When you are working on the same website every day, it can be difficult to tell when the site starts to become less effective at selling your products or promoting your business. With more and more people going through search engines to find businesses that can provide a service that they need, a strong website that entices the user to convert is vital to a successful company. If you are experiencing the following eight symptoms with your website, your site most likely is ready for a redesign.
1. Your Site Takes a Long Time to Load
Most users expect pages to load quickly. If your pages take more than two seconds to load, users are more likely to become impatient and navigate away from your website. In fact, according to an Akamai survey, half of all users admit to leaving a site if the page takes more than two seconds to load. Worse still, Google has announced that page speed is a ranking factor on mobile, so if your site’s mobile version loads slowly due to being out of date, you run the risk of losing high ranking.
You run the risk of losing half your potential customers if your website pages take a long time. Test the speed manually by loading and reloading your website pages. Be sure to try it on computers and mobile devices, so that you can be sure that your site is loading quickly on multiple different devices.
2. Your Shares on Social Media Do Not Look Good
When you share a product on social media, it should look appealing. It should have a good image, a description that is interesting to consumers and should give them a clear idea of what you are sharing. Around 31 percent of website traffic comes from social media, so a weak social media presence will have a significant impact on your business.
If previews and shares of your site don’t look appealing, they won’t catch the eye of users scrolling through a social media feed. If your site isn’t modern enough to help produce high-quality shares on your social media, it could be hindering or hurting your business.
3. Your Site Is Hard to Use on Mobile Devices
Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices are becoming increasingly common. Desktops and laptops are no longer the only ways that people find online information. In fact, mobile devices overtook computers as the primary searching tool a few years ago. If your website does not function well on mobile devices, you will lose many potential customers.
Pay attention to whether the text is legible, if the images appear correctly, and if the site is easy to navigate on a mobile device. Your website analytics can show you the percentage of visitors to your site who come from mobile devices. If the percentage is large, it should be a priority to improve your mobile site. If it isn’t large, it might also be because your site makes it harder for users to navigate.
4. Your Website isn’t Contributing to Business
If your business isn’t gaining any leads through the website, it is due for a redesign. Your site can be an extremely productive asset if used correctly. It’s important to check your ranking and your digital footprint to ensure that the issue isn’t a traffic problem rather than a conversion problem. However, if you have high traffic to the site but a low conversion rate, that’s a good indicator that you’re your website design is hurting your business’ ability to draw leads.
5. Visitors Do Not Stay on Your Site for Very Long
For most websites, users staying on the site for longer periods is almost as important as getting users to visit the site in the first place. To measure this, the first thing you should check is your bounce rate. A bounce rate is how often people leave your site having only visited one page. You can also look at the average pages that visitors use per session. Bounce rates, pages per session, and other information about your website traffic can be found using Google Analytics or other tracking methods that your content management service (CMS) might provide.
A high bounce rate, such as higher than 80%, means that your site isn’t enticing visitors to stay longer than one page. A redesign can help draw customers in and keep them longer – the longer that a user stays on your site, the more likely they are to contact you. Bringing down the bounce rate, upping pages per session, and longer times on site will indicate your website is better at converting.
6. It’s Difficult for People to Find What They Are Seeking
Like loading times, visitors want to be able to find what they are looking for quickly. They will grow impatient and leave if it takes them more than a few minutes (sometimes even seconds) to reach the page that they want. Users should be able to buy, subscribe, and inquire about what they need without requiring outside help. If you are receiving a lot of calls or email from people asking about using the site, it is a sign that you need to redesign it to be more user-friendly.
7. Your Competitors Have Redesigned Their Websites
An effective way to judge the design of your website can be to look at the websites of your top competitors. If they recently redesigned their sites and it looks extremely different or more modern than yours, you should consider revamping your website to something more current. A newer design also subtlety shows customers that you are keeping up with the trends, not only in web design but in your industry as well.
8. Your Brand, Products, or Services Have Changed
One of the most basic reasons to redesign your website is if your company is offering something new or different. People visit your website to understand the products and services that you have, so it is vital that you have information up that is still relevant to your business. A redesign will ensure that your new brand, product, or service is highlighted properly.
An Effective Website Is Vital to the Success of Your Business
Without a functioning and appealing website for your company, you’ll lose potential customers and clients. A company’s online presence is significant to its and you will not be able to keep up with your competitors if online users do not like your website. It’s extremely beneficial and important for your business to remain aware of the status of your website and redesign it whenever it begins to lose impact on users.