Your website is your sales representative working 24/7. Day in and day out, it’s how you show your company to the world. How your site looks to a visitor can have huge effects on your sales, credibility, and perception in the marketplace.
Times change and technology advances.
In order to continue to rely on your site to attract visitors, grow leads, and increase sales, it needs to adapt to these changes.
How do you know it’s time for a redesign?
Bounce Rate
In school, a 95% constitutes an “A”.
In the world of web design, a 95%, when it comes to homepage bounce rate, is a killer.
If your bounce rate is climbing into the 90’s, it means that visitors aren’t hanging around to see what you have to offer. They are getting in and getting out—quickly. This is a red flag that it may be time for a redesign.
Outdated Design
Your website design affects the user’s experience on the site. It can happen quickly.
Many trends in website design come and go, taking with them a positive visitor experience.
A great example of this is sites that show the menu on the side. Below, you can see the highlighted side menu. A popular way to set up sites 10 years ago, when viewed today can end up as a garbled mess.
With over 60% of visitors using their mobile devices, outdated website designs can be less than mobile-friendly.
Terrible navigation
Is your navigation cluttered and confusing? Are any of your links broken or lead to dead ends?
How about your CTA’s, do you have too many?
Turning leads into customers is much easier when the visitor’s path is simple to follow and uncluttered. Not only is clean navigation important for your visitors, one of the biggest changes we have seen in Google is that now they prefer sites that are simpler and easier to navigate.
User journeys can be tracked and broken links, dead pages, and bad navigation tools can be identified using Google Analytics.
Along with being an outdated design, the shared screenshot above is an example of confusing navigation. You can see it has both the top and the right navigation down the side of the page.
New Products and Service
Do you offer products and services on your site that are no longer available? Are you listing your current products?
Nothing is more frustrating for a user than going to a site after a Google search only to find that the site doesn’t show the product. And, then they find out that the products that they do have on the site are no longer being offered.
Remember, no one likes the ol’ “bait and switch”! Make sure you are keeping your site updated with your latest offerings.
Wrong Target Audience
In my opinion, the biggest reason to update your website is when you are no longer in line with your target audience.
One sure-fire way to know if that is happening is if your website is receiving inquiries, but they’re from people the company can’t or didn’t intend on serving. This may mean that your website was either built for too broad of an audience or that your offerings have been scaled down.
The fix for this is to remove the excess pages and content and prioritize the website’s most popular and profitable audience.
Or, if your business is pivoting or changing its niche, a website review is important to make sure that you are focusing your efforts on capturing these new opportunities.
Are you seeing these signs?
Reach out for a FREE consultation today and let’s talk about a fall website refresh.
At Waterfront Graphic Design, we provide seamless web support while you grow your business. From start to finish, and all the maintenance in between, we handle it all. We outperform in the background as your website partner while you enjoy the spotlight.
