The phrase “your website is your business shop window” has never been as true as it is today. After all, it is often the first impression people get of you – especially this year! Your business website should be the hardest working salesman in your company.
Think about a shop window. Successful stores tend to be those that update their windows – adding new stock and displays to keep people’s interest. And your website should be like this too. It should be refreshed with exciting, new and relevant content to give people reason to come back and check it out.
So, maybe it’s time to have a look at your website to see if investing in a redesign might be worthwhile in 2021. If you have added new services to your offering or tweaked your branding recently, then redesigning your website is a no brainer. But what if you haven’t? What other signs may there be that would indicate that it’s time to refresh your digital offering?
Sign One: Your website is not mobile-friendly
This is a real no-no these days, especially with Google moving over to a mobile-first index.
Google is going out of its way to let us know that if a business wants to stay relevant it needs to be able to provide its visitors with the same website experience, whether they are viewing it on a desktop, tablet or mobile device.
In fact, a study conducted by Salesforce back in 2014 revealed that 83% of mobile users said that a “seamless experience across all devices is very important.” People want to be able to get the information they need, when and where they need it, and if your website can’t give it to them then they will leave it and go and look somewhere else.
So, having a mobile-friendly website is crucial to delivering the best user experience across devices, and also for grabbing valuable leads which you can then convert into sales. If your site isn’t mobile friendly yet, then you need to get in touch with us quickly – we can optimise it for you before Google switches over to its mobile-first index in March.
Sign Two: Your website is slow to load
There is a lot of research out there proving that if your website takes too long to load – longer than 2 seconds, then users will abandon it and go to another website to find what they are looking for.
Site speed is therefore critical – it can also affect your Google ranking, increase your bounce rate and decrease the amount of time people spend on your site.
Unfortunately, it can be hard for people to realise their website has speed issues as the causes tend to be things that aren’t easily noticeable, such as:
- Large file sizes
- Too many 3rd party scripts embedded on site
- Outdated CMS that doesn’t use coding best practice
If you are unsure about how well your site is optimised for speed, get in touch with our web development team as we have access to a couple of tools that will enable us to give you a high-level understanding of how your site is doing, and whether you need to move to a more up-to-date CMS or just make a couple of tweaks.
Sign Three: Your website doesn’t align with your branding
As your company grows and develops, it is not uncommon for your branding and messaging to develop and change as well. Maybe you have added some new services, or broken into a new market, or maybe you have learnt that your current branding doesn’t help you to stand out from your competition.
Keeping your website and your branding aligned is key for customer engagement.
Maintaining your brand consistency across all of your marketing channels – website, social media, printed materials – helps to create trust amongst your customers and can have a direct positive impact on your sales.
The first step in this process is to create brand guidelines and then you can check your website against these guidelines to see how it stacks up – or not! You may find that you just need to tweak the fonts and colours, or it may prove that it is time for more than just a little facelift.
To find out more about our approach to branding and website refreshes, check out our case study on our client Gentronix. They approached us to help support them with their business growth plans, alongside a brand refresh so that all of their marketing materials represent their developing multi-service offerings.
Sign Four: Your website isn’t performing well on Google’s SERPs
We often talk about SEO in terms of on-page elements like keywords, meta titles and descriptions and link building – to help your website do well on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, this is just one small part of SEO, with the other part being technical SEO (also known as off-page). On-page SEO tends to be focused on the content of your website that users can see, whereas technical is more about the things that are important to search engines, such as:
- SSL certificates
- Speedy hosting for fast page load times
- Properly structured /XML sitemaps
If you are unhappy with the way your website is performing, then get in touch with us, and our SEO team can perform a technical SEO audit for you and come up with a plan to address any issues to help improve your search visibility.
Sign Five: The user experience (UX) of your site is outdated
The world of web development and UX is a world that is constantly changing with each year bringing new approaches to improve the way we engage with customers.
This is even more important now, as Google has announced that Page Experience is going to be an even bigger factor for rankings than it has been in the past. We can’t overstress the importance of keeping your website up to date with Google’s best practices.
We can help you to ensure your site is not using any outdated approaches, and that all of the modern-day UX signals that Google is looking for are integrated onto your website.
As you can see, your website is an extension of your business and can be one of your most efficient marketing tools – if it is kept up to date. You may need a refresh of your website in 2021 to make sure it not only builds trust with and inspires your customers but educates them as well.
If you would like us to take a closer look at your website, then please contact us on 01625 238 770 or email us at [email protected]
10 signs that your business website needs a redesign
Digital Web Design and Development / Jan 11, 2021
The phrase “your website is your business shop window” has never been as true as it is today. After all, it is often the first impression people get of you – especially this year! Your business website should be the hardest working salesman in your company.
Think about a shop window. Successful stores tend to be those that update their windows – adding new stock and displays to keep people’s interest. And your website should be like this too. It should be refreshed with exciting, new and relevant content to give people reason to come back and check it out.
So, maybe it’s time to have a look at your website to see if investing in a redesign might be worthwhile in 2021. If you have added new services to your offering or tweaked your branding recently, then redesigning your website is a no brainer. But what if you haven’t? What other signs may there be that would indicate that it’s time to refresh your digital offering?
Sign One: Your website is not mobile-friendly
This is a real no-no these days, especially with Google moving over to a mobile-first index.
Google is going out of its way to let us know that if a business wants to stay relevant it needs to be able to provide its visitors with the same website experience, whether they are viewing it on a desktop, tablet or mobile device.
In fact, a study conducted by Salesforce back in 2014 revealed that 83% of mobile users said that a “seamless experience across all devices is very important.” People want to be able to get the information they need, when and where they need it, and if your website can’t give it to them then they will leave it and go and look somewhere else.
So, having a mobile-friendly website is crucial to delivering the best user experience across devices, and also for grabbing valuable leads which you can then convert into sales. If your site isn’t mobile friendly yet, then you need to get in touch with us quickly – we can optimise it for you before Google switches over to its mobile-first index in March.
Sign Two: Your website is slow to load
There is a lot of research out there proving that if your website takes too long to load – longer than 2 seconds, then users will abandon it and go to another website to find what they are looking for.
Site speed is therefore critical – it can also affect your Google ranking, increase your bounce rate and decrease the amount of time people spend on your site.
Unfortunately, it can be hard for people to realise their website has speed issues as the causes tend to be things that aren’t easily noticeable, such as:
- Large file sizes
- Too many 3rd party scripts embedded on site
- Outdated CMS that doesn’t use coding best practice
If you are unsure about how well your site is optimised for speed, get in touch with our web development team as we have access to a couple of tools that will enable us to give you a high-level understanding of how your site is doing, and whether you need to move to a more up-to-date CMS or just make a couple of tweaks.
Sign Three: Your website doesn’t align with your branding
As your company grows and develops, it is not uncommon for your branding and messaging to develop and change as well. Maybe you have added some new services, or broken into a new market, or maybe you have learnt that your current branding doesn’t help you to stand out from your competition.
Keeping your website and your branding aligned is key for customer engagement.
Maintaining your brand consistency across all of your marketing channels – website, social media, printed materials – helps to create trust amongst your customers and can have a direct positive impact on your sales.
The first step in this process is to create brand guidelines and then you can check your website against these guidelines to see how it stacks up – or not! You may find that you just need to tweak the fonts and colours, or it may prove that it is time for more than just a little facelift.
To find out more about our approach to branding and website refreshes, check out our case study on our client Gentronix. They approached us to help support them with their business growth plans, alongside a brand refresh so that all of their marketing materials represent their developing multi-service offerings.
Sign Four: Your website isn’t performing well on Google’s SERPs
We often talk about SEO in terms of on-page elements like keywords, meta titles and descriptions and link building – to help your website do well on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, this is just one small part of SEO, with the other part being technical SEO (also known as off-page). On-page SEO tends to be focused on the content of your website that users can see, whereas technical is more about the things that are important to search engines, such as:
- SSL certificates
- Speedy hosting for fast page load times
- Properly structured /XML sitemaps
If you are unhappy with the way your website is performing, then get in touch with us, and our SEO team can perform a technical SEO audit for you and come up with a plan to address any issues to help improve your search visibility.
Sign Five: The user experience (UX) of your site is outdated
The world of web development and UX is a world that is constantly changing with each year bringing new approaches to improve the way we engage with customers.
This is even more important now, as Google has announced that Page Experience is going to be an even bigger factor for rankings than it has been in the past. We can’t overstress the importance of keeping your website up to date with Google’s best practices.
We can help you to ensure your site is not using any outdated approaches, and that all of the modern-day UX signals that Google is looking for are integrated onto your website.
As you can see, your website is an extension of your business and can be one of your most efficient marketing tools – if it is kept up to date. You may need a refresh of your website in 2021 to make sure it not only builds trust with and inspires your customers but educates them as well.
If you would like us to take a closer look at your website, then please contact us on 01625 238 770 or email us at [email protected]
