three: companies have started to face lawsuits.

ADA compliance is a law. If your website falls short of a reasonable level of accessibility, you could face legal action.
What is a reasonable level? Some website platforms aren’t built from a coding perspective as completely ADA compliant. So it’s not reasonable to penalize the website owner if the platform you’ve built your website on isn’t completely ADA compliant.

That said, text size, alt text, and website colors are all in your control. So if you fall short on this front, you’ll need to make a change.

4) Old Web Design Trends

Think about a website that feels like it’s from the early 2000s. You suddenly have less trust in the brand. It’s because they are using design techniques that have become dated.

Many design trends were considered industry standards and best practices years ago. These design practices have changed, and if your website hasn’t changed… Well, your visitors may be feeling like you do when you land on a website from the early 2000s.

Here are a few outdated website trends to avoid.

• Heavy drop shadows
• Using bevels
• The entire site is contained
• Using gradients everywhere
• Lots of different fonts
• Multiple colors are used everywhere
  
  These trends discredit the authority of your website. If you have some of these design trends on your website, it’s time to make a change.

5) Inconsistent Branding

To understand where you fall regarding your marketing strategy, simply ask yourself three questions. 

1. “What role does our website play in our marketing strategy?”
2. “How effectively is our marketing strategy impacting revenue?”
3. “Of the six roles a website should play, how does our website do?”

If you don’t know the answer to any of these questions, you are likely in the first situation outlined and need the assistance of an agency in a major project. If you know what you’re trying to accomplish but fall short, you are in the second situation. Finally, if you see continuous revenue growth, you are likely in the third situation. 

If you fall into the second or third situation, assess your goals, internal capabilities, and upcoming initiatives. Then you can determine exactly what you need. If you don’t have the internal resources you need to execute your website project, you’ll want to find an agency partner that can equip you with the website you need to help you grow.

6) Requires A Developer For Everything

As mentioned before, your website should have constant minor improvements based on data. Let’s say your homepage has a high bounce rate, so you are looking to A/B test some new content. With website platforms like the HubSpot CMS, a content marketer can easily make those changes. If you have an older website, you need the help of a developer to set up an A/B test.

There are places where developers are still essential for highly effective and engaging websites. For example, if you want to have an ROI calculator on your website, you’ll need to have the help of a developer. Or, if you want to help your customers build their own packages online, you’ll need a developer.

But today, numerous website platforms make it possible and easy for non-technical marketers to accomplish what used to require a developer. Like changing the punctuation on a landing page...

7) Still Using Flash

If you are still using flash on your website, this is a major red flag.

Reason one: it’s outdated.

The movement away from using flash started in 2010 when Apple stopped supporting flash on their mobile devices. If you are still using flash, it indicates you probably haven't taken a deep dive into improving your website in roughly a decade.

Reason two: it kills your site speed.

Flash takes a lot of power to load, and there are now better solutions. Not only are long load times annoying for your visitors, but Google will also deprioritize your website in search because load times are a ranking factor.

Reason three: there are serious security concerns with flash.

If you are getting pushback on removing flash, send the next two sentences to your IT team.

The most common Flash security vulnerability being executable code, denial-of-service, overflow, and cross-site scripting. These issues have resulted in many security experts advising against installing Flash or suggesting that internet users employ tools to block Flash.

That should help them see the need to remove flash ASAP.

8) Lacks Curb Appeal

There’s no other way to say it. If you look at your website and it’s just ugly, you have to make a change.

You know for a fact you’ve landed on an ugly website that immediately caused you to lose trust and click the back button. Content on page is absolutely important.

So how do you know if your website is ugly? Well, you’d know, but if you need some examples of great websites, here are a few fantastic websites you can steal inspiration from.

9) Cluttered Content

Some companies have a lot they want to communicate to their customers. As a result, they write a novel on their homepage. Then they wonder why no one reads their information.

Website visitors very rarely read content in-depth. Most of the time, they are simply skimming.

Translate these reading habits to the homepage of your website. Look at your website with fresh eyes. If you have massive blocks of text, you need to refresh your content. You need a website redesign to clearly and concisely communicate your message.

10) Your Website Hasn’t Been Touched in Over 2 Years

If your website hasn’t seen any changes in the past two years, it’s a near guarantee that something on your site needs some love.

The world has completely changed in the past two years. Your brand message needs to adapt too. Otherwise, your content probably doesn’t resonate with your audience like it once did.

The way you communicate your message should change to match the times. And that doesn’t mean messages like “In these unprecedented times…” like every single company did. It means recognizing a transition in the way people are living and crafting your message to align with the transition.

Getting Started

If any of the ten signs appear on your website, you need to make a change. If you have the internal ability to start making some changes, you need to get them implemented as quickly as possible. 

If you don’t have the internal ability to make these changes, you will likely want to look into outsourcing sooner rather than later. Many of these issues are directly impacting your ability to generate revenue. So you need to assess your opportunity cost. 

If 90% of your traffic is bouncing from your homepage, what could it look like from a revenue standpoint if you had a more engaging website that decreased the bounce rate to 80%? 

Once you’ve gotten an assessment of your opportunity cost, start assessing your potential outside resources that you’d bring in. If you’d like help changing your website, please schedule a call. Also, check out the website audit kit to learn more about the four approaches to a website overhaul!