How to know when your website needs a redesign
Things just aren’t going your way, and trust me, I know what it’s like to think about redesigning. Maybe you want new content published on your website, maybe you just want to ditch the old site altogether and start fresh with a kick-ass design. I completely understand.
It can be exciting to think about what your website could be if you just did a few things differently the next time around or put more effort into conveying what you want to your branding agency or web design agency, but what you don’t want to do is think a website redesign is a cure-all. Website redesigns can help your business, and they also can hurt it. It’ll take a long time to truly understand if you hit your goals and if the new website was worth it. So how do you know when to redesign and when not to? Well, glad you asked.
Reasons not to redesign:
#1 Your website metrics aren’t what you want them to be
Website data and metrics are an important part of knowing what works, and what doesn’t. I’d be lying if I told you we don’t use 2-3 different data platforms to see what is happening on our website, what direction to move our efforts to, and what needs to be optimized going forward. What you don’t want to do, and very much avoid, is take in data points that don’t matter for your business and waste your time and money on trying to make them matter.
For example: Let’s say you own a website that only makes blog posts and doesn’t offer any products or services to customers. To get the word out about new posts, you create social media posts that have the link to the blog as a call to action to drive visitors to your website to read the article you wrote. Your goal for the post is simple: Get people to go to your website and read your blog. Sure, you’ll have some users venture off and explore more of your website and read a few more posts, but most of your traffic is going to be users who already like and follow your business on social media are returning to your website repeatedly to read your new posts. They just aren’t really incentivized to go off and re-explore your website unless it’s redesigned, or there is content on it that they don’t recognize from the last visit they had.
Let’s get back into the metrics part of all of this. For a website that focuses solely on blog posting, worrying about what your bounce rate is just really doesn’t matter. Metrics that would be beneficial to know and follow on a weekly or monthly basis would be how many users are returning users vs new users, time on the page (can also filter down to returning vs new users for this), and how many people were referred to your website from each social network you posted the blog URL to are much more beneficial to make decisions off of and spend time optimizing for.
Before you invest in a new website, make sure you are looking at your brand from the outside and listing what actions your target customers are going to make on your website. Even creating a small list of key performance indicators and data points is going to help you make decisions going forward and drive more relevant traffic to your website. Don’t mindlessly redesign your website because a few things look off. Make sure those few things are relevant to your business and are worth worrying about long-term.
#2 Your website is slow
Even though poor website performance can be seen as a relevant reason to redesign for most, for many, many, many websites, it’s probably not. Website performance is affected by a lot of different things that can be out of our control at times. For example, if your website was built on a visual composer or website builder, there’s a good chance your website is performing poorly because of the builder itself. Things that we look for in UI/UX reviews and fix are performance issues relating to being hosted on a bad server, first paint response times, and/or your website featuring a lot of uncompressed videos and images.
To make sure you know what exactly is affecting the performance of your website, it’s probably best to contact a branding agency or a web design agency to look everything over and make sure it’s a problem that can be fixed. Unless you are familiar with fixing website performance issues or have done it before in the past, it’s going to be worth contacting someone to fix these issues for you. Usually, agencies will have a process in place to go over the website you currently have and price out fixes. For us at Delini, this tends to be scoped as a UI/UX review. Unfortunately, if you have a website that was built on a visual composer or website builder, there isn’t much we can do to fix the problems they come with unless the problems stem from things that are outside of the builders’ control.
Reasons to redesign:
#1 You don’t refer your customers to your website anymore
Don’t give out business cards anymore because your website URL is on it? Want leads to go to your social media page instead of your website? Hate to break it to you, but you have a website problem.
A great website should be the sales team that never goes home. The team that is always around to go to bat for you and sell for you, even when you can’t do it yourself. A great website shouldn’t be shunned away from existence, because if it’s good it should be working for you. If you are scared that people might find your brand’s website online or feel that customers might think it’s horribly designed/cheesy, it probably is. An agency is going to be able to tell you if you need a redesign or not, but you should also know when a good time to redesign is. If your website is working for you but you want a few things done to it, get the little things done to it. If it’s not working for you at all, you should’ve changed it yesterday.
#2 You redesigned everything but your website
If you have gone through the branding and/or rebranding process with a branding agency either here in St. Louis, or in another city/state, they probably bid out a website or mocked up a website that they can design for you. Hell, some agencies will make a marketing website for you that is built into the statement of work. If you are someone who decided to just go with the new brand and do the website later, what’s stopping you from redesigning to fit your new brand?
Not only can plopping your new, awesome logo on your old website be an absolute sin (depending on what it all looks like old vs new), but it also can give your customers a feeling that something is just… off. We want your brand to be as cohesive as possible on every platform that it encounters, and fitting the new logo in with a newly designed website does just that.
#3 Your website isn’t mobile friendly
You have probably read in 3-4 different blog posts that your website needs to be mobile friendly, and if it’s not, to redesign your website. Well, I’m here to reiterate to you that they aren’t lying, it’s the truth. We are in an age where almost half of all website traffic is mobile, and I’d be willing to bet that your website metrics probably approve of that statement as well. It’s just a reality of the times we are heading to that mobile is going to be more dominant than desktop for most industries.
So how do you know if your website isn’t mobile friendly?
A great test that Google used to offer was called the Mobile Friendliness Test, which is now retired. A great test to run now that the standalone test is retired is directly viewing your page via Google Chrome viewport settings, or via Google Search Console. It won’t paint the entire picture and give you every suggestion in the book, but it will let you know if there are common mobile-friendly problems on your website. Things that tend to make it past the mobile-friendly test but are still considered not-mobile-friendly by our industry are “Desktop” and “Mobile” versions of websites where a user can choose between the two options on the footer of your website, pinching and zooming to read text or tap buttons, tap targets being too small or too big on your website, or content touching/being cut-off by the edges of the page itself.
#4 It could help you move past your competition
It’s always good to get a sense of what the competition is doing in your industry. Outside of the national or global players, looking into your local niche and seeing what everyone is doing is how the game goes. We are all curious by nature, and we want to make sure we aren’t being left behind when our competitors are changing things up. With most businesses now having websites, looking them up is probably one of the first things we all do to see what they are up to, what they are offering, and how they are displaying their brand to customers.
The way a website is designed can be a major factor in the decision-making process for website users. Most of these decisions are going to be made subconsciously, but even I have been a stickler about a few things lately. Are buttons and content arranged in a manner that makes sense? Is what the business is telling me truthful? Aesthetically, do I like the website? My favorite: Does anything immediately annoy me when I scroll or try to navigate?
You not only have to redesign your website to be better designed than your competitors’ website, but it also has to be more functional, be more trustworthy, have better content, be different. You could have an award-winning website, but if the design isn’t paired with engaging content and fluid functionality, you are just trying to keep the agency you hired in business, not yourself.
If you think you are being left behind because of the design of your website or creative, don’t impulsively redesign your website or think that’s the underlying problem, there might be more to it. In the end, you need to talk to someone in the branding and web design industry that you like and can trust that will give you honest feedback about your current situation and give you actionable solutions.
If Delini isn’t on your “people you like and trust” radar already, we’d love to be the agency that can get to that point, and help you grow. Let’s make something great together.
