Is it time for your small business’s website to be redesigned? I’ll show you how to be sure, and we should concentrate on it this time so you may broaden your reach and make a bigger impression on your prospects. As a small business, your website is your most potent marketing tool.
It can handle a lot of the hard lifting for you in your business, from acquiring new prospects to persuading more of them to work with you or buy from you.
Most websites aren’t built to succeed, so you might be thinking if a website redesign is essential at this stage. I’ve compiled a list of six sure-fire indicators that your company could benefit from a website revamp.
The first approach to tell if you’ve changed your branding or what you provide now. People frequently confuse branding with logo design, but branding encompasses everything from your logo to your marketing materials, including your website.
To put it another way, your company’s branding is its personality. It’s the emotion you’d like others to identify with you. As a result, whether you modify your logo or any other branding aspects, everything must be consistent. That may not necessitate a complete overhaul, but it does necessitate a reassessment of the general appearance and feel.
Likewise, if you change what you offer, or what you do in general, you’ll require fresh written material. Now the difficulty is that you don’t want to just cram this new written content into the gaps left by your current website, so you may need to consider redesigning at that point, and the extent of that will be determined by how different your new content is from your old content.
The next reason for a redesign is if your clients aren’t engaged and aren’t reading your content in the way you want them to. You can find out by checking at your Google Analytics. Let’s imagine you’re looking at your analytics and you notice that when visitors visit your site, they just leave. This is known as bounce rate. That’s not a good sign in general, but the most important factor to consider here is time on site.
In other words, how long are people staying on your pages and engaging with them? The reason I like to look at time on page over bounce rate is simple: bounce rates can be false. Consider this: if you have a terrific site, visitors are finding what they need on the homepage and then leaving; this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is still deemed a bounce because they haven’t gone to any further pages.
On the other side, if people come and leave in less than five or ten seconds, that’s a much greater problem because it suggests either what they’re seeing is confused, or it’s not persuasive, or it’s just an old, uninspiring design. Any faith in you as a company, and depending on the nature of the problem, a redesign, replete with a complete rethinking of your written content, will definitely go a long way toward resolving it.
The next reason is if it is overly intricate. Most businesses tend to say a lot on their website and provide a lot of pages, which may appear to be a positive thing. It appears like you’re catering to everyone, but the truth is that if you offer too much content and give users too many options, they’ll become lost in the weeds and have no idea where to go next.
The better thing to do is to focus on those few sites that will lead to a sale or, at the very least, someone becoming a lead that you can keep in front of over time, and this may be a very simple remedy. It could just be a matter of rearranging the navigation tabs in your header.
Prioritizing what should put up there that is really important against what should go down in the footer menu or starting over, especially if you’re trying to repair any of the other issues on this list at the same time.
If your website isn’t set up to bring you clients now and, in the future, you’re missing out. If your website isn’t bringing in new business on a regular basis, it isn’t doing its job, so I always propose that every website include two separate calls to action. One primary call to action is to give individuals an easy method to get started if they’re ready to transact business right now, and the secondary call to action is to develop your lead list.
You may need a redesign for this because there’s a lot of planning involved and where to put all these different elements on your site, especially a really strong opt-in section for your lead magnet, which is how you start building that list of future customers, and you may need a redesign for this because there’s a lot of planning involved and where to put all these different elements on your site, especially a really strong opt-in section for your lead magnet, which is how you start building that list of future customers.
You should also consider the colours and overall design of your call-to-action buttons. I recommend that your main call-to-action button be large, bright, and bold in order to stand out against the other elements on the page; moreover, whatever colour you choose for your call-to-action button should not be used elsewhere on the site.
It’ll only be used for the primary call-to-action button, and you’ll give your secondary call-to-action button a different colour. This effectively eliminates all of the guesswork associated in becoming a client or customer.
If it doesn’t work well on mobile. Mobile devices account for more than half of all website traffic and visits, and this number is growing every year. If your mobile website is slow to load, or if it appears to be a smaller duplicate of your desktop site, it will need to be updated, and the sooner the better. Almost all recent WordPress themes are responsive.
Meaning, it will scale down in a sophisticated way for mobile devices as well as tablets, and my favorite way of building a site right now is with WordPress and Elementor, which makes it really easy to design the entire site on desktop, then switch to a mobile view, and then make those small tweaks that make your site perform so much better on a mobile device.
In many cases, your desktop site can be much richer and have a lot more visual flair since you can afford it, but it would have to be eliminated from a mobile site so visitors don’t have to scroll endlessly through your entire page.
If it doesn’t tell the story of your ideal consumer. One thing that businesses on their websites don’t always do naturally is speak in a way that their ideal customers understand. You do this by telling a customer saga tale in which you basically convey the problem they’re having, tell them how you fix it, and then tell them what life is like after they’ve worked with you.
Expert marketers have been employing this type of text for decades because it works. If your website isn’t capturing that customer story, you’ll do much better if you write it all down, and new written material frequently necessitates a new style to make it work.
So, if you’re having any of these issues, you may just make a few tiny changes to make things better. But if you could check off at least three of these elements, it might be far more liberating for you to start over rather than patching up gaps with piecemeal modifications, and even if you’re on a low budget, you can do it if you have the correct approach and plan to bring it all to life.
