If you are facing decreasing revenue from your online business, a higher bouncing rate, or decreasing search ranking in search engines, then you should think about redesigning your website.

Your website is the first thing that people who might buy from your business will see when they go online these days. This is the first place they will always go to learn more about your products and services and, eventually, decide if they want to do business with your company. It is your most effective marketing tool.

To keep your business running and to retain your customers, sometimes you need to redesign your website. Before identifying the signs or reason behind going for a website redesign, let’s know, what the website redesign means.

What Is Website Redesign?

People often mix up website redesign and website refresh. Some parts of a website change when it is refreshed, but the code and how it works stay the same. A website refresh might include things like updating the company logo and old material.

Once the process is done, a redesigned website doesn’t look much like the old Site. A company might decide to update its website for many different reasons.

Should You Go For a Website Redesign Or Refresh?

Consider your website’s goals and the changes you want to make. If you mainly want to improve the visual appeal and make minor tweaks, a refresh is likely sufficient. If you need a more substantial overhaul, a redesign is the way to go.

Think of a refresh like redecorating your house. You’re making minor changes to improve the visual appeal without changing the underlying structure. On a website, this could involve updating fonts, colors, or images. You can also make small improvements to the user experience, like adding search filters or updating menus.

A website redesign is more extensive, like renovating your entire house.  It involves changing the website’s look and feel, potentially including the underlying code and functionality.

A website redesign might be needed for several reasons:

As we are talking about your business revenue and overall user experience on your website, let’s discuss the signs of warning that will tell you the necessity of your website redesign.

10 Signs To Determine The Necessity of Website Redesign

The website is not mobile-friendly

Worldwide, 56% of website traffic comes from mobile devices as of 2023. This means that most people who visit your site will be on their phones, not on computers or tablets.

Users should have a great experience on a website that is mobile-friendly because it changes its style based on the device being used. It usually has things like text that can be read without having to zoom in, enough room for tap targets, and no horizontal scrolling.

Google said in 2015 that its algorithm would give mobile-friendly websites more weight than non-mobile-friendly websites when deciding how to arrange search results. So, websites that are mobile-friendly will instantly get a boost in search engine rankings.

If your website is mobile-friendly, most of your readers will have a good experience, and fewer people will be able to find and look around your site. 

Higher bounce rate

A “bounce” is a single-page session on a website that is tracked by tracking tools. To find the bounce rate, divide the number of sessions that only go to one page by the total number of sessions on your site. A study by RocketFuel found that between 40 and 55% of people who visit a website leave right away.

To properly evaluate your website, you should pay close attention to the bounce rate. If the return rate on your website is 56% or higher, it could mean that people are having trouble navigating it, that there are technical problems, or that the content on your website could be better and better optimized for SEO.

A high bounce rate is also scary because it could mean people are leaving your site to find the service they want on another.

Your Website’s Loading Time Is Too Slow

People who visit websites today fully expect a quick user experience. This means that your website needs to load almost instantly.

Google did a study that found that 53% of users leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load. Portent also found that the number of conversations on a website drops by about 5% for every extra second it takes to load.

Search engines may also rank your site lower if it takes a long time to load. As part of its algorithm, Google has added the option to test how fast a website is. If your website gets low marks, it might not show up as well in search results.

Need To Add Functionality

For both your marketing staff on the backend and your website’s users on the front end, it must be simple to use, comprehend, and navigate. You’ll probably need to add more functionality to your website as your team and traffic expand in order to satisfy the changing demands and expectations of both front-end and back-end users.

For instance, you could need to run A/B testing right from your dashboard, add and manage multilingual content, or integrate live chat into your website.

Your Website Does Not Carry Your Brand Message

If your website doesn’t fit with the brand identity of your business anymore, it’s time for a redesign. People decide very quickly whether to stay on a site or leave it, so your brand must stand out on every page. Everything on your website, from the logo to the fonts, should be in line with your brand, your company’s goal, and the services you offer.

Existing Outdated Content

There is often a link between redesigning a website and adding new information. A website with old information will naturally have trouble getting and keeping users. HubSpot did a study that showed that businesses that add 16 new pages of content every month get more than three times as much traffic as companies that don’t add any new content.

By adding new, up-to-date content to your website at least once a month, you can boost its search engine ranking, make it better overall, and improve the user experience, which will eventually make people want to come back for more.

Complex Navigation

Navigation can change almost every part of your website’s success, from how well it does in search engines and how many people leave right away to how the users feel overall.

People who visit your website should be able to quickly and easily find certain bits of information. If it is hard to find your way around your website, people will not stay on it as long and will not continue to interact with your business.

A good idea is to look at your company’s website every once in a while as if you were a normal customer. Click on your site’s navigation links to try to find a certain kind of material.

It’s probably time to update your website with better navigation if you can’t find that information with just a few clicks.

Outdated Design

Do you know that 94% of bad comments about websites is about the design? Your website is the place where you can connect with possible customers.

But if the design of your website is old, it can hurt not only their first image but also their whole experience using it.

Every two to three years, a business website should usually be made new. If it’s been a while since your last update, you might want to check to see if your site still meets your customers’ needs.

Each time a website gets new features or better ways to do things, the style and functionality should be updated to keep up.

Hard To Maintain The Current Website

Some changes you can make to your site, like adding a blog post or changing a product description, shouldn’t require you to be a website creator.

It’s time to think about getting a new website that is built on an intuitive, easy-to-use content management system if your current one is hard to handle or needs help from a third-party vendor to make even the smallest changes. 

Not Optimized or Never Optimized With Current SEO

Things go wrong for your business when your website doesn’t do well on search engines. You need to do on-page search engine optimization (SEO) on every page of your site if you want it to move up in the search results.

In turn, this raises the quality and quantity of your website traffic, which means you get more users and your business moves up in the search engine rankings. 

Common Mistakes People Do While Website Redesigning

Building a new website or redesigning an old one isn’t easy. It takes time, work, and a group of people working together. Digital projects can get hard, and issues will always come up.

But if you plan ahead, you can avoid them or solve them before they happen. Here are four mistakes that many people make when they update their website to help you plan.

Redesigning based on business, not on user

Businesses often make the mistake of redesigning their websites based on what they want to see instead of what the users want to see.

The problem with this is that it fills up the website with self-promotional content that doesn’t meet the wants or interests of visitors. This makes them lose interest, and you don’t reach your goals.

If you sell apples, for instance, you can be sure that the people you want to buy from you want to buy apples. It’s probably not the best way to make sales to fill your page with details about the background of apples and how your business began selling apples.

So you should ask yourself, “How can you make buying an Apple the best and easiest experience for your users?”

Choosing Inappropriate Design

People think that design is easy these days because we live in a digital world. It’s hard to design. It’s even harder to design something that looks good and can solve a problem, like making a website easier to use.

You also want your website to be a good representation of your brand, be easy for people to use, give them a good experience, and so on!

Lots of the time, people get so focused on small things like what a button says or where to use quotes that they forget about bigger and more important things.

When something doesn’t look right, people are very aware of it. It will not be easy to hide things like stock photos, picture styles that don’t match, blurry photos, different font sizes and types, kerning and leading, color differences, and so on. 

People will notice, and it won’t look good for them. 52% of shoppers leave sites and don’t come back because they don’t like how they look generally. It’s important to design. 

Prioritizing Other Stuff Than Content

Before even the kick-off meeting, content should be one of the first things that are thought about. If you have never done this before, think about what your audience would look for online and start there. Today is the time to go over and improve any copy that you already have so that it helps your users and makes your SEO as good as it can be.

Not Updating Content Regularly After Redesigning

Congratulations, your website is now managed and the design, content, and development are all finished. But the hard work keeps going.

As was already said, people can get upset about small things that probably won’t have a big effect on the end user. This happens because some people think that once a website is live, that’s it and it doesn’t need any upkeep.

But this shouldn’t be the case. Websites need to be updated and maintained daily so that they stay useful and search engine friendly.

How often have you seen a website’s blog post something that was written months or even years ago? Or maybe material on the home page that is out of date and talks about dates from the past.

Not only does this change how people see your site and brand, but it can also hurt your SEO and make it harder for people to find. 

Final Thought

Your company’s website is an important tool for reaching your business goals. You can make your website work better by knowing the signs that say it needs to be redesigned as soon as possible. A website makeover can help you reach your business goals by changing the look, making the experience better for users, or adding new features.