Determining when to redesign your website is a common yet challenging business decision. On one hand, your website is often your most important marketing tool. An effective website can make a dramatic impact on your bottom line. On the other hand, redesigning your website requires significant time, effort, and resources.
At Green Apple, we’ve had the opportunity to help dozens of clients redesign their websites over the years — a few of which have gone through multiple iterations. We want to help our clients make informed decisions on whether they should invest in a website redesign. We also want to help them avoid the mistakes businesses make when launching a new website. Sometimes they decide it’s time to redesign the entire site. In other cases, we help them identify small tweaks and improvements they can make.
How to Know When to Redesign Your Website
Beyond obvious factors such as security concerns or outdated functionality, here are a few questions we ask to help our clients navigate the decision to redesign their website:
1. What do the metrics say?
Google analytics and marketing metrics can play a helpful role in helping you determine the current state of your website.
For example, If your website has a high bounce rate, you should conduct further investigation to see if the issue is based on slow page load speed, bad or unclear content, or a poor user experience.
Your conversion rate can help you determine if your website is doing its job of converting visitors into potential customers. Websites that have a hard time generating leads and conversions are typically missing key elements that help with the conversion process.
2. How is the mobile experience?
In today’s digital-first age, mobile marketing is an essential tactic for every business. The majority of web traffic nowadays is conducted on mobile devices. Your website should be “mobile responsive” and also easy to navigate on a phone. If you have received numerous complaints about the mobile optimization of your site, it might be a good idea to get ahead of the issue by redesigning your website.
3. Does your website reflect the way you currently talk about your business?
Most businesses adapt the way they do business in order to keep up with the changing demands of their customers. For some, the way they talk about their business changes as they discover new messaging that resonates with their audience. It’s important that your website matches the way your leadership and sales team talks about your products or services. This is key to creating a cohesive user experience.
4. How easy is it for people to quickly understand what you do and take the first step?
The ultimate goal of every website is to support business development. That’s why it’s essential to make sure your website is easy to navigate and understand. Having a disconnect at any level of a user’s journey can lead to confusion and frustration.
How do you provide a great experience? Make sure your website is easy to navigate, your content is easy and enjoyable to read, and you have clear calls to action.
5. Are you being outranked by competitors on important key search phrases?
Designing an SEO-friendly website is a foundational element for your marketing efforts. SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible to searchers, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers.
One way to determine if you’re maximizing your SEO efforts is to conduct keyword research to see how you compare with other competitors in your industry. If your website is struggling to rank for important keywords, it’s likely that your website is not built in accordance with new search engine algorithms and needs to be redesigned.
Failing to keep your website updated can waste marketing resources, lose out on sales, or hurt your brand reputation.
If you’re just looking for a website redesign, Green Apple might not be the best fit. But if you want to ensure your website is aligned with your overall marketing strategy and actively helping you grow your business, we’d love to talk. Through a comprehensive audit of your website, we can discover opportunities to improve your website so that it reaches your audience. Contact our team today.
