Your website is probably the top connection
potential customers and current clients have with your company. Like other
aspects of your business, it should evolve over time, improving and growing to
continue to put the best foot forward. If your website is outdated, visitors
will likely think the same about your brand, but if it is modern, professional
and fresh, they will see your business the same way.
Although your site should be constantly
maintained and updated with fresh info, a general facelift is needed about once
every two to three years to stay current with design and technology trends.
Here are common signs that your site is ready for that makeover:
It is tiny!
Monitor resolution has increased greatly in
the last few years, and if your site appears to have missed the memo, you risk
looking outdated.
You ask visitors to ?Enter site.?
Splash pages were a major trend about five
years ago, but the time has passed to welcome visitors to your site with a
flashy design that ends with an invitation to ?enter site.? Visitors clearly
want to enter when they click on a search engine result or type your address
into a browser bar, so don’t create an annoying block by asking them to confirm
once more.
It’s slow.
Internet users have very little patience
when surfing the web, and 40% will navigate away from a site that isn’t loaded
within three seconds. You lose conversions with every second your website takes
to load, so make upgrading your speed a priority.
You can’t change it.
In the past, only programming gurus could
create and update websites. Today, however, there are many free and inexpensive
platforms that enable you to update your own content quickly and easily, with
little to no programming knowledge required. This comes in handy when you
realize your ?about Us? page has been outdated for years or the last blog post
was from 2007.
You can’t find it.
If your website isn’t showing up on search
engines like Google or Bing, it is definitely time for a makeover. One of
the main objectives of having a website is bringing in new customers, but they
will not come if they can’t find your site. Invest in search
engine optimization to ensure potential customers don’t go straight to the
competition.
It’s not mobile responsive.
More and more people are searching the
Internet from their mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, and your site
must be mobile responsive to look and perform its best on anything other than a
traditional computer screen.
