A good website is at the forefront of nearly every business. As your business grows and adapts over the years, so too should your website.
If you’re wondering why you would want to spruce up a website or start a new one altogether, take a look at our reasons to give you some food for thought.
Article contents
1. Your website isn’t mobile first
2. Your design doesn’t reflect your business
3. Your website doesn’t and can’t rank with Google
7. Your website is inefficient
8. You’ve built (website) Frankenstein
Reasons why you need to update your website
1. Your website isn’t mobile first
Mobile users are likely to make up more than half of your website traffic, so it’s important to create the best user experience for both mobile and desktop. This doesn’t simply mean that if your website runs on a phone, everything is fine – it’s got to be ‘mobile first’. Nearly every industry these days has more traffic coming to it on mobile than desktop.
Our best friend (or enemy) Google takes the mobile version of your website into consideration for indexing and ranking pages, called mobile-first indexing. When designing content for the mobile-first index, you need to think about what users are seeing on their phone, considering the content usability and visibility, while taking core web vitals, site performance and page experience into account.
2. Your design doesn’t reflect the business
Never judge a book by its cover unless we’re talking about web page design. There are a few questions to ask yourself when it comes to whether your website design reflects the business or if it’s out of date:
- Are your brand identity, services and products being well conveyed?
- Have you rebranded and not yet updated your website?
- Has your audience moved or changed?
- Have your competitors got better looking websites?
- Have you got market intel that tells you that your conversion rates are behind the time?
It might be that one or more of these issues need addressing, in which case a new website could well be the answer. It's possible that with a little TLC you can change the templates or content of your existing site, but often it can be more work and effort than you expect and a website rebuild is actually the best answer. Often a reputable web design company would be able to help you evaluate this.
3. Your website doesn’t and can’t rank with Google
Surprise, surprise - Google is still by far the most popular search engine, with an overwhelming 94% market share in the UK as of August 2024. Which means if you’re not catering your websites to rank on Google, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. While Google’s algorithm and ranking system focusses on user experience, here’s a few other reasons you might be struggling to rank:
- Poor tech: Badly built, slow webpages will also be slow to be indexed, if at all. Excessive use of Javascript can make this a big issue.
- Poor code: Templated websites like Hubspot and Wordpress can create huge web pages; excessively long pages like this can create issues with indexing and longer load times.
- Poor page management: Some CMS’ will handle redirects automatically, creating long redirect chains that cause search robots to lose interest and waste budget.
4. Your CMS is out of license
When is the last time you checked your CMS version and license? As time goes on, tech may be ditched or be forced to be upgraded, leaving website owners with a choice between updating the CMS (and paying an agency or freelancer to do the upgrade), continuing with an out of date and potential insecure CMS or sometimes moving platforms may even be the only choice. Keeping up to date may be difficult but might often be completely necessary. But here’s an Adido pro tip: Many ‘big' CMSs are often overpriced and not worth the money you pay for them – so go open source!
5. Your website is slow
You’d be hard pressed to find anybody more impatient than someone waiting to access a web page. The number one reason for a visitor to leave a website is due to slow loading times. Now this is pretty subjective since a slow web page for me might not be slow for you, however noticeable improvements to performance can increase customer satisfaction and conversion rates. A little bit can go a long way here, so if you feel like your website needs old code looked at or server tweaks, it might make a difference.
6. Your website has bad UX
A good user experience is extremely important for website performance, so what is it that users really want? Answer: To easily find what they are looking for. Bad UX and templates that steer users down dead ends and lead them in circles affects session duration and whether they’ll want to come back again, so think about how easy it is for users to interact with your web pages and complete their tasks.
And don’t sleep on landing pages! They’re important for increasing conversion rates and encouraging users to find out more, so definitely give thought to building ones which are tailored to your users’ needs as well as yours.
7. Your website is inefficient
When time is money, efficiency is everything. Old websites can have bottlenecks that create issues which are hard to fix without starting fresh or upgrading. For example, choosing the wrong tech stack can lead to forms not getting pushed through to CRMs, so what happens next? Someone must manually enter information into another system, wasting time and money. A new website would address basic issues like replacing poor data structures that can’t be changed and in this situation, you would be spending a little to save a lot in the long run.
8. You’ve built (web) Frankenstein
It’s wonderful seeing your website grow, building upon it, adding more functionality, but take a step back and look at the bigger picture. You might not have created a monster, but if your website is strung together with a patchwork of official plugins, custom plugins and custom CSS, it might be time to let it go. Give it a fresh start – it’ll be reborn like a phoenix! While your website might be smooth sailing right now, software updates from an amalgamation of plugins and code can cause compatibility issues, errors and more that would be a headache to fix, so rebuilding your site might be necessary.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, a bad website costs money through lost sales and bookings to competitors with better sites. Focussing on improving certain aspects of your website or creating a new one will hopefully improve your conversion rate, SERP ranking and be worth the cost. For the longevity of your business, take into consideration when it may time to upgrade or invest in a new website.
Think you need a new website?
If any of the above points ring true about your website, or maybe you’re just looking for something fresh and new, Adido can help with that! We have an amazing team of professionals who specialise in website design and building. From optimising your website so it runs smoothly and efficiently to creating a user-friendly experience that aims to rank competitively on SERPs. Contact us today to learn more!
