Design matters when it comes to any website, but it is a crucial element for the sites of small businesses. If your business’ site is designed poorly, it might be hindering your growth rather than helping it. In a case like this, website redesign is an important step to building a successful enterprise!  That being said, it is not an easy task. 

Website redesign involves not only changing the overall look and feel of the pages on your site, but also the way information flows, improving user experience and optimizing site performance. But how do you know when is the right time to redesign?

If you’ve been wondering whether or not you should redesign your website, you’re in the right place. In this post, we’ll go over the top six reasons to redesign your website that will help you improve performance as well as bring more leads, sales, and conversions. 

Why You Should Redesign Your Small Business Website

There are 6 key reasons why you should redesign your website, including: 

• You’re not getting the results that you want from your website
• Your website is loading slowly
• Your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices
• Visitors have a difficult time finding information or are abandoning your site 
• You’ve updated your brand and/or marketing strategy
• You want to add new functionality

Let’s go over each of these in more detail below. 

1. You’re Not Getting Desired Results From Your Website

One of the most common reasons to redesign your lead generation website is that you’re not getting the results you want. This can include not getting enough sales or not having many clients filling out your contact form. It can also include not getting enough subscribers.

Your website should be your best marketing tool that helps you achieve your business goals. If it’s not doing that, a bad design could be the culprit. 

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to redesign your entire website. In some cases, simply redesigning a section of your website could make a world of difference. 

For example, maybe nobody is filling out your contact form or making a purchase because your call to actions aren’t clear enough. Perhaps your buttons don’t stand out from the rest of your site. Or maybe your visitors don’t know what action they’re supposed to take. These are crucial steps to creating landing pages that convert.

Consider this famous example of a simple tweak that led to a $300 million dollar increase in revenue. In the article, Jared explains how an eCommerce website was losing customers due to the unfortunate placement of the form. 

The form had Login and Register buttons but it appeared on the page after visitors pressed the Checkout button but before they could actually enter their payment information. It was needlessly confusing and neither first time visitors nor return customers found it helpful. 

The problem was solved after replacing the Register button with the Continue button. This prompted the customers to continue with the purchase without having to create an account. 

The main takeaway here is that you won’t really know what the underlying issue is for not getting the results from your website unless you test the changes. Conducting a survey about the usability of your site with your existing users or performing an A/B split test is a good way to see where potential problems are and determine if you need a complete redesign or if you only need to improve certain areas of your site.

2. Your Website Is Loading Slowly

In today’s day and age, 47% of people expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less. Pair that with the fact that a 100-millisecond increase in site speed resulted in a 1% increase in revenue for Amazon and it’s easy to see why having a fast website matters. 

In other words, one of the first things you should do is check your website loading times. You can use a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom Tools to check how fast your website loads. 

All you have to do is enter your website URL and then let the tool run its analysis. Once the test is complete, you’ll see how fast (or how slow) your website is along with recommendations on what to improve. 

In most cases, you’ll find that the biggest culprits for slow loading times are images that haven’t been optimized for web use. If you’re using WordPress, you can solve this problem with a plugin like ShortPixel which will help you compress the size of all the images that are already uploaded to your site as well as those you’ll upload in the future. 

Aside from that, you should also make sure to save any future website images in the correct format — JPG for images of your office, team members, products, and similar and PNG for logos or product images that need a transparent background.

A few other reasons why your site might be loading slowly include too many poorly designed plugins, too many style or script files, lack of using any caching techniques, and more. 

If you find your website is loading slowly, a redesign that takes into consideration website optimization techniques can help speed things up.

3. Your Website Isn’t Mobile-friendly 

More than 50% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices nowadays. On top of that, Google now ranks mobile websites before desktop websites. As such, if your website is not mobile-friendly, you could be losing quite a few potential customers and clients, not to mention your SEO rank could be negatively impacted, as well. 

Like with the website speed, the first thing you need to do is check if your site is mobile-friendly. Once again, Google comes to rescue here with its Mobile-Friendly test tool. 

Simply enter your website URL and click Run Test. The tool will then tell you if your website is mobile-friendly or not. Once you have the result from the Mobile-friendly test tool, you should be able to tell if you need a redesign or not. A negative result means you should really look into redesigning your website, while a positive result means your website looks and works as intended on mobile devices.  A simple check can make all the difference!  

This is definitely something your in house web team can do, but for a focused and expertly done project, hire responsive web designers to guide you through the process of modernizing your site! We go through how to choose a web design company in another article you may be interested in.

4. Your Website Offers Poor User Experience

Another reason why you should redesign your website is because it offers poor user experience. Perhaps your visitors can’t find the information they’re looking for, aren’t sure what your business does or simply don’t know what you want them to do due to lack of interactive design. 

There are a number of reasons why this could be happening. Some of the most common reasons include:

• Your website is designed for you and not with your customers in mind
• Your website uses industry jargon potential clients don’t understand
• Website navigation is not easy to understand and has too many links
• You could be putting too much focus on your company rather than the products or services you sell

A website redesign can help you organize the information on your site in a more logical fashion and improve the overall user experience for your visitors, this includes responsive design. 

However, before you embark on a website redesign for this, think back to what you want your website to achieve and how it ties into your business goals. Then, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about what you want them to do once they land on your site. You can also talk to your existing customers and clients and ask them how you can improve your website. This is a great step toward figuring out what website design services you’ll really be needing.

For example, if you’re an eCommerce store, you might want customers to check out your featured products first. In that case, featuring those products prominently on the homepage could help you increase conversions. 

Maybe you want potential clients to download your white paper or sign up for a consultation. In that case, your website should be designed around getting people to fill out the form.

Once you’ve figured out the problem you want to fix in your site’s user experience, you need to develop a plan.  You’re definitely not the only one going through these issues, and the world knows. There are plenty of tools and software out there to help you get over this hurdle, but we’ve actually broken down some of the most popular UX and UI tools for you to compare before jumping into this task!

5. You’ve Changed Your Brand And Marketing Strategy

Your brand and marketing strategy change and evolve over time. This is only natural as it’s important to adapt to the changes in your industry as well as the shifts in your customers’ behavior.

If you’ve redesigned your brand and marketing assets, it’s crucial that you redesign your website to reflect those changes. This should all be a part of your rebranding strategy. Otherwise, both new and existing customers might get confused when they land on your site from a social media post, random search or an online ad. For example, if your website colors are not consistent with your advertising, they might wonder if they’ve landed on the right website and leave in frustration. A website style guide will lead the way to keeping all of your marketing and web efforts uniform.

According to BrandExtract, a branding agency with decades of branding experience, brand consistency matters not only because it 

“[…]helps increase the overall value of your company by reinforcing your position in the marketplace, attracting better quality customers with higher retention rates and raising the perceived value of your products or services.” but also because it “provides a rallying point for internal buy-in and helps employees understand how they fit within your organization”.

In other words, when your brand is consistent across all of your marketing channels and customer touchpoints (including your website), your business attracts better, more loyal customers and allows you to stop competing on price with your competitors. It also builds trust and makes it easy for your employees to firmly stand behind the brand they represent.

6. You Want To Add New Features

The last reason why you might want to redesign your website is because you want to add new features or incorporate a new design trend. Let’s take a closer look at these two reasons. 

If you’ve been in business for a while, maybe you want to add new features that are aligned with your newest offering. For example, maybe you own a brick and mortar store and want to add online store functionality to your website. 

Maybe you want to add a membership area for customer support-related issues. Another possibility includes incorporating a learning management system so you can expand your services into courses. If either is the case, a website redesign can help everything flow seamlessly together and provide your website users with a consistent experience. 

On the other hand, if you simply want to incorporate a new design trend, stop and think twice before starting your search for a web designer. If your website doesn’t look outdated and if you’ve recently had a redesign, ask yourself if redesigning your website just for the sake of incorporating the latest design trend is really worth it. 

Keep in mind that web design trends come and go. If you’re really keen on implementing the latest and greatest on your site, be prepared to update your website repeatedly. This means means committing to frequent design updates which can become tedious over the long term.

However, if your website is outdated, then changing things up is definitely in order to stay relevant. It’s a fine line that you’ll learn to traverse based on your piorities.

Final Thoughts

Website redesign might be necessary if you’re dealing with poor user experience, you’re not getting desired results or you changed your brand and marketing strategy. If your website falls short in any of those areas, a redesign should be done as soon as possible. 

While a website redesign is a considerable investment in both time and money, it will pay for itself through increases in sales and customers!

Using the tips laid out in this article will help you decide how soon you should tackle your redesign. If you liked this reading, you might want to check out our checklist for launching a new website.