How often have you done research on what to buy next via a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet?
I would bet that at least half of these browsing sessions lead to some websites that had terrible user experience and basically put you off of making a purchase from them.
Well, you are not alone.
According to a recent research, 81% of people would think less of a business if their website is outdated.
This is definitely not a good situation to be in as a business owner as the losses are potentially tremendous.
In this article, I am going to share ten reasons on why you should you should regularly invest in maintaining the website of your business in order to keep it both modern and useful for your potential customers.
Reason 1: Insufficient or complete lack of mobile-friendliness
It is crazy how many of the websites out there are still not optimized for mobile experiences, even in 2020. A recent study found out that the Internet as a whole is less mobile-friendly in 2018 than it was in 2017.
According to a Statista report, mobile searches surpassed desktop searches in 2018. It is now more imperative than ever before for your website to be mobile-friendly.
Just look at the graph here:
Also, besides the constantly growing daily usage of mobile searches, mobile-friendliness has been a ranking signal for quite some time now.
This means that your business’ website will automatically be pushed down in the rankings, if it is not mobile-friendly.
And in even simpler terms, it means that your business could lose quite a large number of customers because other businesses would be more visible than your business due to the lack of mobile-friendliness.
Reason 2: Your website’s loading speed is not fast enough.
Having a website that loads very fast is a huge factor for any business, which is serious enough about customer satisfaction and attracting new customers.
According to many studies, site speed is incredibly important factor when it comes to customer acquisition and retention.
So, if you are struggling to acquire customers via your online channels and especially your website, you may need to think about on-page optimization or perhaps, a bit more drastic, but still necessary measure – total redesign of your website.
Also, having a fast website will directly improve the experience for your mobile customers.
As a bonus, here are some interesting stats about loading speeds:
- 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load.
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
- If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Perhaps now you are convinced that site speed is a factor that can’t be neglected.
Reason 3: Your website has poor conversions
Achieving top 10 or even top 5 rankings and a nice amount of traffic is nice. But eventually, it all comes to conversions.
Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics that is used to determine whether a website is effective or not.
Now, depending on the type of website conversions can mean different things.
For example, if you are an e-commerce website, the most important type of conversion would obviously be more sales.
As a secondary objective, you may have conversion goals such as gaining more email newsletter subscribers or resources such as PDFs and other similar files to be downloaded after a visitor enters their email address.
This technique is known as a content upgrade and we will release a case study on it sometime in the near future.
Of course, these are just some of the techniques you can use to increase your conversion rates.
Reason 4: Your website is not synced with your current business strategy.
As your business grows and evolves, your marketing strategy is bound to change sooner or later.
For example, if you are an online entrepreneur selling consulting services, you may have had used blogging as a way to build up a name for yourself in your industry.
Fortunately, this paid off and your website has more and more traffic every quarter.
Now, that does not mean you stop with blogging, but instead it becomes less of a focus.
Your primary focus now is generating leads.
So, if you started off with a simple website that was just enough for your early blogging efforts, now you will need a strong one that can handle the traffic as well as being capable of converting that traffic into subscribers, leads and ultimately new customers.
Reason 5: The website’s navigation becomes harder to use both on desktop and mobile.
Having a clear navigation is an important aspect for both keeping the user on your website and also making your website be findable by the search engines’ crawlers.
As your website grows, so will the navigation grow. And as the navigation keeps growing, it will get harder for both search engine crawlers and users to navigate around your website.
If search engine crawlers are having hard time navigating around the site, then it won’t perform that well in terms of organic search.
And if it doesn’t perform well in organic search, fewer visitors will be coming to it.
Therefore, you will get fewer and fewer conversions because of these technical problems, which could be easily solved.
Reason 6: Bounce rate is high
Bounce rate (the amount of visitors who stay on the site vs the number of visitors who leave the site) is hugely important metric that determines the success of your website within the organic rankings in Google.
You should constantly use tracking tools such as Google Analytics and other tools such as heatmaps in order to determine what is going on with the user experience and behavior when they visit your website?
Do they click away immediately or stay for to read some of the content, perhaps?
If the visitors click away immediately, this may a sign that it is perhaps time for a redesign.
Reason 7: Security
No matter how big your website is, security is something you must not neglect. Especially if you are an e-commerce website.
According to Heimdal Security, more malware is being released then ever before.
If your website’s code or the content management system have not been updated in a while this could pose a risk to your entire business.
For example, you wouldn’t want to risk your customers’ personal data such as names and emails being stolen because you neglected your website’s security.
You wouldn’t want to risk your reputation, which you worked hard to build just because you don’t want to spend money on keeping your website’s security up to date.
Reason 8: Investing in redesign shows the will to keep up
In these dynamic and turbulent times, it is important to keep yourself and your business up to date.
One of the reasons for this is that people love new and innovative things.
By investing in redesign, you show that keeping up with your clients’ needs, new trends and the direction your industry is headed into is important enough to justify the price.
On the other hand, if you do not invest in redesign and being up to date in general, why should your customers and clients care about your business?
Reason 9:  Broken or not up to date third-party features
Modern content management systems such as WordPress are of great help to businesses of all kinds and sizes because of the vast support they offer in terms of functionality.
Most of these functions are provided by third-party developers and are known as plugins.
Despite of great these plugins are initially, some of them will cease to be supported by the developer at one point in time.
And if you have an installed plugin on your website that no longer has an adequate support or updates then it becomes a threat to your website’s stability and security and most importantly – to your entire business.
So, if you rely on such outdated plugins, which no longer offer support then it may be time for a website redesign.
Reason 10: Your current website does not offer modern customer support solutions
Customers and clients are essential to both the survival and growth of your business. And one of the best ways to acquire and keep customers and clients is to be constantly engaged with both current and potential ones.
According to recent studies, over 42% of people prefer using live chat as a customer support method:
Conclusion
Nowadays, both big and small, businesses are moving at the speed of light. Companies in all sectors and all sizes are coming into and going out of business faster than ever before. Many of the new companies are relying on innovative technologies to get ahead of their competitors. Sometimes, these competitors have been around for decades. Only to be replaced by a company, which is only few years old.
This is because the newer companies are wiling to invest in newer and better technologies in order to improve their efficiency. These new companies are willing to invest money, time and energy in one of the most important assets of their business: the website.
These businesses realize the importance of continuous improvement. By doing small improvements over a period of time, the businesses should start seeing an increase in sales, better return of investment and lower costs per acquired customer.
So, are you ready to invest in redesigning your business’ website? If you are, go ahead and get in touch with us and we will gladly consult on your new web design project.
