A website is the driving force for many businesses in 2024, so it’s important to make a good first impression on website visitors. However, some business owners get too caught up in their website design when they should be prioritizing other digital marketing efforts.
Reasons a Website Should be Redesigned
1. Outdated Design
Your website needs to keep up with modern design trends, otherwise, customers might get the impression that your business is outdated or maybe even closed. 83% of people believe a beautiful and updated appearance on a website is useful.
2. Poor User Experience
You need to make sure it’s as easy as possible for visitors to find what they’re looking for on your website. 94% of online users said in a survey that easy navigation is the most useful website feature. If your website is difficult to navigate people may leave unsatisfied and take their business to a competitor.
3. Slow Loading Speed
Following the user experience theme, it’s important to have a website that loads fast. The average load time for a webpage is 3.21 seconds. If you can’t meet the average user’s expectations they are likely to become impatient and leave your website.
4. Mobile Optimization
Over 50% of all website traffic comes from mobile phones. If you aren’t providing a mobile-friendly experience in 2024 you’ve completely fallen behind the times.
5. Poor Search Engine Ranking
If your website is not ranking well in Google it may be caused by some of the previously mentioned factors. Google takes into account user experience, loading speed, and mobile optimization so you need to implement all of these in your SEO strategy.
When You Shouldn’t Redesign Your Website
Every 2 years is still a good guideline on how often to review your website design, but that doesn’t mean you should redesign it just for the sake of redesigning it. Assuming the 5 previously mentioned factors aren’t at play, you may be better off leaving your website design unchanged.
If you get a lot of recurring website traffic from the same people, changing your design may confuse them if done incorrectly.
Or maybe your website is super simple and you want to make it look fancier. It may not be a bad idea to redesign, but weigh your options and see if the cost of redesigning could be better allocated elsewhere in your business.
At the end of the day, while it can be fun to obsess over the little details of your website and make everything look just the way you like, there’s a point of diminishing returns. We recommend you stick to the basics in the beginning and prioritize function over form.
