As a business owner, you cannot afford to have a bad-looking website. A website that is poorly built and doesn’t offer a good experience for users will have a direct influence on how your brand is perceived. It may make you look unprofessional, or even worse, untrustworthy. Not only that, but once you make a bad first impression with your website, you may never see a visitor again.
That’s right, some customers will write you off completely as an option as soon as they realize that you have a bad website. Things are that serious. This is why you need to analyze your website right now and see if you could improve it. Let’s take a look at some of the signs that your website may need a makeover.
It’s Been More than Five Years Old Since the Last Major Update
If your site is more than five years old or you haven’t done a major makeover since then, there’s a strong chance that your site is outdated. It might look fine to you, but trends change so fast in the world of web design, and a site that was great a few years ago may have blatant flaws today. You also have to take advantage of new advances in technology.
For instance, things like parallax scrolling and HTML5 animations either didn’t exist or were not widely used back then, and adding these features could greatly improve your site’s look and performance. You might also be using outdated unnecessary bloated code or heavy formats that have been replaced by better options. This is why you should consider having your site audited if it’s been a while and make appropriate adjustments where needed.
You’re Having A Sudden Drop in Visitors
We hope you are monitoring your site’s metrics properly right now as it is one of the only ways to truly tell when a website needs a revamp.
If your visitor count starts dropping overnight, then it’s usually a sign that you need to do something immediately. This will usually have to do with some sort of search engine update. If you understand SEO, then you could make the changes needed to satisfy new criteria, but it would usually be a good idea to get your site audited by an expert that is aware of the recent changes and will be able to get to the root of the problem.
Low Conversion Rates
Unusually low conversion rates are also a sign that there is something wrong with your website, so you should get some information on what the averages are for websites in your category and consider making some changes if your site is not competitive.
Sometimes, you may only need to make some changes to your checkout process, but it could be more complex than that. This is again why it’s very important to keep your eye on metrics at all times, especially those reflecting user engagement.
If people bounce in and out of your website without looking at other pages, then it’s often an indication that they didn’t like your site’s homepage. This might be because of poor/outdated design, poor mobile experience, bad or irrelevant copy, or bad navigation. This is something you’ll need to investigate further through things like heat maps and A/B testing.
If people go on your site, browse around, and seem to get stuck somewhere or abandon carts at the last minute, then it’s usually a sign that there’s something wrong with your checkout process. Either they mistrust your site for some reason or maybe there are too many steps. In this case, you might want to see if you could remove steps such as forcing them to sign up for an account or any step forcing them to leave your website.
You also have cases where one specific page is an issue. People might come to your site, go to your “about us” page, and leave without performing any other action. Or you may get plenty of traffic to your contact page but no inquiries. These would be clear signs that there’s something wrong with these pages and they might be the only ones that need to be changed.
In either case, you need to always keep a close eye on your site’s analytics so you can know in which direction your site is heading and when it’s time to make improvements.
Your Website is Slow
A slow website will not only be frustrating to visitors but may get penalized by search engines. You may or may not know this, but if the pages on your website are not fast enough by search engine standards, you could suffer a drop in rankings.
Google uses page loading speed as a ranking factor as they want users to only be directed to high-performing websites. So, if you haven’t tested your site for speed yet, you need to do so right away.
A site may be slow for several reasons. In some cases, it might be because of issues with your server, but it may also be because of fundamental flaws with your site’s design. Again, you may be using images and file formats that are heavier than they should be and you need to do some compression or switches. Or you may want to consider working using a CDN service so you can serve certain design elements faster.
You Have a One Page HTML Website
There are some cases where a single-page HTML website could work, but, in most cases, it will be insufficient by today’s standard. The more content a website has, the better it usually performs, so there’s a strong chance you’ll need to add some depth to your site. One-page HTML websites often offer an inconsistent mobile experience too. So, it might be time to switch to something more elaborate and more responsive.
These are all clear signs that your sign needs to be revamped right now. The more you wait, the more your brand suffers, so don’t take this lightly and make all the changes necessary as soon as possible.