When you launched your website into the world wide web, you no doubt felt a sense of achievement and relief. When your website is up and running and operating smoothly, it can be tempting to sit back and let it do its thing. After all the significant time involved in setting it up, now is the time to relax right? Wrong! It may now be time to update your website!
Your website is one of the most important assets for your business. Therefore, it needs to be up-to-date and relevant. If your audience is not effectively engaging with your site, or you don’t feel that your site is your most powerful marketing tool, it may be time to upgrade or update.
Here are 5 reasons you may need to consider upgrading or updating your website now!
Your website looks dated
The number one reason a lot of clients decide to make a change- their website doesn’t look good anymore and has become somewhat of an embarrassment. They may have even heard from customers that their website is ugly, or is too hard to navigate. Design trends in the digital world are rapidly evolving, and in a few years, a website can go from brand spanking new, to old and dated. And, with an increased reliance on users accessing content on their phone, it’s important to keep up and put your best business foot forward.
Your website doesn’t accurately represent your brand
Your brand image is so much more than a logo- in order to cut through the noise and clutter of your competitors you need to stand out with a strong brand image. This image represents who you are, and strongly guides perceptions for customer’s experiences and beliefs about your brand. To establish a strong brand image, you must have consistency across all your marketing materials. When your website is not consistent with your brand image, you cause problems with your target market. Your target market may be confused about who you are and what your business represents.
Your website isn’t mobile-friendly
As of March 2021, over 91% of global users access the internet on their mobile phones, with mobile devices accounting for over 50% of all worldwide page views in 2021. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, that’s a lot of potential customers that are not having a great experience on your site (that’s if they choose to stay!). A mobile responsive website design allows your site content to respond and reconfigure to various screen sizes (from a standard desktop to tablets, mobile phones etc.) to display correctly regardless of what platform your website is being viewed on. Makes for a much nicer user experience, and helps with your search engine ranking- Google now penalizes non-mobile-friendly websites.
Search, search, search!
Can’t find your website on search engines? Or not being found for the right keywords? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is key to being found online via search engines. Often, a website that has been neglected for some time may begin to rank poorly. This is because it is no longer optimized for maximum exposure and traffic. As such, search engines are not able to interpret your content effectively. Redesigning the site can help you improve the website structure using the latest technology so that it is more SEO-friendly. Through the addition of heading tags, page titles, and optimised content, your website will follow SEO best practice
You want control over your website updates
“Hello, yes it’s me again, can you add one sentence to our website please?”
How many times have you done this, and waited days (or weeks) to have simple changes made to your site? Having control over basic changes on your site gives you freedom to update your website when you need it done. You can change imagery, text, add or remove links, and publish blog posts. You can control your website through a built-in Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is *next to* impossible to build into an existing site (and if it can be built, it’s often expensive!).
If now is the time to upgrade or update your website, give the team at zest a call now.
