Tell me honestly, if you are a business owner and you have a website, did the thought cross your mind that you are sorted when it comes to having a digital presence?
Well, you may certainly have a goodlooking website but have you checked on the health of the primary function of it? The truth is, having a website may put you in-line with the masses at large but that does not necessarily guarantee you are standing as a unique entity.
The primary function of a website is to ensure that people visit your business digitally, understand who you are, what you do and then connect with you. If your website is effectively doing that, you can relax. But if not, you need to wake up and sip a coffee.
To begin with, you need to realise that a website is a channel of marketing for your business and not just a trend following activity. So, though it may have initially attracted some traffic through your initiative of informing people that you are digitally available; but that surely will have died down. This is what resulted in low growth of your business.
YOUR WEBSITE IS THE PLATFORM YOU NEED TO CONVERT YOU POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS FAR AND WIDE.
It’s time to reconsider, re-evaluate and redesign. So, read on to learn the indicators through which your website has been crying out for help.
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Your Website Is Not Being Found on Search Engines
Let us start with the most important part of having a website: being found. You may have invested in a beautiful website. You may have spent time deciding on the colours, images, pages and content. Everything may look perfect when you open it. But there is one small problem; nobody is finding it.
A website is not useful as a marketing channel if your potential customers cannot discover it when they are searching for the products or services you provide. This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) plays a key role.
SEO is not simply about adding a few keywords to your website and hoping that Google will notice. Your website needs to be structured in a way that helps search engines understand what your business does and, at the same time, provides useful information to the people searching for it.
Remember, over time, your business may have changed, your customers’ search behaviour may have changed, and search engine algorithms may have evolved. The SEO strategy that worked when your website was first launched may NO LONGER BE ENOUGH.
Perhaps your website has very little useful content. Perhaps your service pages are not properly optimised. Perhaps your page titles and descriptions are weak. Perhaps your website has technical SEO issues. Or perhaps your competitors have simply done a better job of building their online visibility.
All of these can affect how easily people discover your business. And this is why SEO should not be treated as something you do once when launching a website. Your website needs to remain discoverable as your business and the digital landscape evolve.
If your website is not attracting the right organic traffic, redesigning it with a stronger SEO foundation may be one of the most important changes you can make.
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Your Website Gets Visitors, But They Do Not Become Customers
Now, let us assume your website is being found. The traffic inflow is decent, i.e. people are visiting but you still do not see as many enquiries as views. That would mean simply having website traffic stops being enough.
A website should not only bring people to your digital doorstep. It should also give them enough reason to stay, understand your offering and eventually connect with you. Sometimes the problem is the way the business is presented.
The visitor may not immediately understand what you offer or your value proposition may not be clear. At times, the important information may be difficult to find or your contact details may not be clearly visible. In fact, there may simply be no clear next step for someone who is interested in your services.
This means you could be spending money and effort bringing people to your website, only to lose them once they arrive.
A REDESIGN gives you the opportunity to rethink that entire journey.
The content, page structure, calls to action, enquiry forms, service pages and trust-building elements should all work together towards one objective: helping the right visitor move closer to becoming a customer. Because we must note that traffic is good but relevant traffic that converts is better.
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Your Website Is Not Giving Mobile Users the Experience They Deserve
It goes without saying that the way people use the internet has changed significantly. Your potential customer may discover your business while using a smartphone, check your services on the way to work, look at your website during a lunch break, or contact you directly from their mobile device. That makes your mobile website more than just a smaller version of your desktop website.
It is often the first experience someone has with your business. A website that looks good on a desktop but becomes difficult to navigate on a mobile screen can create unnecessary friction. Text may become difficult to read, buttons may be difficult to tap, images may not display correctly and forms may become frustrating to complete. And in this case, when the experience becomes frustrating, the customer does not have to complain. They can simply leave.
A modern website needs to adapt naturally to different screen sizes and provide a consistent experience across devices. If your website has not been properly designed or updated for mobile users, a redesign can help make your digital presence more accessible, easier to use and more relevant to the way your customers actually browse the internet today.
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Your Website Is Taking Too Long to Load
Here is another problem that can quietly damage your website performance. The loading speed.
A visitor may be interested in your business, but that interest has limits. If your website takes too long to load, the visitor may simply move on before seeing what you have to offer. Slow websites can have several causes. Large images, outdated technologies, unnecessary plugins, excessive scripts, poor optimisation and an old website structure can all contribute to slower performance.
The difficult part is that as a business owner you may not always notice the problem. You may open your website regularly and feel that it works perfectly well. But your customers may be accessing it from different devices, networks and locations, and their experience can be very different.
Website speed is also closely connected with the overall user experience and can affect your search visibility. This is why performance should be considered when redesigning a website.
A redesign is an opportunity to remove unnecessary elements, optimise the website and create a faster experience without compromising the information your customers need.
After all, your website should be helping your customers move forward. It should not be asking them to wait.
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Your Business Has Changed, But Your Website Has Not
The fact is businesses evolve. Perhaps you started with a handful of services and now offer a much wider range. Or you could have entered a new market which would invariably lead to your target audience being changed. Alternatively, your brand may have grown into something completely different from what it was when the website was created. But your website may still be telling the old story.
This creates a gap between your actual business and your digital presence. Imagine having a service that you are particularly proud of, with an experienced team ready to deliver it, but your website barely mentions it. A potential customer searching online may never know that you provide it. That is a missed opportunity.
Your website should thus, accurately communicate who you are, what you do and what makes your business relevant today. This goes beyond simply changing a few paragraphs. Your messaging, service pages, images, navigation, calls to action and overall positioning will all need to reflect the direction your business has taken.
Therefore, do not consider website redesign as something concerned only about the design of the website. It can be an opportunity to bring your digital identity back in line with your business identity.
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Your Visitors Are Struggling to Find the Information They Need
A website can have excellent content and still provide a poor experience if that content is difficult to find. This happens more often than you might think. As businesses grow, more pages are added new services appear but the old pages remain. New information gets placed wherever there happens to be space.
Eventually, the website becomes crowded. The visitor has to move through several pages before finding a simple answer. The navigation becomes confusing and eventually, important information gets buried. And the journey from discovering your business to contacting you becomes unnecessarily long.
The solution is not always to remove the previous information; sometimes, it is about organising it properly. A well-structured website should guide visitors through the information in a logical way. The navigation should make sense, important pages should be easy to reach, and the content should appear where visitors naturally expect to find it.
At Hyrrokkin, special care is thus, taken, taking into account that the user experience is of utmost importance. Your website should not make visitors feel like they are searching for a needle in a haystack. The information they need should be where they need it, when they need it.
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Your Website Looks Outdated Compared With Your Competitors
Finally, we come to the most visible sign of all where we bluntly say, your website simply looks old.
This may sound less important than SEO, conversions, mobile performance or website speed, and in many ways, it is. A website should not be redesigned simply because someone has introduced a new design trend. However, visual presentation still matters.
Your website is part of your brand identity. When a potential customer discovers your business online, the design, imagery, typography, layout and overall presentation contribute to the impression they form about your business. If your competitors are presenting themselves with modern, well-structured websites while your website still looks like it was designed several years ago, the difference can become noticeable.
This does not mean that your website needs to follow every new trend; in fact, my recommendation is, it should not. The objective should be to create a website that feels current, professional and consistent with the quality of your business.
Your website does not have to be the flashiest website in your industry. It simply needs to make your business look as good online as it actually is.
A Website Redesign Is More Than a New Look
By now, it should be clear that a website redesign is not simply about changing colours, fonts, images or layouts. A proper redesign should look at the website as a complete business tool.
It should consider how easily people can find you, how effectively you convert visitors, how your website performs on mobile devices, how quickly it loads, whether your content reflects your current business and how easily visitors can find the information they need.
The visual design is important too, but it should support all of these functions rather than replace them. That is why redesigning a website should not begin with:
“How should the new website look?” It should begin with:
“What should the website be doing better?”
Once that is clear, the design becomes part of the solution rather than the entire solution. In a nutshell, your website should work as hard as your business. But for you website to do so, you should know how to nurture it.
Ready to Make Your Website Work Better?
At Hyrrokkin, we believe a website should be more than a digital presence. It should be:
- Discoverable
- Useful
- easy to navigate
- represent your business correctly
And most importantly, it should work for your business. Because your website is not just where your business exists online, it is where your business gets the opportunity to be discovered, understood and chosen.
