How to decide if you need a new website

Signs Your Website Needs a Refresh

Your website is the digital face of your business, and ensuring it’s aligned with current trends and user expectations is vital for success. In this article, we’ll explore key signs that your website might need a refresh, going beyond surface-level issues.

Key signs you might need a new site are:

• Platform, theme and/or plugins are no longer supported
• Your site doesn’t work well on mobiles
• Your site’s navigation is a mess and confusing your users
• Security vulnerabilities
• User engagement is poor resulting in high bounce rates
• Out-dated designs
• Your website isn’t aligned with your brand
• Traffic has plateaued or dropped
• You can’t work on your own website anymore
• Sales/leads have dropped
• Customers keep saying your website isn’t working or something broken
• You’ve had a quote to fix your site and it’s not far off what you paid to have it built
• You can’t find a developer to work on your website anymore
• Websites in your industry/market has changed
• You’ve tried everything, and it’s not getting better

Many businesses invest a lot of time and money in creating a website, often led by a designer or developer and are left to create the content or use a copywriter. This can lead to a disconnect between the business and its customers. That’s why we offer a solution-focused approach to SEO and Content Strategy.

What might be wrong?

Maintenance and Technical Issues

Finding out your site is “no longer supported” or has “security vulnerabilities” can be frustrating. You can’t plan or budget for it, but you can mitigate this risk by using tools and platforms that have shown they can stand the test of time. This is easy to say, but you likely went with the expert’s recommendation last time, and now you feel uneasy about making this decision again. As with everything in life, you now know something you didn’t before and can pose this as a problem that needs to be future-proofed against for your next project.

Security vulnerabilities are every business’s worst nightmare; data breach risks associated with outdated systems are 100% avoidable, and simply paying a developer a retainer to maintain your site will often have this risk covered. Having an expert on hand for emergencies is always sensible.

 

Outdated Content

Being in the top position for a keyword is great, but content freshness is vital for certain terms, especially if you’re creating articles showing “best” or “top” types of products/services. This type of content and content relating to current or recurring events should always be kept up to date. Moreover, Out-of-date content can frustrate users and, in some circumstances, damage your reputation too.

 

Competitors Versus Industry

Measuring your website against competitors is a great way to create and measure performance with benchmarks, but remember that a competitor having a great-looking site doesn’t translate to more SEO traffic or sales growth. When you’re reviewing your site, consider your industry standards. What functionality does everyone have available on their sites? Are services/product formats consistent across your industry? Is anyone doing it better? If so, how? Simple questions like this take you away from looking at a competitor because you know them and often lead you to find new ways to see how your industry operates and create something better still.

 

Keywords and Topics

Initially, most businesses we talk to have 1 or 2 top keywords they want to focus on; whilst these are great ways to measure your overall SEO strategy, you should be thinking bigger! Think topically and consider your customer’s sales journey. Focusing on your customer and their journey instead of a single “target keyword” for SEO will likely positively impact both SEO and Sales. You’ll find most companies target these high-value/high-volume terms, and as a result, it can take time to improve and maintain these positions. Keywords which indicate users are higher in your sales funnel, in the “discovery and research” stages of the sales journey, are often less competitive.

 

Content Strategy

Are you starting to struggle to fit pages, categories, and products onto your site? Do you feel it’s getting messy, and people keep saying they get lost on the site? Creating a site structure isn’t easy; that is why we suggest creating a detailed content strategy before engaging with web designers/developers. It is key to ensuring you create a scalable site whilst also having a helping hand in understanding how to structure pages, what content to create, what functionality to include and more.

 

SEO Optimisation

Simple optimisations such as improving SEO metadata, schema, internal linking, and fixing broken links and similar issues are easy to fix, but before starting, you need to have a good understanding of where you are now and why. One of the most important things to consider is whether we are making things better or worse. It seems so obvious and silly to have to say this, but last time you changed something, did you have an objective? A benchmark to measure against? Did you even go back and look? This is why a dedicated SEO specialist working with you is vital. We love data, and we measure everything! We love getting things wrong as much as getting things right because it’s an answer to a question we now have, something we can learn from.

 

User Experience Challenges

User experience (UX) goes beyond site speed. Consider real-world feedback and objectively evaluate factors like:

• Navigation Difficulties: Are visitors easily finding what they’re looking for, or is navigation cumbersome?
• Outdated Design: While you might love certain elements, do they hinder usability?
• Mobile Responsiveness: Is your website optimized for various devices?

For example: Using tools like Hotjar, conduct user testing to identify pain points in navigation. Ensure that your website provides a seamless experience across different devices. Don’t leave tools like this running unless you’re actively testing something with a definitive end date, as they can slow your site down.

 

Alignment with Brand Evolution

A website should mirror your business’s evolving identity, not just reflect a logo change. As time passes, everything changes, including your business, customer needs, your market, and everything else. As a result, your business has likely adapted and evolved too. Your website is a digital tool allowing you to communicate with your prospects and customers, and if it’s not a current reflection of your brand, you’re likely missing opportunities.

 

What to do next

Deciding to start again doesn’t mean starting from scratch. It simply means that you’re ready to take more of a considered and strategic approach to creating a tool to both support your customers as a resource and help your business grow.

Just remember, If you decide to rebuild your site instead of trying to fix it, find an SEO agency that will help you first, and make sure you believe they understand you, your customers, and your goals. Finally, Once your new site goes live, see this as your website’s new starting point; this is where you start to ask questions, think about the next steps, and how you can keep the momentum of investing your time into the tool intended to provide for you.

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