1. Whenever Your Website Stops Working For You.
Your website has a clear purpose which is to support your business on the internet. If any part of that arrangement starts to fall apart, that’s a clear sign that your website isn’t pulling its own weight and needs to be redone.
- Your website goals aren’t being met.
If you have a good web designer, your site was created with a specific set of goals in mind. An extra percentage of income per month. Thirty percent increase in form submissions. Knowing where you want to go is a crucial part of getting there. But it’s important to have long-term goals for your small business website, too.
If any of your goals aren’t being met you are falling short, plateauing, or even losing ground a website redesign can help you catch up.
- Your current website is simply not working.
For your website to work for you, it has to…well, “work.”
If your site consistently experiences “404” error codes, crashing, slow load times, viruses, and other digital headaches, it might be time to redo your website.
Good web developers have tons of tricks up their sleeves to fix website issues and make sure they don’t happen again. Anti-virus plugins and SSL certificates can stop hackers from using your site to infect other computers (including yours). Moving your site to an updated server increases the number of simultaneous visitors your website can handle.
People often think website issues are limited only to their computer or that they’re just part of owning a website. But a failing website is like a house that doesn’t meet code. Even if you don’t care about the aesthetics of your site, you should at least make sure it’s not going to crumble down around you.
2.Your site is not optimized for a mobile device.
With Google’s recent updates expanding mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, it’s clear that mobile is the direction we all should behead. Even if you have a B2B site and few users are tracking from mobile devices, your SEO is still going to suffer without an update. The time has come to bite the bullet and optimize your site for mobile, no matter where your customers are coming from.
3. Your visitors are bouncing.
If you get decent traffic, but all your visitors are bouncing, it’s possible that your site’s appearing in irrelevant search results. For example, if you’re running Google AdWords for ‘dress shoes’ but only sell children’s dress shoes, you’d bring in visitors that don’t belong on your site. Make it clear what people will be getting before they get to your page by utilizing titles and meta descriptions and optimizing AdWords.
4. Your users aren’t converting.
This is similar to the above issue, but in this case, you know you’re targeting the right audience. Your site visitors spend time on your site on multiple pages but then never convert. This probably means that you need to focus on your customer journey when redesigning your site. Your customers should be able to navigate their way around your site in their preferred medium, at their preferred time, on their preferred device. Focus on your user’s experience to bump up that conversion rate. Your objective is to help users find what they didn’t know they were looking for, which can be accomplished by creating enticing content and improving your user experience.