Congratulations, Digital Manager, on the launch of your new website!
Your customers are complimenting you on the contemporary look and layout and how easily they can find info.
Your department heads are thanking you for the user-friendly editing tools and how easily they can create content.
And your boss is promoting you because you delivered the company’s new online baby on time and on budget.
Well, proud website parent, enjoy this moment of accomplishment, because in no time, your digital baby will wake up and start crying, “When are you going to feed me?”
The stark reality is that as soon as you launch a new website, the countdown clock resets. How long before your highly performant portal begins to underperform? How many news cycles before your news clippings look like old news? How many site visits before key landing pages stop landing new visitors?
How long before your shiny, new site loses its luster and needs to be redesigned?
Websites are never done
Websites are important, often expensive, investments organizations make to survive and thrive in a world where commerce and communication are now largely digital affairs. And while finance directors like to think of websites as capital-intensive, depreciable assets, the truth is, websites are never “done” and require constant operating expense and attention.
Good websites are always evolving, adding new content, features, functionality, and staying current with both the latest (and most secure) front- and back-end tools that make them run. So, if you’re keeping your website software and plugins current, refreshing your homepage layout, adding new menu sections, pruning out-of-date info, publishing and promoting blogs, and staying on top of that staff bio page as people come and go…way to go! You are constantly evolving your site, and that is a good thing for this essential digital asset and for your business.
Know there will come a day when your website is due for more significant remodeling. You may be wondering what tell-tale signs to note as that day approaches, so you can prepare your team, your boss, and your budget for the time, effort, and financial investment required for a needed renovation.
Also know that our crew is here to help you plan, design, and develop website updates, and has compiled a list of warning signs to note in the form of “10 Reasons Why You Should Redesign Your Website.”
- Your organization updated its brand or visual identity
- Your website design and/or user experience (UX) is outdated
- Your website is no longer compatible with the latest technology
- Your website performance is declining
- Your business goals have changed, but your website hasn’t
- Your competitors’ websites can do more than your site can
- Your target audience has changed
- Your website is delivering poor conversion rates
- Your website’s content management system is challenging to use
- Your website is vulnerable to security risks
1. Your organization updated its brand or visual identity
Let’s begin with an obvious organization-wide change that will affect your site’s appearance. If your organization has recently introduced a new logo (or wordmark) and updated its visual identity in the form of new color palettes, typography, brand messaging, and taglines, you will want that reflected in your website, one of the primary ways customers experience and engage with your brand.
How much work is required to reflect your brand update in your website depends on the extent of the changes: It could be as simple as updating your website styling tools to match your new brand guidelines. Or a more extensive site overhaul may be warranted if you are reinventing your brand to reflect a change in product or service lines, target audiences, corporate culture, and/or ownership or executive leadership.
If your organization is planning a brand overhaul, be sure to include your website in the list of marketing collaterals and creative assets (e.g., letterhead, business cards, presentation decks, signage, digital graphics, merchandise, packaging, etc.) to be refreshed, and include the requisite dollars to complete those updates in your rebranding budget.
2. Your website design and/or user experience (UX) is outdated
An outdated website design will make it look like your company is behind the times. An outdated user experience (UX) will prove it, and customers forced to wrestle with it will soon go elsewhere.
What are some UX-related signs that your website needs reimagining?
a. Your website analytics indicate visitors are exiting your homepage or key landing pages after spending only a few seconds on them.
b. You are getting complaints from users that your website’s navigation is too elaborate, not intuitive, or “clunky” and hard to follow.
c. Your website is not optimized for smartphones, tablets, or other mobile screens. Mobile devices account for a significant portion of web traffic, so if your site does not adjust to fit smaller screens, it is time for a redo.
You built your website to connect with and serve your customers, so if they cannot easily find information or conduct business using your website, it is time for a redesign with their needs (and feedback) in mind.
3. Your website is no longer compatible with the latest technology
Again, if your website and the software supporting it is not optimized for mobile use, you are not keeping up with the times. Other technology updates that could affect your website’s presentation and performance include updates to – or the introduction of – new browsers. Web browsers come and go and fall out of fashion (Anyone remember Lynx, Mosaic, or Netscape Navigator?), but your website should play nice with all of them — or at least, the most commonly used ones.
The same is true for content management systems (CMS), which are constantly evolving and adding new features and functionality. Is your website dependent on certain design-related plugins (I’m talking to you, WordPress website managers!) that have been retired or that are no longer supported with regular updates? That could leave your website vulnerable to security risks. If any design components tied to your website’s design have reached their “end of life,” it is time to update your site design and its related software dependencies.
If your website is not syncing with the latest technology, that’s a problem. But it could also affect how easy it is to find your organization online.
Any technical performance (e.g., page load speeds) or user experience (e.g., low page engagement scores) problems with your website that go unaddressed will likely hurt your site’s search engine optimization or “SEO.” (Yep, that means Google cannot see you.) As such, your site may fall further down the organic search engine results page (SERP) when a prospective customer types in a search query and tries to find you online.
There are lots of simple but strategic changes you can make to your website and its content that can improve your SEO – from the way you title your pages to how you incorporate keywords and build authority into your native content. (Our SEO partners at Fire&Spark have plenty of ideas on that.) But if your site is losing traffic and visitors for any of the previously stated reasons, your SEO will be negatively affected. If customers cannot find you, they cannot interact with you or buy from you. A well-timed website redesign can address both types of problems, keep your website visible to search engines, and make customers glad they searched and found your business online.
5. Your business goals have changed, but your website hasn’t
Perhaps, you started as a self-employed business advisor but have grown your practice into a small consulting agency. Maybe that sure-fire new product you introduced last year didn’t take off. Or maybe it did, and it has become the focal point of your retail operation.
Business goals change, and business websites need to change with them. If you started with a do-it-yourself site and now need something more sophisticated that integrates with customer relationship management, marketing, and e-commerce software, chances are you need to redesign your site to guide customers through all the new ways you want to engage them, from product catalogs to mailing lists.
Similarly, if your business is moving in a new direction or scaling down, the robust website that got you to this point may no longer be necessary. Something simpler may do. As your business changes, make sure you have reserved the resources necessary to bring your website along with it – and make sure your website design supports the direction you are taking your organization.
6. Your competitors’ websites can do more than your site can
This is a tough one, because no one wants to be second best. If you work in a competitive industry, one where your website needs to stand out from others who offer the same products or services, then keeping up with the “Online Joneses” may feel like a never-ending battle you don’t want to fight or finance.
Here is where Agile web design and development comes into play. Consider setting aside a comfortable amount of annual budget money to keep improving your site, adding new content sections, introducing new features, and prioritizing design updates to pages that drive customer engagement and conversions (e.g., purchases, email signups, etc.). That allows you to keep an eye on competitors’ sites and make sure you are keeping up with improvements that truly differentiate your site and value proposition from theirs.
Make gradual enhancements when you see a clear competitive advantage in doing so, and ignore changes that may seem fashionable but are not profitable. Build this into a retainer relationship with your web agency, and you’ll always have a bank of dedicated web design time and dollars to iterate your site.
Conversely, if your site is so obsolete that gradual updates won’t be impactful enough, fast enough, send your finance director a sample list of competitor URLs and be ready to make the case for a full website redesign, because preserving your brand integrity and your market share may depend on it.
7. Your target audience has changed
If your business originally targeted young professionals and now targets senior citizens, you will want to make some design and UX updates. (As someone who needs glasses to read small print on screens and packages, hear me when I tell you that your FONT SIZE could be BIGGER!) Similarly, if you used to serve a niche audience and now need to satisfy the masses, your marketing strategy needs to adapt, along with your website design.
If your target audience or customer is changing, hopefully it is for good reasons that will financially support a website redesign. If your change in focus is due to unfortunate circumstances, consider what you stand to lose if your audience or customer base winnows further because your website does not meet their needs. Even if you only set aside enough money to remake your homepage to better suit and serve your new target users, you have helped your business hang on to them.
8. Your website is delivering poor conversion rates
This ties back to the outdated user experiences we discussed in Reason No. 2. If your website isn’t helping people to buy your products, reserve your services, or sign up for your communications, perhaps it is because your site currently makes it too hard to do so.
Are your call-to-action buttons placed in locations where they can be seen and clicked on throughout a landing page? Do non-text design elements, such as graphic cards, image carousels, and FAQ sections, also serve as navigation aides to places where site visitors can click to register or enter an email address? Do visitors get lost in the amount of scrolling it takes to get through product descriptions to a “Buy Now” button? Does your shopping cart take too long to update, include confusing language, or a multi-page checkout workflow?
There are numerous ways your website’s design and UX could be causing friction for customers as they are trying to conduct business with you. Redesigning menus, product pages, CTAs, and user workflows can remove that friction and increase the likelihood of successful customer conversions.
9. Your website’s content management system is challenging to use
If you avoid making updates to your website because you don’t understand your content management system – or if your site’s CMS is too complex for non-technical site editors to use – then it is time to swap it out for something that supports your internal users’ needs. In doing so, you can include a site redesign to address any customer-facing design or UX issues, because changing out a CMS usually requires some degree of work on existing page templates.
While Culture Foundry designs and develops websites and web applications using a variety of popular content management systems, if you are looking for a robust and flexible CMS that is open-source and easy to use and maintain, you cannot go wrong with WordPress.
NOTE: Our Culture Foundry website is built on WordPress, and our crew is working on new design tools we will be introducing in the weeks ahead that will supercharge your WordPress design capabilities. So, stay tuned for big news to come!
10. Your website is vulnerable to security risks
This could be due to outdated back-end or front-end technology, relying on too many plugins, corrupt databases, lax password protocols, insufficient CMS access control, or any number of nasty exploits that bad actors may try to access your website and customer data by extension.
If you need to improve your site’s infrastructure to make it more secure, there is a good chance that a tech stack update will affect the tools used to render your page designs. While improving your security systems and protocols may not require a full website redesign, make sure you understand to what extent the design tools you have been using (e.g., plugins) may have contributed to your site’s vulnerabilities, and then be ready to remove or replace them.
Conclusion
There are countless reasons to consider a website redesign. The 10 reasons shared above solidify the connection between your website performance and your business performance, which may be the essential link you need to emphasize when approaching your executive team for the resources necessary to remake your site.
Remember, a website is never done, and whether a mini or major makeover is in your website’s future, our team of web strategists, designers, developers, and project managers can help assess where your website is currently and where it needs to go to achieve your business goals.
Ready to redesign your website? We can help!
Complete the form below, or connect with us via email at hello@culturefoundry.com and a member of our crew will be in touch ASAP!