Your website is literally the "face" of your company and your brand.
It is important to update your website every 3-4 years to ensure that you are maximizing your online presence. It needs to be refreshed with the latest branding, messaging, calls-to-action and updated to leverage the latest web technologies.
1 Visual Appeal
To ensure engaging website experiences and conversions, you need to keep your site fresh and appealing, both to new and repeat visitors. A design update should be considered every 3-4 years. This should be accompanied by regularly scheduled updates to home page sliders and other variable/rotating messages.
2 Better Reflect Your Brand
If your branding, colors, or messaging has been updated as it should be every couple years, you need to reflect and leverage this on your site. Your website is the centerpiece of your branding.
3 Outdated Theme & Technologies
“Old School Cool” does not apply when it comes to technology. Whether it's Joomla, WordPress or HTML5/CSS, you need to leverage the benefits of the state-of-the-art web code, technology and platform advances.
4 Powerful Calls-to-Actions
A call-to-action (CTA) is a button or link that you place on your website that convert users to customers. Your call-to-actions should be highlighted clearly on your home page and every landing page. Consider a sticky-button which is accessible in the page margin to the visitor regardless of where they are on your site.
5 Measuring Effectiveness
Learn what pages are most popular and what messages and calls-to-action are garnishing the most traffic and responses. There are an assortment of online tools, including Google Analytics, designed to help you measure what is working best for optimizing the effectiveness of your messaging and conversions on your site.
6 Slow Loading Website
Many visits are abandoned if a website takes longer than three seconds to load. Slow loading could be caused for a number of reasons: graphics/images that aren't optimized, under-powered hosting and even an old, poorly performing theme.
7 High Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who arrive on your site and leave without visiting a second page. To lower your bounce-rate, you need to Quickly provide your visitors relevant and engaging content. Unpack your story on the home page and link to more information or contact points.
8 Website Security
The likelihood of security flaws affecting an older website is much greater as it relies on older, less secure coding and technology. Ensure your site and platform is updated with the latest security measures and hack prevention techniques. Avoid the “This Site is Not Secure” message, plus Google ranks you higher if you have an SSL Certificate.
9 Mobile-Friendly Responsiveness
Your website should look fantastic on all devices including smartphones. Even if you already have a responsive or adaptive site design, you still need to keep up with the latest trends. Newer themes include modern css code which allows your site to adapt nicely to any device. They also allow you to hide certain page blocks for mobile, for a faster loading speed and nicer user experience.
10 Updates for SEO
If you don’t update your website, it’s sure to fall down in the search engine rankings. Search engines regard websites with the most recent content as the most relevant to web users. Your content might be gold, but if it’s the same content as it was 5 years ago then search engines crawlers might not think it is as relevant anymore. A site redesign also gives you a chance to rethink your keyword targeting and the overall conversion rate of your website.