If you are any kind of business owner, we can take a pretty educated guess that you already have yourself a website up and running. But, is it time for the long-overdue redesign that you might keep putting off thinking about?
Putting usability aside for a second, topics such as security, SEO, and conversion rates are all critical to any small and medium-sized businesses.
To help you make the right decision. We have put together a quick guide, learning about the overall benefits of opting for a website design.
A complete overall website redesign implies pretty much rebuilding your existing website from scratch again, starting with the code through to the final touches of appearance.
In an ideal world, you should be looking at evaluating a redesign every 3 - 5 years. This however all depends on what your site currently looks like along with your industry standards, audience, and any technology advancements which have come out since your last site launch.
Also, if you notice that your site isn’t performing as expected, this is also another key factor that it needs to be refreshed.
An updated site will help reinforce the consistency of your brand. With a modern design, a website will promote that all-important trust and recognition amongst consumers.
Potential customers that find your business will use the overall design and quality of your site to evaluate if they are going to trust you or not.
Let’s say your site appears cheap and outdated, it’s slow and things just keep breaking it can be a major turn-off for potential customers. On the other hand, a complete redesign will help keep your business relevant, enhance your brands' images, and even get ahead of any competition.
A well-designed website means better SEO. Your site's redesign should be taking search engine optimization into account from every aspect right from the code through to its end responsiveness.
Ultimately, this means your new site should help you climb up in the SERPs, scoring you that much-loved organic traffic and not having to invest so much in paid ads.
Finally, a well-designed site can also help attract more backlinks, this in turn can give you a stronger push for even higher Google rankings and additional referral traffic.
The core goal of your website's content is to help any potential customers learn more about your business, products, and services.
Whether it's information on your company or your founder's story, a website's main purpose is to provide information that prods visitors to take the desired action which in most cases is to make a successful conversion.
Most people will expect to find the information they’re looking for to be right there in front of them. This tends to be where a lot of sites fail. With a website redesign, you can do your best to structure and present information in a efficient way.
By overall improving your brands' consistency, boosting your rankings, and funneling visitors through to a conversion, a website redesign will help increase revenue.
When choosing to complete a redesign, you’ll get the opportunity to re-evaluate your hosting and CMS. Also, a new site will more than likely run a lot faster and more efficiently, taking up less space on your server.
A complete overhaul and start over is a much better option than taking the ‘band-aid’ approach and start adding in excessive plugins to try and fix functionality issues.
When we say seamless, we mean seamless. A mobile-friendly site should be responsive, offering the same user experience that your desktop site does.
If that’s not a good enough reason to think mobile-first, just keep in mind that poor performance on mobile devices can also seriously hinder your SEO and organic traffic.
Website users hate to wait. When it comes to user experience, SPEED MATTERS!
While there are things that you can implement to help speed up load times to an old site, issues causing low loading are often deeply ingrained in your website's design and coding.
For those lightning-fast websites, you need to design it with speed at the forefront of your mind and not just an afterthought.
Changes within your industry and target audience all call for a website overhaul. Shifts in trends and customer preferences will dictate what’s considered as appealing and will essentially drive those results.
Be strategic and when a new industry trend emerges, ask yourself these two questions.
- Will a website design be beneficial to how your brand is perceived?
- Are your competitors already taking advantage of these new trends?
Another common reason why you may be looking to redesign your site is that your business goals have changed.
You may now be focused on lead generation whereas before it was driving sales. It’s also more than possible that you started with a DIY or templated website which you feel like you’ve just outgrown now. If the templates or themes are just too restrictive for your new site goals then it is time to explore a design that allows for more customisations.
A brand update is another compelling reason to look at a redesign. You could have made changes to:
- Business Logo
- Colour Pallet
- Imagery
- Tone of Voice
- Content
- Brand Messaging
Your business’s website is pretty much the only place on the web where you have complete control over how your brand is presented. Unlike social media where the platforms have visual control where you must adapt your content to their format.
Your website is your hub and the one place where users know that every decision is up to you.
So there you have it. An outline of the key reasons to get a website redesign.
Here at Cold Banana we live and breathe websites and can help you accomplish your website dreams. We are always here to help and can bring your ideas into your brand's reality.