Signs you need a new website

Your website reflects the soul and shape of your business. It’s where people will get to know your business better, and form an overall image of what your business is like. A website that feels outdated and no longer serves the purpose that it was built for could be a major setback for you.

Keeping your website up-to-date, and making sure it still delivers the message it was built for with ease is crucial for the success of your business.

Here are some clues that you may need a website remake:

You’ve gone through rebranding

Maybe you got a new brand for your business, and with it came many changes to the identity, look, feel, and tone of your old brand.

It’s essential to have a website that matches your new brand in every aspect. Its colors should correspond to the palette of your brand, the tone of its content should follow the brand voice and tone guidelines, and it should overall be a crystal clear reflection of what your new brand feels like.

This helps establish a solid connection between visitors and your brand, and it keeps consistency in check across the spectrum of your business.

Your website is not responsive

It’s a fact that the majority of your users are going to access your website through a mobile device. More than 52% of web traffic is coming from mobile phones as of 2018.

This means it’s necessary to have a mobile friendly website that works properly on different mobile devices, and adjusts its content to fit a variety of different screen sizes.

If your website is not responsive, the larger part of your website visitors will have trouble navigating through your website and many of them are bound to stop using your website altogether. This will surely hit your visitors’ count hard due to the fact they are simply not able to have a pleasant experience with your website.

Another reason the number of your visitors is very likely to go down is that your website will be ranked on the lower end of Google’s ranking ladder, since the ranking algorithm penalizes non-responsive websites with a lower ranking index.

That’s why it’s very important to get a new website that is built in a mobile-first approach.

Your website takes too long to load

In a very fast-moving world, most people don’t have the luxury of staring aimlessly at a web page, waiting for it to load its content while the seconds go by. A user is more than likely to close the web page if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.

Performance and speed are two major factors that contribute to the success of any website. It plays a huge role in leaving a strong impression for your visitors. If your website is fast, it’s likely to be perceived as professional.

Having a fast website is not luxury anymore. A slow website will kill your Google rank as well. Since Google takes website load speed into account when ranking websites. Not only that, but also fewer Google’s crawlers will crawl your website if takes long to load.

So it’s needless to say that having a slow website should raise a flag that your website needs either major fixes or a complete remake.

It looks overall old and obsolete

Remember when you first had your website? It probably was topping website design trends back then, with the perfect look and feel that matches its era. But then time goes by, trends change, new best practices are discovered and the overall taste of web adjusts to fit the newer needs of web surfers.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to go look up the top 10 website design trends of your current time and clone one of them, just to follow the trend. But it means that you need to be flexible enough to provide your visitors with the same personalized flavor which defines your business and website, while still making sure it never goes out of style.

Pay attention to the major agreed-upon changes that your website is still lacking. Maybe sliders are out of date due to several facts that touch both user experience and web performance, then it’s time to look for an alternative that also fits you well.

Your bounce rate only keeps going up

Bounce rate describes the amount of visitors who land and your website and leave before they visit any other page of your website.

You typically want your visitors to roam your website as much as possible. Because this is more than likely to help you achieve the goals your website was built for. It’s unlikely that your visitors will get the information you wanted them to gather, or take the action your website on, if they just leave before they get to explore your full website willingly.

A bounce rate that’s going higher day by day could be an indicator to an underlying problem. It just means that people don’t find your website helpful. Maybe it’s time to go for a website remake that puts your customers’ goals in mind from the start, while implementing the best practises of the day across the different aspects of performance, user experience, and more.

It’s difficult to make small updates

Maybe you want to add a few new features to your website, or change the logic of some current interactions according to new needs that your business calls for. It’s natural since websites are not meant to be one-time, fire-and-forget kind of assets.

Proper websites should be built with maintainability in mind, and they shouldn’t be too difficult to scale up as well when the times and needs call for a change.

If you find yourself getting stuck for long periods with every change you want to make, and features that shouldn’t take too much time are starting to take longer than they should, then it’s probably a sign that your old website is struggling with flexibility.

Moreover, the more you try to push the old website beyond its limits, the more you’re going to end up with a complicated logic of the codebase, which will make future updates even harder than previous ones.

Your content is no longer viable

The content of your website is basically your business speaking to people out there. You have to make sure it’s always up to date and delivers the correct and updated data you want your visitors to see.

If your business strategy or description has changed, you need to have the updated information live on your website. If you have stopped selling a certain product or added new ones, then you have to update the listing of products on your website with the latest items you are providing.

You should be able to easily update the content of your website through a friendly content management system that allows you and your staff to regularly edit the content of your website.

Conclusion

If you find one or more of the above points apply to your website, then maybe it’s time you consider getting a fresh website that serves the correct purposes of your business and puts you ahead.