7 Signs You Need a Website Redesign
Is your business considering redesigning your website? While refreshing the design and user experience is important, not many business owners feel comfortable with the investment. Asking management for a website redesign can be a tough conversation. The next time you decide that it is time for your business to have a website redesign, make sure that you have the right information to take to your higher-ups with your request.
When the staff at Big D Creative meets with new clients, one of the most common questions from their boss is, “We just redesigned our site three years ago. Does our site need another redesign?”
While there is no set expiration date for a site’s design success, we do suggest analyzing your web performance from time-to-time to ensure that there are no performance issues. The real question now becomes how do you know if your site actually needs a redesign?
The Top Redesign Myth: You Need One Every Few Years
Many business owners wrongfully fall victim to the belief that they need to update their website’s design every 2-3 years. Some business owners even change their design more often than this out of sheer boredom.
If you do this, you are seriously killing any chance that your site has to flourish. Organic growth and allowing optimization to help your site takes time. If you focus too much on the amount of time this growth takes, you could make the mistake of too many redesigns that end up:
- Costing you large amounts of money
- Losing you time that you could have spent properly optimizing your site
- Creating something that is so flashy that it kills your user experience
All of these issues are mistakes that can easily be avoided by working with a professional design company that has an in-house SEO team. Our team will be able to crawl through your site and make sure that you truly understand where you stand on the redesign spectrum.
Do I Need a Website Redesign?
The short answer to this question is: It depends. There are many factors that need to be examined when making this decision. Pulling the trigger on a web project is not always as clean cut as it seems.
7 Key Performance Metrics (KPIs) & Other Factors That Indicate a Redesign is Necessary
There are several metrics that can tell the story of a website’s success or failure. If you believe that your website’s performance is declining, then pay attention to these seven factors:
- Bounce rate
- Load speed
- Conversion rates
- Mobile metrics
- Poor UX
- Outdated Coding
- Site isn’t compatible with modern CRMs
Fortunately, experienced web design companies like Big D Creative can help you review your analytics and guide you through actual metrics involved with the decline of your site.
1. Bounce Rate
If your keyword rankings improve, but your site still has a high bounce rate, you may need a site redesign. This means that users are having trouble navigating your site and it’s not converting traffic properly. An average healthy bounce rate is between 30%-60%. If your site is at 60% or above, that’s a big sign that your website is not performing well.
Before jumping straight to a redesign, look at the bounce rate of all of your landing pages. This will help you identify if there are any individual pages that are cause high site-wide bounce rates.
*Pro Tip: If your bounce rate is well under 30%, check your tracking scripts. This could indicate an error. If there are multiple Google Analytics tracking scripts on a site, your data may be skewed.
2. Load Speed
This is a major ranking factor because it directly affects the user experience. Make sure that your developers follow Google’s recommendations for improving load speed. Google provides a few tools for testing your site’s load speed and identifying elements that cause slow load times.
*Pro Tip: Check the load speeds between devices & landing pages. If it’s just your homepage that is slowing down your site, then you could first experiment with optimizing that before investing in a global redesign.
3. Conversion Rates
This one may sound like a no brainer, but it’s still worth mentioning. When looking at conversion rates, pay attention to:
- Conversion rates month-over-month and year-over-year.
- Mobile vs. desktop conversion rates
- Landing page conversion rates
At the end of the day, it’s all about getting consistent conversions with a steady upward growth trend.
4. Mobile Metrics
If your site is getting good results on a desktop but poor results on mobile devices, then you should test your mobile experience. In March of 2018, Google announced a switch to mobile-first indexing. This means that Googlebot looks at the mobile experience of your website before the desktop. If it performs poorly on mobile devices, then your website will be subject to poor keyword rankings.
5. Your Site is Too Hard to Use (Poor UX)
We’ve all visited sites that were so poorly designed that they prevented us from finding the information that we originally came for.
In short, if your site is too difficult to navigate, your bounce rate will rise, and you won’t get any valuable site visits.
If you have noticed an increase in bounce rates and a decrease in business, it may be time for a site redesign.
6. Coding is No Longer Up to Its Best Practice
When you are focusing on improving your SEO, how the website is developed is extremely important. This used to be a simpler subject, but over the years it has grown to be very complex.
To keep this as simple as possible, the best way to have a fast site is to have clean code. At Big D Creative, we believe that great code means accomplishing all of your goals with the least amount of code.
Think of it this way. You could tell a story in a paragraph, or you could summarize it in a sentence.
Essentially, clean code ensures that your site is easy to read and maintain. With fewer lines of code to read, browsers also load faster and Googlebot crawls faster. You want Googlebot to be able to read through your clean code in order to catch any updates that have been made to your site.
7. Your CRMs Don’t Fit in With New Technology
Your business’ CRM systems must be up-to-date with modern technology. This is essential for the success of both your site and your business. If your CRM is unable to analyze the correct data about potential customers and their interaction with your company, you really don’t have a way to understand where business relationships need to improve.
Big D Creative Makes the Right Moves in Your Site Redesign
If you have noticed a decline on your conversion rates or simply a decline in general site visits, it may be time for a professional site redesign. Get a fresh start with Big D Creative. We are an award-winning web design company that has launched over 1000 successful projects for our clients. Contact us today to find out more about our portfolio or to request a quote.