10 Reasons why your website may need redesigning

Posted on January 29, 2021

A website is one of the most powerful marketing tools for your business. It works for you 24hrs a day 7days a week, something that none of your employees can ever do for your business.

A website can help you reach more people, generate more leads and make you more sales.
It showcases important information about your company, your team, products, and services, and even directs people to your physical location.

While many companies have a website, many are outdated and not effectively and accurately reflecting the company’s brand. Also, web design trends keep changing and evolving as technology keeps advancing. A website that was designed a couple of years back may look old-fashioned and outdated when compared to the newer one and may even pose challenges in usability across various devices.

In this article, we will explore 10 reasons your website may be due for a redesign.

1. Your site look old-fashioned and outdated

Website design trends constantly keep changing over the years as technology keeps advancing. A website designed a couple of years ago will seem to look outdated when compared with the latest design trends. If your website is outdated, now is the time to have it redesigned to modern designs.

2. Your website is not mobile responsive

In the early days, the internet could only be accessed via desktop computers. The websites at the time were built to be viewed using only computers. In the later years, there have been great advancements in the mobile industry and mobile devices can access the internet and be used for browsing the web. Those websites meant only for computers can not fit well in mobile devices and require much zooming and scrolling right and left in order to view all the page contents, which is very tiresome and annoying.

The 2020 statistics show that 55.73% of internet users use mobile, while 41.46% use desktop computers and 2.81% use tablets. Still, there are many different brands and versions of each type of these devices having different screen sizes(eg. for smartphones there is iPhone, Samsung, Huawei, Tecno, etc with each having different versions and screen sizes. The same applies for desktop and tablets). To cater for optimal view of the websites across all devices, a design approach was introduced in 2010 and named “Responsive Web Design(RWD)”. This is a design approach that focuses on building flexible and fluid layouts that adapt to any screen size of the device used to access the website. In addition to giving your website visitors a great experience, having a responsive/mobile-friendly website is also a ranking factor for search engines.

While your website may have the best look on the desktop screen, you should also try accessing it using multiple devices. If it is not responsive, then having your website redesigned is a top priority task for you.

3. You have rebranded your business

To keep up with the changing times, it may be inevitable to update your brand. The change of branding may involve updating a logo, colors, slogan, tagline, mission statement, or even a complete overhaul of your services or products.

To be considered professional and taken seriously, it’s very important for your website to accurately reflect your business. If it doesn’t, you could lose brand recognition and quality leads.

If you’ve recently updated your brand or are thinking about it, it is highly recommended to redesign your website as well to match the brand.

4. It is not search-engine-friendly

93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. Statistics also show that over 3.5 billion Google searches are conducted daily. Also, 75% of people who search on Google never click past the first page of search results.

That means that you can drive massive traffic to your website from search engine results. But for this to happen your site has to rank high in search engines’ rankings. A process known as Search Engine Optimization(SEO) can help improve your website’s search engines’ rank. But if the site is poorly designed for SEO it still will be difficult to rank.

A website redesign can help you improve the site architecture, URLs structure among other features to make it SEO friendly.

5. Your website has poor user experience

You probably have at some point visited a website that was very difficult to use and navigate for you. May be due to a complex or a poor design. Having such a website will frustrate away your potential leads which is a big loss to you. 88% of online consumers said they are less likely to return to a site after having bad experience.

User experience (UX) is a crucial design discipline that focuses on the emotional experience a visitor has when navigating through a website and how it aligns with their intentions.

To create a good user experience, the website needs to be easy to use, visually appealing and attractive, be free of bugs, easy to locate content, have quality, credible and original content.

6. Your website is slow

Users want to access information quickly and easily and hate to wait for slow-loading pages. In fact, 47% of consumers expect a website to load in less than two seconds, and 40% will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. If your website takes long to load, then definitely you are losing potential leads to your competitors.

Also, website’s loading speed is used as a ranking factor by Google. So if you want to rank high on Google you better speed up your website.

Factors related to site design causing slow website loading speed include bad code, unnecessary plugins, and oversized un-optimized images. Improving the website speed may need a complete redesign of the website.

7. Your website is built on outdated technology

Same to design trends, web development technologies keep changing over time. A technology that works perfectly today may become obsolete and outdated in the coming years. For example, your website could have been built in flash which has since been replaced with HTML5. It is difficult for search engines to read and difficult to access on mobile devices.

Your website may have been built on a CMS such as WordPress and running on plugins that have not been updated in years. Updating your website with the latest technology and plugins will help your website to perform better and be more efficient, providing a better user experience for your visitors.

8. Your website isn’t getting adequate conversions

The goal of a website for your business is to help you generate more leads, inquiries and make more sales. If you are doing the marketing right but not getting adequate conversions, it could be a sign that your website is not connecting well with your audience.

The reason could be that pages are too complicated or the call-to-action (CTAs) are not clear enough. You may need to analyze the reasons using tools such a Google Analytics to establish the real reason. If it’s due to poor or complicated design then the website will need a redesign.

9. Your website is not in line with your current marketing strategies

As your company grows over time, your marketing goals and strategies are likely to evolve as well. For example, your marketing strategy at the time of starting the website could be getting traffic through paid ads and getting inquiries via the contact form.

Today you could be trying to generate organic traffic from search engines and building authority and credibility through blogging and email subscriptions.

If your strategy has changed from when you started your business, it is important that your website evolves to align with your goals.

10. To facilitate integrations with external systems

You may want to have your website integrated with eternal systems to introduce new functionalities. This may include linking it to a CRM system, integrating payment gateways, linking it with a webinar software, etc.

Whatever the integration you want to do, you may need to change the technology behind your website for it to work perfectly which will necessitate a redesign.

Conclusion

Having a well-designed website that is up-to-date and user-friendly is key to online business success.

While there is no need to redesign your website every now and then, it is important to have an objective look at your website occasionally to examine whether a redesign is needed.

A redesign can help you align your website to your overall business strategy, increase your conversion rate, improve your search engine rankings, and meet the needs of your team and visitors.

If you happen to be in need for a website redesign, feel free to contact us at any time. We will not only, redesign your website but will as well actively assist you where need be as far as your online business success is concerned.