When to Change and Update Your Website

29 July 2020

Your business is constantly evolving - and so should your website. In a competitive marketplace, things move quickly. Whether it's developments in technology, shifts on customer behaviour or wider factors in the outside world, the pace of change shows no sign of slowing - so you have to keep up. And the best way to do this is by staying on top of changes and updates to your website. This is important both to ensure that your customers have the best experience and also that your site is ranked well on search engines and gets the visibility it needs to attract leads. So what are the telltale signs that your site is well overdue for an upgrade?

When You’ve Overlooked Mobile First Design

It’s no secret that we live on our smartphones, and with half of all web traffic - and rising - coming via these devices, if your website isn’t optimised for mobile use it’s likely to fail quite badly. The attention span of prospective customers coming to your site is low, and if they are unable to navigate properly and view text and images clearly, they are likely to go elsewhere straight away. The world expects responsive websites built to handle mobile traffic, and are unlikely to trust sites that don’t provide this experience. Search engines now also use mobile-first indexing, meaning your position in search results will be affected and you’ll slip down the rankings if you don’t take a mobile-led approach.

When You Don’t Have Great Content

When designing content for your website, it should all come back to one question - what is the user need? How can you help to make something easier for potential clients? What do you have to offer that they might find interesting? Try conducting some social listening and keyword research to determine what topics and challenges your audience cares about - then focus on creating killer content; concise, well-written articles, beautiful infographics and informative videos. Build these with SEO in mind, and you’ll find that they will enhance your website and it's rankings.

When Your Analytics Tell You So

Our websites should throw back a whole range of analytics about visitors - and these can tell us when it's time for a redesign. If you’re seeing especially high bounce rates on some pages, overly short or overly long dwell times in one area, or many more new customers than returning ones (without the corresponding uptick in enquiries or sales) - it's a sure sign that something has to change. Either your visitors are not finding the information they need from you, or it isn’t there to be found. The data recorded on our sites is only useful if we can interpret it correctly and translate it into developments that can be made to the site.

If you need help in keeping your website up to date, optimising and improving, we’ve got you covered. Get in touch with our experienced team and we can help you to craft a better site and a better user experience.