There is no better or more cost-effective way to advertise your
business than on the World Wide Web. The trick, though, isn’t
just having a website, it’s developing the right website.
There could be many decisions that go into updating your website and we have broken down our 14 key reasons into the following categories:
Design
Location – If your company is a local business
serving customers in the UK, you should expect a high bounce rate from
outside of the UK. If you are a local business, definitely segment your
traffic to understand how traffic is performing within your local area
and avoid it being skewed by irrelevant visits.
Device – A desktop user, tablet user, and a mobile user often have different intents. For example, we expect more people to bounce on a mobile device than a desktop/tablet user because mobile users are often looking for specific info like an answer to a question versus casually browsing or shopping.
New vs Returning – A returning visitor has a different intent to a new visitor. It is common for new visitors to have a higher bounce rate than returning visitors since they are less familiar with your brand or your website. You should segment your traffic to optimise individually for new visitors and returning visitors.
Medium – People coming to your site through different mediums such as website referral, email, social, direct, organic, paid, display, offline, press releases etc will often have different expectations and may well have substantially different bounce rates.
There could be many decisions that go into updating your website and we have broken down our 14 key reasons into the following categories:
-
- Design
- Marketing
- Usability
- Time
Design
1. Visual Appeal
When people visit your site, they see it as
a reflection of your organisation. If your site looks professional and
is loaded with useful information readers will see you as an authority
and expert. Likewise, if the site looks poorly designed and structured
and/or out-of-date they’ll make the same assumptions about your company.
The website should highlight your product and/or service and the layout
should look harmonious and consistent.
Has your content got dates on it – blog
posts, events and similar? It makes sense to remove or update out of
date content. As websites mature and grow, it often becomes apparent
that certain parts just aren’t working well anymore and are becoming
outdated. An obvious example of this is the use of flash.
2. Responsive & Mobile Friendly
The UK is now a smartphone society. We’re spending two hours online on our smartphones every day; twice as long as laptops and PCs. If you factor that fact with Google’s April 21st 2015 mobile-friendly update ignoring
the mobile market is a very risky business. It is now considered the
common practice to make a website mobile-friendly (responsive design).
Responsive Web Design is a collection of
techniques that allow a website to flex and adapt to the size of the
screen it’s being viewed on. Someone opening your site on a small
smartphone could be shown on the same site as the person opening it on
their laptop etc. For many businesses, it may even make sense to design
your website “mobile-first”.
“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come.” – Jeffrey Veen
In conclusion, if you haven’t updated your
website in a while the chances are that you may be driving mobile users
and potential customers away. Find information on our responsive on mobile website design.
3. Technique & Coding
Is your website browser compatible? Is your
source code valid (HTML and CSS)? Does your website meet the basic web
standards? Is the technique and/or (version) programming language
outdated?
An important factor you should consider is the increase in usability in web design. Every year web standards
change radically and techniques to build websites become more advanced
to comply with the latest standards. If your site was developed several
years ago, it probably has a lot of unnecessary HTML code and may be
slowing down your website loads speeds – which may, in turn, impact your
ranking in the Google search results.
Including modern techniques such as CSS coding will allow your web pages to adapt to all smartphone devices.
4. Stock photos
When building your website, it is important
to only select components that will positively impact the objectives of
the website. One aspect of a website where this is especially true is
in photography. Too many dated website designs have an over-reliance on
stock photos. There is a range of arguments on why not to use stock
imagery covered in the blog by Grant Epstein, including:
- Your vision versus the vision of someone else
- Short-term cost versus long-term cost
- Immediate connection
Do the use of images on your website accurately reflect the business message you are trying to present?
Marketing
5. Effective use of calls to actions
Many dated websites lack effective calls to
actions that convert users to customers. A call-to-action (CTA) is a
button or link that you place on your website to drive prospective
customers to become leads by completing an action on your landing page.
Is your USP and call to actions highlighted clearly on every landing
page? As important, are they interesting enough to persuade your visitor
to complete the desired action?
6. Measuring Effectiveness
You’ll be able to measure the effectiveness
of your website. An old website may not be equipped with the necessary
tools that will help you measure how effective your online presence is.
Examples of this include heat mapping, conversion tracking & user
recordings. Nowadays, there is an assortment of online tools you can
invest in to help you measure what works and what doesn’t on your
website, right down to the minutest detail. However, to use those, you
will need a modern website.
7. Content
The first impression of your website would
be the overall layout, but the reader is visiting your website because
they are looking for useful information. A site redesign can also allow
you to re-address how you communicate with all your visitors and to
write simple copy, on target and more effective – remember, in the
modern “go faster and faster” world you only have 2 -4 seconds to engage
new visitors.
The content of a website should be
considered to be the most important thing, as it helps in determining
how effective a website is. Fresh and unique website content is a very
important factor in encouraging people to revisit your site more often.
8. SEO & Website Update
Just like a website your digital marketing and SEO
could need a refresh. If you don’t update your website it’s sure to
fall in the search engine rankings. Search engines regard websites with
the most recent content as the most relevant to web users. Your content
might be gold but if it’s the same content as it was 5 years ago then
search engines crawlers might not think it is as relevant anymore.
The redesign also gives you a chance to
rethink your keyword targeting and the overall conversion rate of your
website. The way people search and how they search has changed
dramatically over the last few years, even truer with the explosion of
smartphone devices now in use.
Usability
9. Provide easy navigation.
When we talk about user experience (UX), we
are referring to the totality of visitors’ experience with your
site—more than just how it looks, UX includes how easy your site is to
use, how fast it is, how easy it is to find information and how little
friction there is when visitors try to complete whatever action it is
they’re trying to complete. Your website navigation should focus on
nudging the right visitor toward the must-have experience..
10. Is your bounce rate favourable?
The definition of bounce rate is the percentage of people who arrive on your site and leave without visiting a second page. A
high bounce rate is an obvious sign of an outdated or poorly performing
site. eCommerce Website users usually leave a site hurriedly without visiting
other pages simply because they don’t find what they are looking for
instantly or do not like the look of it!
Are your visitors just leaving as soon as
they land on your site? How does your website compare to estimated
industry standards?
You can monitor the bounce rate on your
website through Google Analytics. Either as a website whole or on a
page by page basis. Look at the bounce rate in the following areas:
Device – A desktop user, tablet user, and a mobile user often have different intents. For example, we expect more people to bounce on a mobile device than a desktop/tablet user because mobile users are often looking for specific info like an answer to a question versus casually browsing or shopping.
New vs Returning – A returning visitor has a different intent to a new visitor. It is common for new visitors to have a higher bounce rate than returning visitors since they are less familiar with your brand or your website. You should segment your traffic to optimise individually for new visitors and returning visitors.
Medium – People coming to your site through different mediums such as website referral, email, social, direct, organic, paid, display, offline, press releases etc will often have different expectations and may well have substantially different bounce rates.
If an alarming amount of users bounce you may need to rethink your website, SEO or digital marketing strategy.
11. Website Speed
Your website’s loading time is a major factor in people either staying or leaving the site and never returning. Kissmetrics published a great infographic on the subject. We recommend you use a tool like YSlow, Google Page Speed Insights
or Pingdom and find out how long your site takes to load. If your score
is not up to par, then you need to rethink those elements of your
website slowing it down. Images and the size of images can often be a
factor. Find out more from our blog on the importance of image optimisation online
Time
12. Easier to update the website
You should be able to update your website
yourself. An up-to-date website based on a content management system
such as WordPress makes it easy to administer, avoids any messy code,
you simply write in what you want in an organized fashion (WYSIWYG
editor). That way, you can personally add to or switch your content
based on your specific goals, while constantly optimizing your website.
The Web design industry is constantly working to improve itself. This
includes keeping layout designs fresh, updating blogs, refreshing
imagery and pushing out timely promotions and advertisements.
13. You’ll reduce your risk of getting hacked.
Stories of websites and social media feed
getting hacked are becoming more and more frequent. Security flaws can
rear their ugly heads on any website, new or old, but the likelihood of
security flaws affecting an older website is much greater as it relies
on older less secure coding and technology.
14. Website Integration
For the vast majority of businesses,
integrated websites are essential for delivering the requisite service
levels. We’ve outlined our benefits for website integration here. Your
customers will expect access to a blog, contact form, support form and
if applicable, shopping functionality, all on one easy to use website.
They will require a single login and rapid access to accurate and timely
information at all times. Integrating your site with your back-office
order fulfilment, tracking, billing and CRM systems such as Sage, MS
Dynamics or Salesforce reduce the likelihood of mistakes and confusion.
Many small businesses start out using a collection of open-source tools
for different activities, only to be forced to use a complex,
error-prone and time-consuming strategy involving manually copying
information from one system to another.
A website refresh is a perfect time to find ways to save admin time and improve customer service.
Conclusion
In summary, the above information
highlights the most important and most common signs to look out for when
you want to know if your site is becoming “old hat”. Although there may
be other signals that you need a website update, there should be enough
here to guide you on the right path.
Originally Published at www.granite5.com
