How do you know when it’s time to give your website a new look? Your website is essentially the virtual face of your brand, representing your brand identity, business values, and offerings to customers. It acts as one of the first points of contact for potential customers and plays a crucial role in shaping their perception of your business. As technology and web-design trends continue to evolve at a rapid pace, it could be time for a website redesign to ensure that your website remains fresh, relevant, and user-friendly.

The 5 Key Signs That A Website Redesign Should Be Your Next Priority

1. Your Current Website Is Slow

Google has previously stated that 53% of users are likely to abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load with 46% saying that waiting for pages to load is what they dislike most about browsing the web on mobile. Fortunately, there are strategies you can take to improve the speed of your website. Even then, with new ways of building panels on platforms such as Shopify, a website redesign might be the best course of action to take advantage of new best practices.

Slow loading times can also impact your search rankings as it ties into page experience for users, which is something that Google is placing increasing focus on. The faster your site, the better the user experience, the higher chance Google will suggest your site to users. You could be missing out on a significant amount of not just web traffic, but also sales - all because your current website takes a long time to load.

2. The Mobile Experience Is Poor Or Nonexistent

Having your website be responsive on mobile is no longer an option, especially with growing emphasis on user experience and increased mobile web browning. Statista reported that in the first quarter of 2023 over 58% of global website traffic originated from a mobile device. BND also reported that 94% of organic searches on Google come from a mobile device.

Google is also putting more emphasis on crawling the mobile versions of websites. John Mueller from Google stated the following:

"We'll use the mobile version as the version for indexing, instead of the desktop version. For most sites, this change has already happened. If your site is already indexed with mobile, nothing will change.”

With so many people using mobile devices to search and browse the web, Google will prioritise websites that are mobile-friendly in its search results as they provide a better user experience for the vast amount of people using their phones to search. Use your own website on a mobile device and pretend to be a customer exploring the pages, collections and products. Are there any pain points you can spot that frustrate you? These will be frustrating to your users too. A website redesign gives you a chance to optimise your website for mobile users and give your customers the best experience on all devices.

3. Your Site Is Hard To Navigate

Imagine going onto a website to buy a pair of running shoes, but you’re met with pop ups, a poorly architected menu structure and broken links. All of this would likely leave you frustrated as you spend far too long tapping or clicking around to find the product you wish to buy. If you’re having a poor time navigating your website, your users are too and they could leave your website for good.

A website redesign provides the opportunity to review your menu structure, ensure that your top level collections and products are easy to find and that customers have all the information they need to make a purchase.

4. You Can’t Update Content Easily

Making small changes or updates to your site, like adding a blog post, updating an event, or changing a product description, should be easy for anyone in your company to accomplish. If you're struggling with a website platform that makes it difficult to make basic updates, it may be good to consider a new website built on a user-friendly CMS.

Shopify is our main platform of choice for both small content based and larger e-commerce websites due to its user-friendly back-end interface and great content management tools. We can update SEO meta titles and descriptions for products, collections and pages, publish or schedule blog posts and change customer facing elements instantaneously. There are plenty of other reasons to choose Shopify, but the ability to update and publish content in seconds already makes it a breeze to work with - even for users who aren’t tech savvy.

5. It Doesn’t Reflect Your Brand Or Company’s Mission

Does your website still represent who you are as a company? Maybe your brand has changed over time with a new colour scheme, but your website still sports your old colours. Maybe you’ve made an effort to be more environmentally friendly as a business, but this isn’t represented on your website. Your website should always match the current brand and voice that you want to be known for.

It can take 0.05 seconds for a user to form a first impression about your website. That means elements like the header banner that will appear first could play a crucial role in your website’s first impression.Claiming to be cutting edge and always up to date, only for your website to not reflect this signifies that it is time for a website redesign.

If your website feels outdated or mismatched with your brand, lacks mobile optimisation, has slow loading times or is hard to navigate, a website redesign might be the best next step you ever take. By addressing these issues sooner, you can enhance your online presence, attract new customers, improve your user experience and overall get that much closer to hitting your business targets. Embrace the opportunity to revitalise your website and unlock your brand’s full potential.

What Can Mucky Puddle Do For You?

Mucky Puddle are a digital agency specialising in web design, branding, and digital marketing. This means we can not only design and build you a new website, but we can also conduct ongoing marketing of your brand to drive more eyes to it than ever before. Contact us today and we can help make sure your website is the perfect representation for your brand for any and all visitors.