In today’s digital age your website represents your business brand and reputation on the Internet. As per any business, it makes sense to consider redesigning and updating your site in order to remain competitive, market-relevant and accommodate the changes in demand that your marketplace may face.

Your website should always evolve and remain dynamic.

So, when should you renovate your website?

According to the tech-land experts, a website has a general life-cycle of three years. This means that at least every three years you should refresh your site and perhaps consider undergoing a full redesign process.

Key Items To Consider

How is your website currently looking? Are visitors finding it appealing in general? Are the website´s KPIs being met? Do you have a business website that isn’t bringing in the customers you would like? Are your customers having trouble finding your website on Google Search? 

These, are some basic questions that you may consider to determine if it is time to renovate your site.

Always keep in mind, that the initial design of your site may have fulfilled its specific purpose at a specific time, but over the course of time, your business needs and conditions may have evolved and changed.

At eWebsites before our clients come to us and request a redesign/renovation of their existing website, we always like asking them some questions to better understand their goals and business needs to deliver the best-tailored solution.

2 Main Questions You Need To Answer Before You Renovate Your Site

1) Why is it that you want to redesign your website?

Although this may seem like an obvious question, our preference is to always listen to our clients first and let them expose the specific reasons or factors they may consider in order to renovate their website.

• Does it look old or outdated?
• Are you considering improving your rankings on Google
• Are the competitors in your niche redesigning their own websites?

At eWebsites we are here to understand your needs and provide you the best tailored solution to you.

2) What problems are you currently facing with your website?

• Is your bounce rate really high?
• Does your website take too long to load?
• Is it easy to navigate through your website?
• Do you have a compelling landing page?
• Is it clear for your visitors what they should do and expect of your website within the ´5-second rule´

As part of our solutions we provide a full site audit which enables us to understand what are the current problems, areas that may still be working and main items to tackle first in order to redesign your website.

5 Signs Your Website Needs A Renovation

Below are 5 of the main signs that can typically tell us that a website needs a redesign or renovation in order to remain relevant and appealing to your visitors and customers.

Let’s dive straight into them:

1) Poor Mobile Speed

In recent years, mobile has become more important than the desktop. Studies show that approximately  50% of all internet usage is mobile. And the trend is pointing out that the number will continue to grow in the upcoming future.

Now when it comes to the internet world, speed is gold. If your site takes more than 3.3 seconds to load, around 40% will abandon your site straight away! 

Not sure if your site´s mobile speed is good enough, we got you covered!

One of the best mobile speed test is from Think from Google

2) Slow Website Speed

If your site is taking more than 2 or 3 seconds to load, both your visitors and Google will not like it. You will be losing traffic and general visibility on the search engines.

You got to remember that among other factors, Google takes into account the site speed when they are indexing different websites and determining how to rank them.

The first thing you should do is to test your site speed:

You may think it’s just fine, but it could actually be slower than what you consider:

Check PageSpeeds Insights and find out your website speed (both desktop/mobile)

3) Poor Content

Content is a crucial aspect we address during a website renovation. If a website doesn´t contain fresh and updated content it will not be appealing to its visitors.

Content together with relevant images will make the interaction with your visitors way better allowing you to bring some of these benefits:

• If you pump up more content, the search engines will visit your site more often to index it. That translates into more visibility to your site, hence increasing your overall traffic;
• It keeps your visitors engaged and informed with the latest updates. This will improve your site KPIs and avoid high bounce rates whilst increasing the time they spent on your site;
• If you share more content, you will start becoming authoritative in your niche. That is crucial to establish more trust with your visitors and to ultimately convert them into qualified leads.

Contact us for your website redesign or new web design in South Yarra

4) Lack of Engagement From Your Visitors

If your visitors are inclined to abandon your site straight away, then we got an issue as this is showing us that they are not finding the information they are after.

This may be due to different factors, but as a rule of thumb, the longer they stay engaged in your site the more likely they are to engage and take action.

Some key measurements we check to determine the online behavior of your visitors are:

• Bounce Rate: Shows how many people are landing on a page and then clicking straight back without going deeper into the site (90% is bad. Ideally you want less than 50 %);
• Sessions and Users: shows how many individual people are visiting the site each day and how many times they are visiting;
• Behavior/Top Pages: shows the most popular pages which indicates what people are most interested in, and what pages are ranking best. One of the first things we look at when doing an audit. What are people engaged with the website? Do we need to improve it?
• Average Time On Page: indicates how long people are spending on each page, a measure of engagement and interest in the content

5) Poor Navigation-UX Experience

If your website is not easy to navigate, your visitors will find it really hard to obtain the information, products or services they may be searching for. That immediately translates in a poor UX experience, hence an increase in your abandon % rate.

As a business owner, you definitely don´t want this to happen.

A website renovation should not only focus on the design to make it more appealing to the eyes. But it should also create simple navigation.

Having a clear, well-structured site is very beneficial for the overall UX. Some of the key benefits you will obtain include:

• Increase your visitor’s duration and lower your bounce rate: When a website is easy to navigate, your visitors will increase the time they spent on it. This will allow them to read more about your company, discover any products or services you may be offering and take more action.

• Increases your opportunity to better showcase your products and services: Let´s face it, ultimately you want to increase your sales and get your visitors to take action. Well ticking this item, will boost your results.

• Improves your rankings: Google considers this factor into determining the ranking of your website. Therefore, you always want to keep Google happy so as to assure your chances of ranking on the first-page increase.

Conclusion:

If your website is looking a bit lackluster, not getting you any leads and barely having any traffic it is definitely time to consider renovating your site and going through a whole redesign process.

After all, what´s the purpose of having a website that is not translating into more customers for your business.