One of the most common questions we hear is, “How can I tell if my company needs a new website?” This is a critical question as your website is essentially the digital face of your business and is usually the first port of call for an exisiting and potential customer. At Jetset Marketing, we have seen many factors that contribute to needing a new website, here we have listed the 7 key signs.
Your Website is Not Mobile-Optimised
More and more people are spending longer periods of time using their smartphones online and as a result, businesses need a website that works and looks great on every device. A responsive website is the best solution to this, this is a website that is easy to use on desktops, tablets and smartphones alike as the content of the site automatically adjusts to fit on large and small screens. Creating a website that is ‘responsive’ is a standard part of the website design process at Jetset Marketing.
Your Bounce Rate is Too High
A website’s bounce rate is percentage of visitors who land on your website and the leave without looking at any other pages on the site. As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent, 41 to 55 percent is roughly average and 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. If you’ve got a high bounce rate, that means that most likely you have confusing design or content, upfront requests for too much personal info or simply ugly pages. To get clean design, good functionality and the ability to post relevant sticky content that interests people in a way that takes into account modern consumer habits and mobile, it’s easier to look at launching a new site.
Your Website Doesn’t Align With Your Current Branding
Your branding and website need to match, for most businesses now, your website is your primary marketing tool –- so it needs to be consistent. If you have brand guidelines for colours, fonts, image use and image style, stick to them. If not, write some and stick to them. Brand guidelines can be tricky to implement into an existing environment, but building them alongside a new website means from day one they become the standard.
Page Loading Takes Too Long
This one is similar to the point we made around your website being responsive and it goes beyond a user’s on-site experience. Google will penalise your site if your page speed is low, the lower the page speed, the more severe the penalty. Not only does Google penalise you, but, customers also get frustrated and more often than not, end up leaving the site. If this is something you’ve never thought about before, then you might not even have an indication how fast your site is.
Your Search Engine Rankings Are Low
This is a big one. If your website isn’t ranking near the top of the organic (unpaid) search results for important keywords that your potential customers are typing-in to find your products or services online, then you could be missing out on traffic, leads, and possibly even sales. There’s a lot that goes into performing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but even the fundamental components of SEO on your website can cause a noticeable shift in your rankings in the search engines. Some older sites haven’t had much work done on their keyword strategy, carry a lot of duplicate pages and content and are riddled with problems that make life difficult for Google and other search engines to index and evaluate them. By deciding to go for a new website, you have the opportunity to clean up all that SEO muck and start climbing back up the rankings.
It’s Been Over 5 Years Since Your Last Website Redesign
For most businesses, we typically recommend a website redesign every 4-6 years. Web design trends come and go, but many profound, long-lasting developments can take place over the course of just a few years. Even if your website is getting a lot of traffic, if you’re not seeing a steady increase in leads or sales then your website may have a problem converting visitors to leads, guests, or customers. As part of the website redesign process, our goal is to help improve conversions on your website.