Nowadays, it's extremely important for any business to have a website. A business without a website is clearly out of opportunities. Opportunities that will make your business grow, be recognized, and be considered as a business professional. But on the other hand, let’s say your business has a website but a bad website it is, then it is better to have no website.
Your website is your customer service representative, it is the digital face of your business.
A poorly designed website is close to a rude, unhelpful customer service rep. A more effective website design, on the other hand, is like a polite, friendly rep that goes out of his or her way to help customers in any capacity.
An effective website design can help your business stand out from your competitors. You do not have to follow the market. You can make your website look completely different but still looks professional. In that way, it would make your business unique in the eyes of your visitors
Here are some of the reasons that may help you determine when to consider redesigning your business's website. Plus we have also added tips aside from redesigning to make your website more effective. The following are as follows:
1. Your website is not generating leads, sales or revenue
If your website receives tremendous traffic, but no conversions, then something is off. Your website could be missing something important that is turning your website visitors off.
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Include call-to-actions buttons
A call-to-action button is simply the area of a web page that urges the visitor to take action. An example would be “sign-up now”, “get started today”,“subscribe” or “purchase”. This is necessary to take your website visitors from your homepage to your purchase page. Without the call-to-action button, you are failing to help your visitors navigate through your website.
2. Your website design is outdated.
First impressions are everything. The truth is that you only have 3 seconds to make an impression on a website visitor. If your website does not make a good impression within this time frame, you will likely miss opportunities.
Even people with no experience in web designing can tell whether a website is outdated or not. This could hurt the business, especially if users are choosing between several competitors.
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Make gradual improvements to your website design over the years to keep up the times. You really don’t have to go for a total makeover of your website. Your first step is to get inspired by seeing other sites that have done it well. From there you can then see how much of a makeover your website needs.
3. Your website is not trustworthy or credible.
If your website is poorly designed and doesn’t rank well in search engine results, people are afraid to buy anything on your website, because “they don’t know who you are”. Poor website designs can dramatically increase this feeling.
Let us cite an example, would you invest money in a business located in a dark, back-alley building with cracked windows and trash all over the place? Of course not. Accept it or not, we humans are visual creatures, and putting your best web design foot forward is very important in converting your visitor to a customer.
Your website design is one of the reasons why people are converting, or not converting on your website.
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Add Testimonials
Add testimonials to your website from your clients with their logos to establish a trust to your possible client. Testimonials can persuade consumers decisions to avail or purchase whatever service or products you are offering.
Do SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process optimizing your website to get free visitors. Aside from redesigning your website, it is also important to optimize your web content for better search results ranking and for online branding.
Being on the first list of a certain search engine search results are perceives to be trustworthy or credible. The further back you are in rankings on Google the more people are doubtful about your website.
To know more about Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O), click here.
4. Your website has a high bounce rate.
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. In other words, people are exiting your website as soon as they enter it.
The average bounce rate for most websites ranges between 40-50%. Though, this varies across different industries. The lower bounce rate your website has the better. Low bounce rates indicate that visitors find your website to be valuable.
A more effective website design can lower the bounce rate of your website and increase your conversions.
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To find out the bounce rate of your website you may use a website analytics provider, such as Google Analytics. If you are not familiar with Google analytics, it is a website analytical tool offered by Google that enables you to see how your website performs, how much traffic your website is getting, where are they coming from and so much more features. We are very much lucky that Google is allowing us to use this powerful tool for free.
5. Your website has a low Session Duration.
Session duration is the amount of time (in minutes or seconds) visitors have spent on your website.
If your website visitors do not stay on your website long, this means that your website’s design is a major turn off. They are not finding what they are looking for. This could mean that your website is complicated, confusing, or just poorly-designed one.
Measuring your website ’s session duration is a way of assessing how engaging or enticing your content is, and whether or not it is effective at driving users to explore your site.
A more effective website design will likely increase your session duration. The longer people stay on your website, the more value they are finding on it. The more value you offer to your website visitors, the more likely they will convert.
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You can use Google analytics to get the session duration of the users to your website. Clicky, Piwik, and other analytical tools on the market also have this feature.
6. Your website is not mobile-friendly or responsive.
Half (50%) of all internet users are using mobile devices. 46% of all people who use mobile devices reported difficulties in navigating websites. An effective website design is a website that focuses on the desktop and mobile experience.
In order to offer the best website experience to your visitors, your website must be responsive not only in mobile but to all screen sizes. This is a non-negotiable feature of your website. People will be browsing your website on various devices and if you want to maximize your conversions, you need a responsive website.
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To check the average of responsiveness of your website you can use website.grader.com.
7. Your website is slow.
It is important to pay attention to the page speed of your website. If your website loads slow on certain devices or browsers then you need to fix this. For example, your website loads slow on Google Chrome, but loads just fine on Internet Explorer. You should troubleshoot this.
You only have 3 seconds to make a good impression on your visitors. If that very short time is spent on loading your website, then you are in trouble. Your visitors are going to exit before your website even loads!
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If your website loads slow, Google will certainly demote you. To help your website perform and rank better, the following must be taken into account.
Optimizing website images. This is the process of modifying the images used by reducing their quality but make sure not to make them ugly.
Minimize the number of plugins. The more plugins and widgets you install, the more work it requires for your website to load. Remove plugins that are not useful for your website to load faster.
Choose the right web server. The three main tasks of the web server are to: execute code, run database queries and serve files. If your web server is fast enough, the web page that you are trying to access will also load quickly.
Enable browser caching. Browser caching allows assets on your website to be downloaded to a temporary storage or the user’s cache whenever a user visits a website. So the next time the same site is visited by the same user on the same device, a user’s browser can load the page without sending another HTTP request on the server.
You can use website.grader.com or GTmetrix.com to check how fast your website loads.
8. Your website does not rank on search engines.
If your website has not been optimized, then you are missing out on thousands of free visitors to your website.The first step of optimizing your website is by having a well-designed website. Web design and SEO work together, a web design that is compatible with SEO is likely to draw more traffic.
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Do blogging
One of the most important reasons why blogging is a must of having a website is because it helps boost your SEO results. The better you optimize your blog posts for SEO, the higher your web pages will appear on search engine result pages, this means that more people can find your website and get to know your business.
10. Your website does not reflect your brand.
Is there a mismatch between the way you communicate online and your branding? If the answer is YES then you need to make a change now.
The Brand is the single most important element of a business or organization. It is extremely important for your website to portray a strong brand image that represents your company accurately and captures the essence of your brand. Your visitor should be able to tell what type of business you are in just by looking at your website.
Wrapping Things Up
Your website is the digital face of your company, and if presented well can bring in a lot of opportunities to your business.
When considering a website redesign, think of your website as if it is a store. It is the platform in which your visitors make purchasing decisions. If your customers walk-in to a messy store, they will have a poor experience. If your customers can’t find your products (or services), they will not buy it.
By focusing on user experience and seeing if your current website has any of the tell-tale issues mentioned above, you should be able to determine if you’re website needs a full redesign or just some small changes. If you can relate to a few of these points then it might be time for you to invest in a website redesign.
If you seek professional help in redesigning your website may contact us at (032)410-6528 or via [email protected]. Work with our awesome team today and experience high-quality service.