As the digital marketing space moving at a rapid pace, having an outdated website can have a negative impact on your business. That's why it is necessary to update your website to keep it fast, relevant, and safe. Today, trends in web design are changing almost daily, so it is important to keep up with them. Besides, search engines like Google are regularly updating their algorithms to deliver the best search results.
In this era of digital marketing that is regularly changing and innovatively evolving. If you want your company to grow, be it through marketing, sales, designer or manager, it is necessary to examine how contemporary the company's website. In order to stay ahead of the design, functionality, and development trends, websites should be redesigned in every 3-5 years. Your website is the portal to your business, and first impressions matter, to both your competition and customers.
Before we discuss the reasons on why your website may need a redesign, the major question you should ask is "What do I want to get out of this website?" Defining your objectives from the beginning is the first step before embarking on a website redesign. From exactly that point, you can deliberately target your market, track user's behavior and most relevantly, develop a plan.
Let's take a look at reasons why you need to consider a website redesign---
To Get an Expanded or Changed Target Audience
Maybe you were targeting a limited or specific demographic or user group in the past. But with the release of a new product or service, you may shift your target personas or market strategy. Every user that you target is looking for something distinct that he needs and your website is a gateway to all these requirements. But recognizing these requirements is not enough. You must be able to capitalize on these requirements by incorporating corresponding attractions on your website. A website redesign is needed to align your website with the expectations of your new user groups. The realigning expectations are:
- The words used to describe the products and services offered by your company
- Design elements and functionality of your website
- How to organize your website?
- The content your audiences expect to find on your product or service pages.
To Update Brand Messaging
It is essential to present a uniform, clear, and consistent brand message throughout your website. This means your tag lines, slogans, brand voice, value proposition, mission/why statement are all crucial factors in determining how well your website reflects your business and your brand. Check out your website today, and if there is any of the above elements are missing, then it is time to upgrade your website and give it the taste it deserves.
To Update the Purpose of Your Website
If the purpose or goals of your website have changed it may require a website overhaul. For example, if your new goals are to provide more lead generation content, it is needed to restructure pages to drive more leads; or if you have added a shopping cart to your website recently, it is needed to update the layout of the site in order be more in line with other e-commerce websites.
Even though you might not need to change the structure of your website every time, it is a good idea to keep checking to ensure that your site is still aligned with your new marketing plans and strategies.
To Resolve the Complaints from Clients and Users
A skillful way to identify issues with your current website is by working closely with your customer service team. If your customers are facing any underlying issues or have any complaints, then you must start addressing their complaints and plan to redesign your website accordingly.
The problems that your clients and users might face and complaint, if they are not happy with your website layout might include:
- Unable to find you online
- Facing problems to use the website on mobile and other devices
- Can not to locate your business
- Facing challenges in buying some of your products
- The website takes more time to load and perform actions
To Update the Website According to Industry-specific Design Trends
It is important to stay relevant to the current industry design trend. With industry-specific web design trends changing every few years, a website that is two or three years old will look outdated when compared to a competitor having the website with the latest design trends.
To achieve the best from your online business, it is necessary to take time and put effort into ensuring that you give your website one of the best looks that are focused at attracting and impressing users or clients.
While you go for redesigning your website according to the current design trends, there are some questions that may be taken into consideration--
- Will redesigning our website be beneficial to how our brand is perceived?
- Are our competitors taking advantage of these new design trends?
If your answers to both questions are yes, then it is time to work on your web design on an urgent basis. It is very often that clients and users always choose to work with companies that take a keen interest in keeping up with current industry trends.
To Enhance the Look of Your Outdated Website
It is estimated that around 75% of website visitors will always judge your website's credibility depending on its look. The first impression will stay in their minds for a long duration, and they may not even have enough patience to look out for what you have to offer. Before people purchase something online, they look at the overall structure of your website, functionality, and features. This is the reason why you should look at your website carefully and make the right changes that your site needs immediately.
There are four ways in which a website can communicate trustworthiness. These include design quality, up-front disclosure, comprehensive and current content, and connection to the other parts of the web. Once you have addressed these issues, you can continue to influence users and clients today.
If Your Website Has a Bad Foundation
If you tend to spend your money on improving the functionality of your website instead of putting in newer features then your website apparently has a bad foundation. One of the main factors that may lead to the bad foundation is website speed. Today, most users expect websites to load in less than 2 seconds. If your website cannot load within two seconds then it is optimized for speed. Users often tend to avoid websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. So, this means that you may lose the number of sales if your website is not get optimized for speed. The other things that can be taken into consideration are image sizes, bad codes, unnecessary Java scripts, and server resources. Thus, for all these factors, you need a website redesign.
If you have not updated your website in a few years, then there are chances that you may be missing out on some really great tools and methods to build your business, market your brand, increase sales, achieve better rankings, and increase your online reputation. While redesigning your website it should be always kept in mind that your website must match the current industry standards in terms of speed and user-friendliness.