Your website could be costing you business! An outdated website can put potential customers off doing business with you, damage your reputation and more. But how do you know when it’s time for a new website? Keep reading and we’ll tell you the nine important signs to look for… 👇👇👇
1. Your website looks outdated
Does your website look like it belongs in the days of dial-up internet and free AOL CDs? Then it’s almost certainly time to update it. 🕸️🕸️
Aside from looking odd, a website with an outdated design is likely to reduce trust in your potential customers. 🤷
Put yourself in their shoes. Would you buy from, or do business with, a company that has a website that looks like it’s from the early 2000s?
We thought not! ❌😞
Thanks to the widespread adoption of user experience best practice, more and more websites look and feel similar.
People have come to expect (whether they realise it or not) websites to look and navigate in a certain way. 🔍🔍
Therefore, it’s important that you update your website so that it doesn’t look and operate in a jarringly different way to the majority of websites on the web.
2. It doesn’t fare well compared to your competitors
Even if you only use your website to promote your services (rather than sell through it directly), it’s important that it stacks up well compared to your competitors’ sites. 💪💪
These days, whenever someone has a question or is searching for a service, what’s the first thing they do? They go straight to Google or Bing (other search engines are available). 💻🖥️
If your competitors have up-to-date, well-optimised websites packed with high-quality content, then it’s likely they’ll appear first in searches made by potential customers.
In other words, you need to make sure that your website is just as well designed, built and optimised as your competitors (if not better), in order to capture potential customers at the start of their buying journey on search engines. 😀
3. Your website is slow
Site speed is now an important factor, both from a customer perspective and from a search engine perspective.
We know it’s a common refrain to say that peoples’ attention spans are getting shorter these days, but the data seems to back it up. 🤯🤓
If a web page takes longer than 3 seconds to load on a user’s device (e.g. computer, laptop, smartphone), then they’ll leave your site. 🏃♀️💨
Aside from users, search engines like Google now look at site speed as an important ranking factor. Using what they call ‘Core Web Vitals’, Google will assess your website on its speed and assign a score. 💯
If your score isn’t good enough (which it probably won’t be if your website is old), then you’re likely to lose important keyword rankings and search traffic. 👎
4. Your site isn’t responsive on mobile
In 2021 smartphones accounted for 56% of all internet traffic. It’s a trend which is likely to continue, so if your current website isn’t responsive on mobile, then you’re going to lose out on potential customers. 📱📱📱
Back in the day, accommodating mobile users required building an entirely separate mobile-specific website. Not only was this costly and time-consuming, but it effectively doubled the amount of ongoing maintenance work you had to do. 😫
Luckily, those days are gone and one website will suffice. However, you need to ensure that this website has a responsive design. This simply means that it will adapt to perfectly fit the device it is being displayed on.
You can test if a website is responsive in this way by shrinking the size of your browser window. If the site moves around and changes to fit as the browser gets smaller, then it has a responsive design.
Below you can see this in action with the upHost website. The first image is the desktop version: 👇👇
The second image is the mobile version:
You can still see all of the same information, but the website has adapted its layout in order to fit on a smartphone screen.
Smart! 😎🥳
5. Your website is difficult to update
A key part of running a successful website that attracts new customers is ensuring that it’s regularly updated with high-quality content.
However, if your current website makes that difficult, it’s probably time for a new one. After all, if it’s easy to add new content to your website, you’re more likely to do it regularly!
Many older websites have clunky, difficult to use content management systems (CMS). Not only can these CMSs be not particularly intuitive, but they can also be very slow, making updating content a long drawn out process. 🐌🐌🐌
So, make sure you commission a website which is based on an intuitive, easy to use content management system such as WordPress. 👍😃
6. Your conversion rate is poor
Whether you’re selling goods and products through your website or you’re using it to capture leads for your services, a website should have a good conversion rate. 💵📈⬆️
If you’re finding that your conversion rate has been declining over a long period, it’s likely that your website is to blame. 🚧
Whilst there are minor tweaks and changes that you can make to improve your site’s conversion rate, if your site is particularly old (5 years or older), then in all likelihood it’s going to need a complete redesign.
As we mentioned earlier, there are now certain user experience best practices which people expect to see on websites. If your website doesn’t follow these best practices, then it’s going to need to be redesigned. ✏️📋
7. Your website isn’t getting enough traffic
If you’re updating your website regularly with good content and still not seeing an increase in web traffic, then it’s likely there’s something fundamentally wrong with your website. 😵💫😵💫😵💫
These days Google expects websites to adhere to certain technical best practices, such as having a sitemap with a robots.txt file, having clear URL structures, fast page load times, minimal content layout shift, and other essentials.
If your website isn’t adhering to these technical best practices, then Google simply isn’t going to rank it well in the search results – no matter how much great content you add to it. 🙄😒
SEO best practice moves so quickly these days, that if you haven’t reviewed the technical aspects of your website for a few years, then there are almost certainly some major fundamental things which will be broken or wrong.
Commissioning a new website is one of the best ways of fixing this and will leave you with a technically up to date site that’s able to pull in larger volumes of high-quality web traffic. 👍
8. Your site has accrued ‘technical debt’
Technical debt refers to the situation where your site has so many underlying inconsistencies in its code (due to changes being made to the site over time), that it actually works out cheaper to commission a new website rather than paying a developer to fix the existing issues. 💰💰
You can help avoid the build up of technical debt on your new website by choosing a provider such as upHost for your new site. We offer WordPress websites which are fully maintained. We ensure that your website is kept-up-to-date and running on the latest software, thereby avoiding the accrual of technical debt. 💡🎯
9. Accessibility
Is your website truly accessible? If it’s been online for several years unfortunately the answer is likely to be no.
Not only is making your website accessible the right thing to do ♿, it opens up your website and business to a wealth of potential new customers. 🛒🛍️
Depending on the industry in which you operate, many of your competitors probably already have websites which are accessible. So, if yours isn’t, you could be gifting potential new customers to your rivals! 😮☹️
By upgrading your website to a platform like WordPress you’ll benefit from a whole host of features that’ll make your website more accessible, such as accessibility-ready themes and plugins.
Time for a new website? Then speak to upHost!
Does your current website have any of the issues listed above? Then it’s probably time for a new one!
Luckily, at upHost, we are experts at building websites that conform to all of the latest trends and requirements – of both consumers and search engines alike. And, we do so at a really competitive price. 💯😎
We create WordPress-based websites for which you can pay monthly, and cancel at any time. What’s more, we do the hard work so you don’t have to. So, if you want your website to be completely customised and regularly updated with authoritative, high-quality content, we can do that too! 👇👇👇
Check out upHost’s website design, build and maintenance packages now
For more WordPress website and hosting advice, read the upHost blog…
7 WordPress Design Tips You Need to Know in 2022 | 8 WordPress Security Tips & Best Practices Every Site Owner Should Know | What Are the Key Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting for Your Website?
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