“A lot of things have happened since we made our original offer. It is outdated.” - Rafael Villaseca
You look back throughout the years and ponder “where did all the time go”? Hopefully, your answer to that is “a lot of new experiences occurred that made me who I am today”. You, as a flourishing business owner and Entrepreneur, stayed strong during the storms and sailed calmly into paradise during the continuous growth of your business.
The question now is, does your website still reflect who you were when you first started your business or have a lot of things changed? If it's the latter, isn’t it about time to get your outdated website redesigned? “Didn’t I just update my website 3 years ago”, you wonder? But in this digital age, those 3 years is considered ancient.
The average lifespan for a new website design is 3 years. However, the system that your website is using should be updated once a month for security and performance. Unless your website is not using a Content Management System (CMS) to begin with … in that case, you need a new website immediately!
Still skeptical? Here are more reasons why an outdated website is bad for your business:
- Does your website reflect your present Brand and Values?
- An outdated brand may reflect an inflexible and unoriginal company in the eyes of potential new customers / clients / investors
- How do new customers know your company is growing if it doesn’t see any changes occurring on your website
- New product / service or rebranding of your company should match your website’s design and content focus of your new goals
- Does your website keep up with the competitiveness of your industry?
- Modern website trends with a touch of your company’s unique qualities and storytelling through visual elements will leave a longer lasting impression
- Attract your customers more than your competitors by drawing them in to your website’s user friendly and beautiful new design
- Who knows how much profit your business is losing from prospects who may have chosen a competitor because of their better looking website
- Is your website compatible with mobile devices?
- If your website is not responsive or doesn’t resize properly depending on browser resolution or device used, your SEO is definitely getting punished by Google
- Google has made it mandatory that all websites must be responsive design ready since 2015.
- If your website is done in Flash, you need to update your website immediately because Flash is extinct, it does not support SEO or Google search bots well
- Is it easy to make updates to your website?
- If your website is static and always requires a developer to “code” your website contents for you, your website and your contents are old
- Outdated contents are bad for SEO because search engine bots stop rescanning websites that have no new contents, which means they stop getting ranked in Google
- Your website should also be using a Content Management System (CMS) so you can easily make content updates yourself
- If there are broken links and images in your website, it should be easy to fix them
- Is your website easy to use and navigate?
- Can a visitor easily navigate to all the pages of your website within 3 seconds before hitting the back button
- Is your navigation well organized and easy to understand; can easily see which page you are on and how to go to the next page
- Are the most important pages more prominent and should the pages be visited in a certain order
- Are the products or services your company offers easy to find and have a very clear and visible call-to-action button
- Are there parts of your current website that are no longer used or not working properly?
- Simplicity is always better than complicated so the same applies to web design
- If something is no longer serving its purpose, it’s time to remove them
- Removing unused features will help de-clutter your website
- Updating old systems especially for E-commerce websites needs to be done
- Does your website load too long?
- Visitors tend to hate websites that load longer than 5 seconds
- That will result to lower number of customers and loyal followers of your company
- Deleting unused features is one part of optimizing a website for performance
- Make sure that caching is properly installed and enabled and files are small in size
- Have a Content Delivery Network (CDN) setup to take the load off of your server entirely when loading files
- Is your website losing visitors over time?
- If you have not updated your website for 3+ years, the main reason is because your visitors are bored of your website
- Your SEO is not properly setup because SEO best practices are not done correctly
If you answered yes to any of the following reasons, you should contact your web developer soon. If you need a web developer, contact Goldlilys Media immediately. Why?
"The longer you wait, the more outdated your design becomes." - Steve Schwartz
