Confused about whether your site is one of those that need a redesign? You’re fortunately at the right place reading this article. Your website represents your company online, it also depicts what your company can offer. Although website owners and designers have their take on what a great website is, popularity or visits aren’t really major factors. This article discusses 4 great ways to help you decipher websites that need redesign.
As a website owner, you should be able to distinguish between good and bad websites. This is very important as your website remains a major part of your business and, redesigning your website can be of great benefit in the long run.
What is website redesign?
Website redesign is the complete renewal of the elements of your website. The aim is to attract more visitors and customers and generate the required sales over time. Website elements that might get an upgrade include; content, structure, code, format or layout, and more. With several good and bad website examples around, you should have a base knowledge of what yours should look like.
The more modern, effective, and engaging it looks and appeals to potential customers, the more likely they’d troop in. If your website is well-structured then it’s good, however, if otherwise, then you should really take a second look. There are various good and bad websites on the internet. As a business owner, your priority should be to ensure your website comes out as one of the good.
Once upon a time, websites like All West Properties, and Blockchain Training earned recognition as a result of their good redesign. Understand where we’re headed? A bad website is characterized by unclear messages, poor layout, and even difficulty navigating. All of these point towards a need for a redesign which we would discuss in the latter part of this article. Be that as it may, the first step in redesigning is accepting the fact that your website needs one. However, how can you tell if your website needs it? Let’s dive right into that
4 pointers to websites that need redesign
Here are the 4 things to consider in determining whether your website needs a redesign or not:
1. Your website is not looking up to date
Walking into a mall, you most likely wouldn’t patronize them if they look very old-fashioned, filled with clothes and shoes from the 60s and 70s. This more or less applies to an outdated website. It is automatically not user-welcoming and friendly. The question then automatically follows, how do I know my website is outdated? For starters, it certainly is if your homepage hasn’t been updated for about two years or more.
Your homepage is the welcoming room for your visitors; hence it requires to be neat and up to date. Stop repelling your audience with an outdated homepage and get your website redesigned today. An unfriendly homepage frustrates the user, it also creates an impression that restricts them from visiting or patronizing your site. This will in the long run reduce your traffic and ultimately hamper sales.
Also, your website is outdated if you have not been adding content from time to time. Putting fresh content on your site is necessary to keep being relevant. It also proves to your users that your web page is a working site and not a dormant one.
If your page isn’t mobile-friendly, then it’s obviously out of date. It is no brainer considering the fact that 63% of Google’s US search organic traffic is made from a mobile phone. You should not lose your visitors to mobile unfriendliness.
2. Your page’s user experience is bad
A bad user experience is as frustrating as a full day’s work on Christmas. It all starts from a poor homepage to users not being able to navigate their ways easily on the site. This hinders the SEO as Google may find it difficult to rank your site. In literal terms, bad user experience hurts your site, the business and as a result, you. This is why it’s important to also be able to tell good and bad website examples apart.
Here is how to tell your user experience is bad:
- Website lacks proper internal linking
- It lacks a working search bar that props up with suggestions for users (especially ecommerce websites)
- When it is not easy to find important pages on your website
- Your content is not easy to read or it doesn’t look good on a mobile
- Poor menu structure or too much complications that makes things difficult to understand
As a website owner, you are responsible for the user-friendliness of your website, so make it very user-friendly. You don’t want your visitors to start grumbling while trying to navigate through important pages on your website. Visitors are easily put off at the slightest difficulty they experience on your website.
This could be because the attention span of people nowadays is around 8 seconds. As soon as visitors start finding it difficult to navigate your site, they would likely leave and consequently lose trust in your brand.
3. Your website is not geenrating the required conversnion or sale
It could be very devastating when your site is not generating sales. The whole point of having a website is to attract your target audience and subsequently, boost sales. A good website must be able to convert visitors to clients. When this is not happening, you should consider redesigning your website. For one, your website may struggle to convert visitors to clients when your product is convincingly advertised on your web page.
Your product or service must be visible and dominating enough that visitors wouldn’t leave without coming across the value you provide and the benefit of them patronizing you. There must be a certain presence your product has on your website and it must be done just right to be effective.
There are also other pointers as to why your website may not be generating the required sale. One of them is not keeping your page simple. Just as mentioned in the first point, your homepage creates the first impression and must be kept simple, do not bombard visitors with too much information. It will appear disorganized and this may deter visitors from visiting your site.
Also, your website may be void of conversion because it does not suit your customer’s needs. If this is happening, you might have to consider redesigning your website asap.
4. Your website does not have an excellent on-page SEO
Google frequently updates its algorithm to better understand the intent of users and meet their needs. With this constant upgrade by google, it is necessary for the content of your website to be optimized to meet the standard of Google and Bing search engines. If your on-page SEO is excellent, your webpage will more likely rank high on search engine results (SERs), helping you generate more traffic and make more sales over time.
Several elements make up an excellent on-page SEO and when these elements are absent or not regularly updated, you should consider redesigning your website. The process of optimizing these elements themselves is what is referred to as on-page SEO. One of the ways to know that you do not have an excellent on-page SEO is to do a keyword search to see the statistics of how many keywords your content ranks for.
You can also check your title tag and your meta description. Check if they include your keyword. Ensure the characters of the meta description are not too long, and they summarize what the page is all about. Doing this increases the content likelihood of getting a click from a user on the SERPs. Your title tags and your meta description have a lot to say about your website.
Your URL structure which stands for Uniform Resource Locator must also be clean. You can have an excellent on-page SEO, but if your URL structure is poor, your pages won’t rank. The structure of your pages is the next thing to look out for. It takes into account how structured your header tags are, whether they are well highlighted for easy identification, and your internal linking. Internal linking helps enhance easy navigation from one page to another.
Conclusion
By now, you will have been educated on good and bad website examples. A good website is one that is free from any of the four ways highlighted above. A bad website on the other hand is one that possesses the characteristics listed above. Now that we’ve discussed 4 ways to know if your websites need a redesign, analyze yours using our discussion as a guide and determine whether you need one or not. For a much easier approach, get a free website evaluation from Iconic digital world today and know whether your site needs a retouch asap.
Also, check out the key elements necessary for building an effective website redesign strategy template. Remember, there is no reason why your website shouldn’t enhance sales!
