Depending on the type of business you’re in, your website is likely your best salesperson. Its purpose is to present everything your company offers regarding services and products and why the prospects should do business with you rather than your competitors.
Your website needs to convert prospects into leads as any salesperson does.
In the same way that you must train and invest in your salespeople, you need to measure your site’s performance and make any updates to ensure the site continues to convert. You might identify specific problems with your website as you analyze it, prompting you to rethink its design.
In the article below, we’ll provide more reasons to help you decide whether a redesign is worth your time, resources, and budget. Let’s get started!
Top 13 Reasons to Redesign Your Website
Different businesses have different reasons for redesigning their websites. The most common reasons are rebranding the site, generating more leads, increasing traffic, and adding functionality.
Ultimately, however, the scope of your website redesign will depend on your business goals.
A simple makeover might be enough if you’ve changed your branding: alter the color scheme, replace a few photos, and you’re done. But, if you’ve decided to overhaul your marketing strategy, you might want to hire one of the best web development companies to ensure the required functionality and responsiveness.
Let’s explore some common redesign objectives and how to achieve them so you can better envision your redesign process.
1. Mobile Optimization
The fourth quarter of 2021 saw 63% of organic search engine visits coming from mobile devices. Search engines have tailored their experiences around mobile-first web design because of its popularity.
When you search for something on your phone, you’ll see mobile-friendly results first. Consequently, you should ensure that both your desktop and mobile websites are optimized.
You don’t have to worry about how your site will look on any device if your platform is already responsive out-of-the-box. For websites built from scratch or those with non-responsive website builders, you must toggle between desktop and mobile-friendly views of a page to ensure they appear the way you intend.
2. Additional Functionality
Your visitors on the front end and your marketing team on the back end need to find your website easy to use, understand, and navigate. Adding new functionality to your site will likely be necessary as your traffic and team grow to meet the evolving needs of both visitors and backend users.
You may need to incorporate live chat into your site, add and manage multi-language content, or perform A/B tests directly from your dashboard.
It would help if you improved navigation and personalization to ensure visitors can find the information they want quickly and efficiently. Enhance the user experience on the site by simplifying navigation and adding smart content filters.
3. Boosting Conversion Rates
Your site needs to be designed around a clear conversion strategy if you’re driving lots of traffic to it. The home page should describe who you are, what you do, and who you are trying to reach. Eventually, it should persuade the visitor to become a customer.
Look at your site’s integration capabilities with CRMs and marketing automation tools if you’re looking to improve your conversion rate. Alternatively, you might need to migrate to a CMS with conversion tools built-in.
4. Increasing Traffic Through Blogging
It doesn’t matter how great your website looks if no one sees it, so your site must drive visitors. Making blogging part of your content strategy is a great way to accomplish this. Including a blog on a website significantly increases its chances of ranking well on search engines.
When creating your blog strategy, you should do keyword research to determine what specific search terms people use in their search engine queries. Include those terms in your URLs, titles, headers, meta descriptions, and body copy.
5. Rebranding for Consistency
The look and feel of your site should be consistent. Your visitors may feel confused or worried if they click on a link on your homepage and are redirected to a completely different page. Visitors can become frustrated by even the tiniest differences, like having different navigation menus on different pages.
There are many design inconsistencies like these, particularly on sites with many authors and microsites that have merged over time. You may want to review and implement brand guidelines and design styles to ensure your website has a cohesive look if your brand has grown significantly.
6. Building a Stronger Customer Base
Are you proud of your website’s appearance, functionality, and pixel-perfect design? Congratulations! Still, unless you get the results you want, it is just a waste of webspace. The purpose of your website is to increase your customer base, and data should show that you’re progressing toward that goal.
A redesign may be necessary if you’re unhappy with your results. Taking an in-depth look at your conversion rates — the rate of visitors-to-leads and leads-to-customers being the most important — can help you determine what needs to be changed.
7. Aligning the Website with New Company Goals
The marketing strategy of most companies is relatively fluid and based on changing results. It’s important to verify every so often if your website still aligns with your newest marketing plans, even if you don’t need to do a total site redesign every time your marketing goals change.
Of course, if you haven’t modified your marketing plans in a long time, the issue may not be with your website.
8. Fixing Problems
Perhaps this reason seems obvious, but you have probably come across websites that are not functioning well, to put it mildly. Maybe your site isn’t at that level, but that doesn’t mean it’s user-friendly.
You may not realize certain aspects of your site make it less effective until you detect them. You should focus on usability — if not, your traffic and lead generation efforts might suffer.
9. Improving Your Content Strategy
The right type of content can help you with everything from customer retention to search engine optimization. Since search engine algorithms change regularly, it would be wise to implement a solid content strategy. Having said that, quality content doesn’t matter if your visitors cannot easily access it.
Therefore, a web redesign would make sense if you plan to make significant changes to your content strategy (perhaps taking our previous advice and increasing your blog production).
10. Keeping up with Competitors
There is no need to overhaul your site whenever your competitors update theirs. Then again, if they make changes that improve their rankings a lot and ultimately push you down in searches, you may want to make some alterations.
When you spend some time on a competitor’s site and see that it can accomplish your goals much better than your own, it’s time to do some work. Your goal shouldn’t simply be to maintain an advantage in search. Still, if competing businesses are preventing you from reaching the top of the SERPs, you might want to analyze what changes you can make to your site to gain a more competitive ranking.
11. Updating Third-Party Tools
Like most sites, yours likely has embedded tools that make it more functional. If any of these tools don’t meet modern functionality standards, you should update them.
Using outdated third-party tools that don’t work right or are outdated in terms of function or design will only drive customers away. Make sure to upgrade to more modern tools and turn more visitors into leads.
12. Improving the Structure
You may have used a template when building your website, or you may have dynamically generated URLs. A website redesign can make your site more SEO-friendly by improving its structure.
Utilizing a more advanced content management system, you can make your website more SEO friendly by creating custom page URLs, alt tags, page titles, H1, H2, H3 tags, etc. This will improve your website’s performance and boost SEO in the process.
13. Boosting Site Speed
Pages that take a long time to load frustrate users. Quick and convenient information is what they want. If your page doesn’t load quickly, you could lose leads to your competitor’s site.
Your site can slow down for many reasons, from its coding to its visual elements. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to learn what is slowing down your website. This tool will show you how fast your page loads and how changes you can make to make it faster.
Conclusion
You shouldn’t panic if you recognize one of these scenarios above, but if you realize several hit too close to home, it might be time to start working on your redesign. The purpose of your website is to generate business for you. It’s time to identify why it isn’t doing that and make the necessary changes.
It takes effort, time, and money to redesign a website – but it’s crucial to your online success. In addition to increasing your conversion rate, improving your rankings, and meeting the needs of your visitors, a redesign can benefit your overall business strategy.
