How often should a website be redesigned?
Posted on 1st March 2019
This is a good question – and one that any proactive business owner should be thinking about.
If you have a quick scout about online, you’ll find that the standard answer is ‘Every 2-3 years.’
But, as you might expect, there’s a little more to it than that. In this article, we’ll look at some of the questions you can ask yourself to check if the time is right for a new web design:
1. Does your website look tired and out of date?
If you’ve recently rebranded your business, or are planning a rebrand, you’ll certainly need to redesign your website as part of the process. There’s nothing worse than seeing beautiful new designs on a company’s printed materials only to visit their website and find their hideous branding from 2009.
Having said that, there might be nothing wrong with your brand, but your web design simply doesn’t do it justice. Perhaps you cobbled something together using a template that looks old-fashioned. Or you used stock photography as you couldn’t afford a photoshoot at the time, and the images on your site now look bland or cheesy.
2. Does it work properly?
This might sound like a silly question. But how often have you tried to navigate a site or buy something online, only to find broken links, missing pages, or a defective shopping cart? Sites that don’t work aren’t going to win you any business. Unfortunately, technical problems on older websites can be difficult and time-consuming to fix. In the meantime, you’re losing customers – and your reputation could be suffering, too.
If you’re in this situation, you need to act fast. Refreshing your site with a new design on a new platform you can trust to work properly will help undo some of this damage and attract new visitors.
3. Is your website helping you meet your business goals?
Over time, your business will evolve, and so will your aims and objectives. For example, when you first set up shop, you may have wanted your website to simply showcase your products and services. That’s fine, as it will have helped build your brand as part of your initial marketing strategy.
Five years down the line, however, things could be very different. You might have refreshed your product offering, changed your target audience or decided you want to set up an online shop. You might be able to adapt your current website so it realigns with your new business goals. But if not, you’re looking at a redesign.
4. Are you slipping down the search engine rankings?
Search engines are constantly crawling your website looking for new content and factors that will push you up or pull you down in the rankings. A static site that’s not been updated for a long time, or has a few changes made every so often, will be penalised. Slow page loading speeds – all too common with older websites – will affect your rankings, too.
Of course, just redesigning and relaunching your website and then letting it stagnate won’t solve the problem. But if having a new site designed is the start of a new digital and content marketing strategy that pushes the right buttons for Google and the other search engines, it could make the world of difference to your business.
5. Is your website responsive and mobile-friendly?
Leading on from the above, this is a key ranking factor in the Google search engine algorithms. It’s so important that if both desktop and mobile versions of a site exist, Google will crawl and index the mobile version as a priority. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, your site will still be indexed – but you could find your SEO rankings are affected.
Having a responsive and mobile-friendly site is also something that your customers will expect. Most people now use mobile devices to browse the web rather than laptops and PCs. So, if your site won’t display properly or won’t load at all with a mobile device, it’s time to file it under B and start again.
6. Are you in control of the content?
This compounds the problem of static sites mentioned above. A cunning tactic of some web developers – and a practice that’s still widely found – is to deny you access to your own Content Management System (CMS). If you want the site updated, you have to pay. The result, all too often, is that the site is left to rot.
Taking and maintaining control over the content in your website is critical to your business. After all, the website is your asset, not your web designer’s. You need the ability to quickly and easily amend content, add new pages and upload images, blog articles, and videos. Of course, you may find this difficult even if you do have access to your CMS, as some older systems are notoriously clunky.
This can be a frustrating one if you’ve shelled out a lot of money on a relatively new site. But if you want your digital marketing to work, you’ll simply have to cut your losses.
7. Have your competitors redesigned their websites?
It’s not all about keeping up with the Joneses. But think about it from your customers’ viewpoints. If they’re browsing for a product or service and find two possible sites: one that’s highly interactive with cutting-edge design and one that looks boring and dated, which are they going to choose?
Of course, your website may not be boring and dated just because it was designed two years ago. Another key question to ask yourself here is: ‘Are you proud of your website?’ If you can look at it alongside your competitor’s new site and genuinely say ‘Yes’, you should be just fine for the time being.
Here at it’seeze Web Design Nottingham, we pride ourselves of getting under the skin of our clients’ brands so we can design a website to suit. All our web designs are bespoke, with no templates ever used. We even offer extra services like copywriting, photography, and logo design to speed up the process and make sure you get the best possible results.
For a free health check of your existing website and to find out more about our unique it’seeze web editor, please call 0115 777 3001 or contact us online today.
Tagged as: Business Growth, Web Design
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