5 Reasons Your Website Needs a Redesign

Every few years we refresh the Power Shift site. While this is a fun process that we love doing, it is also a time to refocus and make some decisions. We are not quite ready to reveal the new and improved Power Shift site, but we do want to share with you some reasons to redesign your website.

1. Redesign to get better results.

The reason you have a website is because you want it to help your business grow. When someone learns about a business or organization they are interested in, they look them up on the web. A website is often a starting point for a potential client or customer and if their introduction to your business doesn’t go well, they might not return.

Many websites were created to simply display information. There is nothing wrong with an informational website, but is your website laid out to help visitors get to key information first? Is your website prompting them to take the next step?

Do you have a clear call-to-action?

Websites should prompt users to take action, sometimes this is as simple as getting them to pick up the phone, sometimes it’s clicking to read the next page, and sometimes it’s filling out a form. No matter what there should always be a next action. Good websites are laid out with this key idea in mind.

Does your call-to-action convert visitors into customers?

There are many ways to get website visitors to take an action, and your website might already have a clear call-to-action, but does that action actually convert a visitor into a customer. Incremental changes combined with analytics, can help you refine your call-to-action into a keystone for your business.

Do your landing pages help visitors navigate deeper into the site?

Websites are the perfect way to educate your visitors about your business or organization. With great content layout and informational architecture, you can guide your visitors from key topic to key topic without them getting lost.

2. Redesign to make your website mobile-friendly

Your website absolutely has to be mobile friendly. With Google’s recent algorithm change, if your website isn’t mobile friendly, then you are getting buried in the search results. 

A lot of company’s choose to build a responsive website, meaning you have one website that adapts and changes to the screen size. This is a great fit for the majority of businesses. There are other options. Some businesses choose to have a separate mobile website that shows different information to mobile users. Either way, mobile users make up 60% of web traffic, and if you don’t have a website that caters to mobile devices, you are missing out on more than half of your traffic.

3. Redesign to update your web technology

The web is constantly evolving and updating. It’s been said that one human year equals at least four Internet years. That's how fast technology is progressing. If you aren’t keeping your website technology updated, then you are vulnerable to hacks and security breaches.

A website is a bit like a car, it needs regular maintenance and upkeep. With regular updates you can run the same website for years, but if you neglect it, you will have to rebuild from the ground up. Most web technology has incremental changes that can be updated as you go to keep your website running great. Talk to your web design team and let them know that security and updates are important to you.

4. Remove features that are no longer used or broken

This one might seem like a no brainer, if something is broken you would remove it, but unused and broken features can get missed. A website can evolve and spread over the years, and you might not be aware of how many broken links you have.

As you get ready to redesign your website it’s the perfect time to look at your analytics and see what items are unused. Just because something is not used, doesn’t mean you need to remove it, but it is time to really consider if it’s helping your business. Web trends have caused lots of people to add things to their site they really don’t need. For a while it was a trend to add a forum or bulletin board. Then social sharing became all the rage. If you have social sharing buttons sitting on your website that have big fat zeros next to them, then it might be time to rethink whether you need them or not.

5. Decrease your load times

As browsing habits move towards mobile use, users value faster loading web pages. Your website visitors won’t wait 2+ minutes for a pretty slideshow to load. If your website takes too long to load they will simply close the tab and try another website.

The trend of responsive websites and minimal - or flat - design aesthetics has helped decrease load times. A good web design firm will focus on placing key content keeping image sizes down, and placing important text content at the top of the page.

Should you redesign?

Knowing whether you should redesign or not is a question only you can answer. But understanding the goals of a redesign will help you approach your next redesign better. While it’s great to refresh the look of your site, the focus of a redesign should be the performance of the site.