Your business website is your most valuable salesperson in today’s highly digital world. Having a quality website is no longer an advantage in the business world. It is necessary to survive. With most businesses already have established an online presence, the question shifts to how can you maximize your business’s online profile?
With access to unlimited information at our fingertips, leading brands offer customers the ability to book appointments or shop for products online with a few clicks of their screen. As such, consumers quickly judge a business’s credibility by its website. If your website doesn’t offer customers what they’re looking for, they will quickly and easily find it in one of your competitors.
As the face of your business, it’s crucial to have a website that delivers your brand message effectively. Your website should say everything you want your customers and potential customers to know about your business. It should also do an excellent job promoting your current products and services. If your website does its job, it will attract new business prospects, answer questions people have about your company, and increase your sales.
So, how do you know if your website is working for or against you? Before we jump into why you should invest in a website redesign, let’s talk about how to analyze your current site to determine its value.
Is My Current Website Projecting the Right Image of My Business?
The reasons why businesses redesign a website vary, depending on several factors. The most common reasons are rebranding your site, increasing traffic, generating more leads, adding functionality, improving user experience, and upgrading an outdated site. Here are some questions to ask yourself before you consider a website redesign project
1. Does My Website Visually Reflect My Brand?
Your website is essentially the first impression potential customers get of your brand. Look at your website and ask, “does it give a good visual representation of who we are?” You should also consider how your website stacks up against your competitors. A simple online search can help you compare.
Today’s average consumer has grown accustomed to contemporary web design. Over 75% of consumers report judging a brand based on its website. Of that 75%, nearly half admit to abandoning a website if the design and content is unattractive. Simply stated, appearances hold significant weight in the business world.
Look at your website through an objective lens. If you were shopping for your company’s products and services, would your website encourage you to buy? How does it compare to other websites you’ve recently visited? If you aren’t impressed, it’s time for an upgrade.
2. Does Your Content Communicate Your Message?
While layout and design hold a lot of weight, content is equally important. More and more websites are moving away from written content to deliver a more visual experience. The average consumer doesn’t want to sit and read long-form content anymore. Instead, high-resolution graphics and trendy videos are the norms today.
The average consumer today has an incredibly short attention span. Studies show that users spend less than 6 seconds scanning your website for the information they need. That means you have a very short time to grab users’ attention. It’s even worse if your content isn’t 100% effective and well-written.
Redesigning your website is the perfect way to clean up your content. You can shorten your website content and find creative ways to deliver your message in a more straightforward and effective manner. Clear, concise, and engaging content provided on a website that effectively moves your users through the sales funnel is the best way to increase sales. A quality web development company can help you find ways to improve your website content and dramatically increase user engagement on your site.
3. Is Your Website Responsive?
Unless you’ve been living off the grid, you probably know that websites need to be responsive. This means it can seamlessly adapt to any device you’re using to view. Over the past five years, mobile eCommerce sales have skyrocketed by nearly 300%. These trends are expected to continue well into the upcoming years.
With more and more consumers shopping from their mobile devices, what does this mean for website design? If you want to succeed online, your website needs to perform well in three key areas. It needs to be fast, responsive, and easy to navigate on screens of all sizes if you want to satisfy mobile users. If your website fails to meet any of these requirements, it’s time to redesign. The cost of website design services will give you a significant return on your investment over time.
4. Has Your Website Changed as Your Brand Changes?
Any business owner knows that brands change over time. As you grow and evolve, your products and service will change, and so will your business goals. If it’s been several years since you’ve evaluated your website, it might be time to sit down and consider. Does your website reflect your products, services, and goals as your business has changed?
Many business owners fail to reflect internal changes on their websites. Your website design should incorporate new marketing strategies, product mixes, and service offerings. However, with all the other internal shifts falling into place, it’s easy to forget to change your website. This leaves a significant margin for lost sales. As such, your website should be reevaluated every couple of years to ensure it accurately reflects your current operations and business objectives.
5. What Do the Numbers Say?
No matter what type of business industry you’re in, you need to keep a close eye on the metrics. Successful business owners always examine their performance metrics and find new ways to improve. When it comes to your business website, countless tools are available to gauge your website performance.
Diving into your analytics can reveal a lot about whether or not your website is working for or against your business. Here are some key performance indicators to pay attention to:
- Page views
- Bounce rate
- Website traffic
- New visitors vs. returning visitors
- Average session duration
- Top performing pages
- Conversion rate
These metrics combined give you a comprehensive analysis of your website’s performance online. If you feel your numbers could be better, a website redesign will undoubtedly help.
7 Reasons to Website Redesign Makes Sense for Your Business
Since your website is your customers’ first impression of your business, you should be looking at your website every so often. Although website redesign is an investment, the return can be substantial. Before we jump into why you should redesign your website, it’s important to make one point clear.
Website redesign does not mean you need to change every single part of your website. You might simply need to add extra functionality to a few pages in some cases. In others, you may want to enhance visuals and improve content. As one of the foundational elements of your marketing strategy, you need to make sure your website works for your current business goals.
Here are some reasons you should give your website a redesign:
1. You Aren’t Getting the Results You Need
Even if your website looks great, it’s crucial to ask if it’s bringing you the results you need. Even a highly function, eye-catching, and pixel-perfect website can require various upgrades to perform the way you need it to perform. If your website isn’t doing what you need it to do, it’s simply wasted online real estate.
Your website aims to inform customers about your business and build your customer base. Your analytics should show that your current site brings you towards those goals. Take a long, hard look at your conversion rates. If you aren’t happy with your current results, it’s time for a redesign.
Here are some things you can discuss with your professional website development team:
- Do my calls-to-action convert visitors into leads or customers?
- Do my landing pages effectively move customers through the sales funnel? Does the current aesthetic and content encourage visitors to dig deeper into my brand?
- Is my site too heavy with written content?
- How does my site compare to my competitors?
Answering these questions is a great place to start in the redesign process.
2. The Purpose of Your Site Has Changed
The marketing strategy is relatively fluid for most companies. Consider how often you modify your marketing strategy and how changes impact your conversion funnel. While you don’t need to completely redesign your website every time you adjust your marketing goals, you should check in periodically to ensure your site is aligned with your current marketing strategy.
If the purpose of your site has changed, you’ll need to update the layout, content, and functionality to stay in line with your current goals. For example, if your new strategy is focused on gathering leads, you need to make sure your call-to-action buttons are easy to see, working, and effective.
3. Your Website Is Outdated and Not Responsive
While this might seem like an apparent reason to redesign your website, many people feel that maintaining an outdated site is just fine. This is a significant mistake business owners make that will cost you thousands of dollars in lost revenue over time. Is your site as user-friendly as it could be? Does your site function as users expect? Are there elements of your site that aren’t effective?
Is your site responsive? Mobile responsiveness is vital to your online success. More than 17% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your site isn’t responsive in 2022, you are losing leads and customers. It is no secret that consumers crave an excellent UX on their devices. Building a responsive site should be a chief priority for all business users, regardless of your industry.
4. You Are Deploying a Better Marketing or Content Strategy
Quality marketing strategies involve several different focus areas to bring your brand growth and success. As a valued digital marketing company in Vancouver, we’ve sat down with clients who haven’t changed their online profile to reflect new strategies, products, and services. It is crucial that your site reflects your current strategy and service offerings. Failing to properly reflect this can cause you to lose customers to your competitors.
Visitors come to your website to see what you brand has to offer. Therefore, your potential customers need to see updated information about your products, services, and business in general. If your online presence is not reflecting this information, it’s time for a change.
Likewise, your content strategy should be reflective of your current business plan and up-to-date and engaging. Having quality, valuable content on your site can improve your overall business strategy, from customer retention to SEO. As search engine standards continue to change and evolve, you need to stay on top of your content plan.
Your website content needs to be relevant, grabbing the attention of your visitors and presenting them with the information they are looking for when they land on your website. Additionally, it needs to be readable and easy to find. If visitors can’t find what they are looking for within seconds of opening your website, they will likely move on to one of your competitors.
If you’re planning to make significant changed to your content strategy, it’s probably time to redesign your website. This will help you highlight quality content, making it easy to find and read for your visitors. With an increased focus on visual content, you can also find creative and strategic ways to convey your message in a way to captivates your audience.
5. You Want to Add Functionality
Today, your website needs to be easy to use, understand, and navigate. This goes for both your frontend visitors and your backend marketing team. As your traffic and business grows, it’s likely that you’ll need to add new functionality to your website.
Meeting the evolving expectations and needs of your visitors and team is vital to your business success. For example, you might need to add live chat to your website to help with customer inquiries and sales or you may need to add multi-language content as you expand your business to include international sales.
As more functionality options emerge in the web design industry, most businesses are eager to try new options for their website. Since more and more consumers are turning to mobile shopping, navigability and personalization are huge. You need to make it easy and fast for visitors to find what they want and make a purchase. Advanced functionality allows you to simplify the navigation system and even add smart content filters to streamline the user experience.
You can integrate a platform with robust built-in functionality and flexibility by upgrading your design early on. This makes it easy to integrate external software and support scalability over time.
6. You Want to Drive More Traffic
Of course, your website is wasted online real estate if no one visits it. However, to drive more traffic to your site, you need to optimize it for SEO results. Most search engine standards require you to meet specific requirements to rank higher on the results page.
There are several ways you can improve your website traffic. For example, adding a blog to your content strategy can increase your chances of ranking high on the SERPs by over 400%. To develop an effective SEO strategy, you’ll need to do the work. Results-driven keyword research and implementation can help you find what words or phrases users are looking for in the search engine queries. You can include these in your titles, headers, body copy, URLs, and meta titles and descriptions.
As you build your strategy, consistency is key. The more relevant and valuable content you add, the easier it is to interlink and boost your search engine results. Believe it or not, Google uses search engine bots that actually understand the value and relevance of your website content. Using a more advanced content management system and features can help improve your results.
The more you optimize your content, the more traffic you will drive to your website. This helps you establish authority online and greatly increases your sales and business growth. If your website hasn’t been updated in a while, a redesign can help optimize your site for your marketing success.
7. You Want to Increase Conversions
Driving a lot of traffic to your website is great, but you need those visitors to take action with your business. If you want to convert visitors to qualified leads, a website redesign can help shift you towards a clear conversion strategy.
Your website needs to tell visitors who you are, what you offer, and who your target audience is. Once visitors have gathered all this information, you need to establish a sales funnel that encourages them to take the next step in becoming a customer. The ultimate goal should be to sell your products and services.
When you work with an excellent web development company, you can improve your conversion rates by up to 20% or more. If you want to improve conversion rates, you need to ensure that your current platform supports integrations between your site and a CRM or marketing software. Upgrading your website and integrating a quality CMS can help improve the user experience. It can also simplify the design process to help your marketing and administrative team quickly and easily adjust your website as needed.
Is It Time to Redesign Your Website?
Is your website bringing you business? Your website is intended to share your brand message and drive conversions to increase your sales and business growth. If it’s not doing this, it’s time to determine where you need to make changes. In most cases, a website redesign is the best option.
Redesigning your website takes time, effort, and money. However, it can bring a significant return on your investment that is crucial to your online success. Aligning your overall business strategy with your online profile is vital to today’s business success. A website redesign can help increase conversion rates, improve search engine rankings, and meet the needs of your current and potential customers.
Is it time to redesign your website? Talk to our Vancouver web design team to assess your current site and determine if a redesign can help increase your online success. We’ll help you create a strategy that works within your budget to increase conversions and improve your overall business growth.
Get in touch today!
