When is it Time to Redesign Your Website?

A well-designed and user-friendly website is the cornerstone of a successful business. It drives traffic and keeps your visitors engaged as they move through your sales funnel. In many ways, a website is like a living organism. It reflects your brand’s personality, speaks for your company, and directs your visitors towards conversion. Furthermore, it should be constantly evolving to meet the needs of your audience.

Table of Contents: 

• Your website is not mobile-friendly
• You have changed or upgraded your branding
• Your competitors have redesigned their websites
• You find it difficult to update content
• Your website takes too long to load 
• Your website is cluttered
• Your website is not SEO optimized

Around 87% of people research a product online before deciding to make a purchase. According to research conducted by Microsoft Corp, the digital age has shortened the overall human attention span reducing it to around eight seconds. Today, people have an extremely itchy index finger and are more than willing to hit the back button and switch to one of your competitors if:

• Your website doesn’t reflect the services you offer
• Visitors find it hard to navigate your website
• Your website takes a long time to load

This is why your website needs to be able to grab the attention of your visitors and fast. If it fails to do so, chances are your website is outdated and needs a makeover.

To help you spot out all of the cues, our web design agency Chicago, answers one of the most frequently asked questions: 

When is it time for a redesign?

Your website is not mobile-friendly

A study by Perficient shows that mobile search accounts for almost 70% of all website visits in 2020. With such huge percentages, failing to provide a seamless experience on all platforms, results in missing out on a huge number of potential customers.

Mobile-friendly websites are fairly easy to achieve. During a redesign, you need to incorporate adaptive web design. Our web design agency usually develops six website designs to fit the most common screen widths:

• 320 pixels
• 480 pixels
• 760 pixels
• 960 pixels
• 1200 pixels
• 1600 pixels

Each time someone uses a handheld device to navigate your website, they will be presented with the layout that is the most appropriate for the current screen size.

You have changed or upgraded your branding

Your visitors need to get the same experience no matter how they choose to engage with your brand. Whether you recently decide it’s time for a logo change, a new slogan, or you got a new business card, you should redesign your website to reflect such change(s).

Your competitors have redesigned their websites

Today’s online competition is fierce across all industries. If the constant battle for leads has made your competitors redesign their website, you should also opt for a revamp. We are not saying you should always mimic your competition. Staying true to your branding and creating your own path is essential if you wish to be recognized as an industry authority. However, taking a sneak peek at your competitors’ websites doesn’t hurt. Review their moves and design choices to gather inspiration to better engage with your target buyers. Staying competitive means constantly improving to get as much online attention as possible.

You find it difficult to update content

If severe difficulties with your backend system keep you from editing your website and keeping your content up to date, you need a redesign as soon as possible. You will never be able to keep up with your industry and audience’s needs if your website is standing in your way. 

As your business grows, your company is bound to undergo certain changes. In this case, your website should be a go-to place for you to inform your customers of the exciting steps you are about to take. If it acts more like a roadblock, consider switching to a new and more user-friendly content management system. As you do so, look for a way to redesign your website to provide your visitors with the ultimate user experience.

Your website takes too long to load

We will start this section with a couple of mind-blowing statistics: 

• 47% of people expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds
• 75% of users leave a page that takes more than 4 seconds to load -never to return

Keeping in mind the overall human attention span, a properly optimized website takes no more than 3 seconds to load. This leaves you with 5 seconds to wow your visitor with a visually pleasing design, a special offer, a prominent CTA button, or engaging content. If none of it loads, they’re gone; one less lead for you and one more for your competitor.

Slow loading time is the first sign of poor user experience. It is usually a combination of several factors, from badly optimized image sizes to heavy code. Whatever the reason, if it takes time for your website to load, a redesign is in order. We speak from many years of experience when we say that the Sage WordPress theme shows the best results when optimizing for speed.

Google also uses page speed as a ranking factor. Luckily, there are many tools that you can use to check your load time:

• Test My Site (for mobile websites)
• Google Page Speed Insights
• GTMetrix
• Pingdom

Your website is cluttered

While you should put all important info. at your visitor’s disposal, it is not a good idea to jam it all on one page. An overcrowded page may confuse your visitors and evoke the feeling that you are trying to oversell them. 

Let your website breathe through white space. This way you will be able to highlight the message you wish to get across while effectively guiding your visitors to your CTA button. Also, you should keep intrusive pop-ups and unnecessary animations to a minimum.

When is it time to redesign your website? When browsing starts to feel like a tense and tiresome chore. Instead, you want to put your visitor’s minds at ease while they interact with your brand.

Your website is not SEO optimized

Missing the chance to fight for top spots on the search engine results page leads to multiple missed opportunities to provide consistent leads for your business. For your website to rank high on Google for relevant keywords such as your brand name, you must undergo on-page SEO. Here are some of the basic SEO elements for your site:

• Unique title tag
• Unique meta descriptions
• A single H1 tag on every page that consists of the page’s title tag
• Page URLs need to be formatted with relevant keywords
• Each page should have internal links to other pages
• Images should be optimized with a relevant file name and alt text attribute

These optimizations are usually done during the process of website creation. However, if your website lacks optimization, you can perform an SEO audit to uncover the steps you can take to improve your brand’s visibility in search engines. Ideally, your site could require an edit here and there, or a complete redesign could be in order.

Keep in mind that nearly 95% of Google users never click past the first page. If you are still asking yourself when is it time to redesign your website, be sure that lack of search engine optimization checks all the boxes.

Final thoughts

Our web design agency from Chicago is aware that it takes a lot of courage to face the fact that your website is underperforming. To think that it took hours for initial development,  just to go through it all again can be intimidating. However, look at it this way, your website is an investment and one of your strongest business assets. It’s your brand’s wingman but, what’s the use of a wingman that pulls you down? How much ROI can you expect from a website that misses the mark with your target audience and fails to provide leads?

When is it time to redesign your website? If any of the statements above are true about your website, the time is now.