In part one of this three-part series on “how to know when it’s time for a redesign”, we discussed issues with your website being outdated, so if you haven’t yet read Part 1 [link back to part 1] read that first (it’s fast!) before continuing on here. Up to date? Great! Let’s get into more questions you need to answer to discover if you need to redesign your website.
Is it difficult to implement new marketing strategies?
If your site has been around for a while you may find it difficult to implement new marketing strategies everyone else seems to add with no trouble at all. This may also happen if your business or organization grows quickly and “outgrows” the platform you started on or theme you started with.
Do you struggle adding buttons for CTAs (calls-to-action)? Do you want to add a chatbot but find it impossible to do so? What about email newsletter signups, downloads, video embedding in your sliders, displaying your Instagram feed on your site?
If you do, you’ve likely outgrown your site. You may be one of the many people who started their website on the easiest platform at the time – and that’s absolutely fine, but you’ve now outgrown that platform because it is no longer supporting your needs. This can also happen if you are on a flexible platform like WordPress but have an older theme that doesn’t support these new integrations; instead of fighting against the foundation of your site, redesign your site and get something that works for you.
Is your site easy to navigate?
Do you have a high bounce rate? (That’s how long it takes for a visitor to leave your site – if they arrive, look around one page for 10 seconds and leave, they’ve “bounced”.) If your website copy is clear and you aren’t being advertised on the search engines as something you aren’t, it might be a problem with your website usability.
If this is the case, you need to find out if your website is easy to navigate. Sure, you know where everything is, but does a stranger? Go to your site and look at your main navigation menu; how many different options are you giving people? When you hover over a menu option how many different things are you giving them to choose from and are there even more pages branching off from there?
You have a very short time to convince a stranger your website is worth spending their time on, and if they can’t see where to go to get the information they need they’ll find somewhere else to get it. Your site needs to guide your ideal customers through to where they need to be, whether that’s your best blog posts, finding out more about your services, or how to set up an appointment.
If this would be a nightmare without a redesign, you know what to do.
Is your site slow?
Think of all the times you’ve been looking for something on your phone on the go and suddenly you’re stuck with this one page taking forever to load. How long do you wait before you try a different page? 15 seconds? A minute tops?
For better or worse, we expect things to happen for us right now, especially online. We’ve been trained to know that we can find or have whatever we need fast, and if a website or service doesn’t meet this expectation we’ll happily go somewhere else without a backward glance.
Your website’s speed is down to the content of your site and your website host. Most hosting services guarantee a certain speed, but they all vary depending on what service you pay for. If you’re struggling with your website speed, it may be worth speaking to your hosting company to see if they can recommend an upgrade that would improve your loading speed. If you aren’t sure how long it takes for your site to load, use Google Page Speed Insights to find out if you need to make improvements.
Still not sure if you need a redesign? Click here to read Part 3.
