9 Signs You Need A New Website
Having a Website for your business is a smart choice for many reasons. Your customers will always be able to find your business and be able to get access to your information from the comfort of their home or mobile device at any time of the day or night.
Having a website presence gives you the opportunity to reach a large audience, build a community and following as well as increase brand awareness. In order to enjoy all the benefits of having a website that ranks high on search engines, you need to avoid making some common mistakes when you develop your website. If you’re wondering why your website isn’t getting traffic, has problems with the way it displays images and text, the pages are not loading properly, then take a look at this list to give you some feedback for some tell-tale signs that you need a new website.
Slow Website Speed
Your website speed can have a huge impact on your conversion rates. Given that most people who visit a website want to get the information they need as quickly and with as few clicks as possible, then leave. If they notice your pages are loading slow or not at all, they’ve immediately leave and search for the next website to find the information they need. On average, a visitor will give your website just a few seconds to load, and if it doesn’t load, they’ll will quickly lose interest and go to your competitor’s website. One of the things you can do is run your own website through Google’s Page Speed Insight tool to check your speed results, if the speeds are too slow, you should contact a website developer.
Outdated Website Design
Website design trends come and go every few years so it’s important to make sure you’re on a stable platform that allows for regular updates for plug-ins and platform updates. A website design has a huge impact on how your business runs. Your website design and functionality not only creates a good first impression for your visitors, but it can draw positive attention to your site, and can attract new prospects and potential customers to your website instead of your competitor’s.
An active website should be refreshed and updated every 3-5 years with the help of a professional. It should support a positive user experience, and have a positive impact on your Google Analytics metrics.
Your Website is Not Optimized
Website optimization is the process of improving the performance and user experience of your site and gets people to convert. It is the process of learning about your target audience and driving more traffic to your website. Some of the most popular optimization strategies include SEO (search engine optimization), creating a tailored website copy for your audience, and optimizing the website for mobile devices. A professional digital agency with this expertise can help develop a strategy that will increase conversion rates and align with you marketing and ROI goals.
Lack of Keywords
Keywords are an important tool for a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. Some people believe that keywords are “dead” and no longer should be used on your website, but they are still important and have a positive impact on your ranking if you use them correctly. Choosing the right keywords can give your audience insight and information into your product or service, and how it can help them solve their problem. You can also use keywords as a market research tool as well.
Poor Mobile Experience
Everyone today uses a smartphone so it only makes sense that people can easily access and see your website from their phone. A mobile version not only includes a smaller screen, but it sometimes requires you to create a dedicated mobile website that allows the visitor to switch to a desktop version as needed. A mobile-optimized website needs to have larger buttons, prominent CTAs, fast load times, and less text. The reason is to provide a productive mobile experience to your target audience because most of your website traffic will be coming from a smartphone and your mobile users have different searching behaviors than the desktop counterparts, plus they don’t want to wait forever to watch images load on their smaller device screen.
You Have a Poor Conversion Rate
One of the main purposes of having a website for your business is to increases your conversion rates. You want visitors to subscribe and become customers. There are many ways to measure your conversion and success rates by using tools that give you data insights on where website traffic is coming from, how long someone stays on your website, which pages they visit, and why they abandon your shopping cart or leave your website. Any time you encounter these issues, it’s time to step up and get your website redesigned. Conversion rates are critically important for a website. The conversion rate is a measure of how successful your business is and how many of your visitors become customers.
Your Visitors Can’t Easily Find What They Need on Your Site
Your visitors should be able to access your website and find the information that they need easily and without much difficulty within 3 clicks from the time they first arrive at your website.
If you can’t provide a comfortable and easy customer experience, then your visitors will most likely leave and go to your competitors’ website. First and foremost, you need to know who your customer is so you can create content and messaging that caters to their needs and allows for easy navigation to find the information that they are looking for in as few clicks as possible.
Increasing Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is an important metric that lets you know how many visitors aren’t clicking on links to other pages of your website and just leaving because they can’t find the information they are looking for. When bounce rates are high, it typically means that there are problems with your website, and the problems could one of many things such as slow page loads, missing images, text, 404 errors, malware on the website, etc. Just because you have a high bounce rate doesn’t always mean that you need to redevelop your website. It could be that it just needs to have plug-in or security updates, and nothing more. On the flip side, if it’s more serious and the simple fixes don’t do the job, you’ll likely need to contact a professional digital agency that specializes in website development.
Your Website Has a Bug
If your website has a bug that is preventing your visitors from subscribing to your site, completing a purchase, or contacting your company, then you have a serious problem that needs to be addressed immediately. One of biggest alarming things you might notice is when you do a keyword search for your company, it will likely list your website (If your website is properly optimized using SEO) along others, but yours will have text stating something like “This website is a risk”. This is bad news when Google lists that under your website. It is recommended that you contact a highly skilled web developer to fix this problem.
