Arguably one of the most important pieces of a digital marketing strategy is a company’s website. Having an effective web presence allows potential customers to find your business when they’re searching online, engage with your brand as they research, and become long-term clients and supporters of your business. If your website is a brochure rather than an active salesperson for your business, it may be time to consider the benefits of a website rebuild.
Just like a good website experience can improve a connection between a brand and its followers, a poor website experience can have detrimental effects on a business’s ability to sell online. One of the key indicators that a website is performing poorly is a lack of conversions when traffic comes from other sources such as paid advertisements or social media.
When Should You Rebuild Your Website?
For many businesses, a website rebuild should be considered when one of these issues is identified:
Slow Load Time – In today’s lightning-fast technology era, waiting on a slow website to load is akin to slowly dragging nails across a chalk board. Google recommends that your mobile website should load in 3 seconds or faster, and indicates that the page load speed is a factor in its ranking algorithm for SEO.
Low Conversions – If a website is not effectively converting the customers that land on it, there is likely an issue with the customer journey or the user experience (UX) of the website. Identifying how to improve the click through rate and planning the new design around that will help ease the friction points that keep users from checking out on your website.
Outdated Technology – Often times, businesses find that the technology that their website was previously built on no longer supports the company’s needs or goals. This is a great opportunity to upgrade and update processes, technologies, and streamline operations with automation.
What are the Benefits of Rebuilding a Website?
Better Customer Journey – With the right tools, and a properly identified target audience, a website redesign is an excellent opportunity to personalize the customer journey on your website to help your top website visitors find what they’re looking for and purchase your product or service with ease. Heatmapping tools like Crazy Egg can help you track website visitors as they’re navigating your site and make adjustments to remove friction points as you identify issues.
Latest Design Trends – Online shoppers are used to seeing modern design trends on the top websites in the world. In fact, the top 4 sites (Wikepedia, Google, YouTube and Baidu) account for over 30% of all online traffic. Keeping your website in line with the trends that are followed by these sites will reduce the difficulty people might find in using your site.
Modern Technology – As we covered above, outdated technology can have a detrimental effect on conversions rates and search engine rankings. Rebuilding a website on modern technology allows a company to replace any antiquated systems and processes, and replace them with cheaper, more streamlined, and automated processes. This can result in faster load times, and improved responsiveness.
Hosting – One of the key performance factors on a website’s load time is the hosting platform that is used for the website. It’s important to keep your server response time below 200ms to keep your website speed fast. If your current host isn’t meeting these requirements, it’s a good idea to switch to a hosting platform like WPEngine, designed specifically for WordPress hosting optimization.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The ability for your website to rank on search engines has a huge effect on the ability of the website to generate leads and traffic. A proper website rebuild should account for the on-page and technical SEO needed to improve the ranking of the website. Together with improvements to page speed and improved conversions, your website will rank higher for the target keywords identified at the start of the customer journey planning.
Things to Consider When Redesigning a Website
Return on Investment (ROI) – One of the biggest mistakes that we see here at Auden Digital is companies that chose the cheapest option for the creation of their website. While initially this might provide a cost savings, over the years we have found that the cost of modifying and extending a cheaply built site outpaces the cost of building and maintaining a website correctly over a 3 year period. There is a direct correlation between quality of the website experience and the quantity of products or services sold on the site.
Platform – While many do-it-yourself builders like Squarespace and Wix allow many business owners to manage the content of their website with ease, they come with significant performance and SEO drawbacks. On the other hand, WordPress – which operates over 1/3 of the websites in the world – has an open source community of contributors allowing you to integrate multiple new technologies with ease, making it our #1 recommended platform for online businesses.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – Now that you’re rebuilding your website, it’s a good idea to evaluate which KPIs are important to your business, and ensure that the site is designed with those in mind. A good UX designer will be able to help you create a user journey around your top products or consumer journeys.
Getting a Website Redesign
When choosing an agency to partner with on a website redesign, it’s important to ensure that your marketing partner has sufficient experience working with the platform and tools that your business requires. At Auden Digital, we help our clients from initial build through inbound marketing automation and data dashboards to track all of their KPIs.