Do you love your website?
If the answer is no or not really, you shouldn’t even continue reading this article. Otherwise, what’s the point in keeping this powerful marketing tool, investing time and effort into it, if it doesn’t help your business grow and flourish?
It’s not enough to JUST have a website. It needs to look good, it needs to present information in a clear, accessible way. It needs to create a strong first impression and make your prospects feel like they’ve found THE ONE. Otherwise, you’re competing for the attention of the same audience alongside another few hundred businesses. And let’s agree, that’s an exhausting game.
If you’re not sure whether your current website does a good job, here are 11 aspects you can look into to decide whether it’s time for a revamp (listed in no particular order).
1. It’s not memorable and doesn’t stand out
What was cool 3 years ago, may not be this year. Maybe you were one of the early adopters of a new design style or aesthetic, but that was 2-4 years ago. Look around, everyone has similar website designs, especially if they use them ready out of the box.
2. You Doesn’t Reflect Your Brand
This one should be straightforward. Your website promotes your business online 24/7. If you’ve rebranded recently, if your photography style changed and evolved, if you’re offering new products and services to your customers – your website should reflect and advocate that change. Otherwise, you’re attracting the wrong type of clients, those who are after your old type of work. Which brings us to reason #3.
3. You’re Not Attracting the Right Clients
We explain this in more depth in How Design Affects Your Business Growth article, but the point is – if you are not getting inquiries from the type of clients you want to work with, you are not positioning yourself correctly on the market. One golden rule is to carefully curate your work. Check the content and galleries you show on your website, remove the type of work you don’t want to do in the future (i.e. family, portrait, editorial, etc).
Carefully select your BEST, fresh images (the type of projects you want to do more of) and include them on your homepage. This will immediately filter out some of the inquiries which are not a good fit for you. Make sure all your content is consistent, including colors, fonts, icons. An example of consistency in a website would be this.
4. Outdated Theme & Technologies
This one affects your visitors’ experience on your website. “Old school is cool” does not apply when it comes to functionality. The digital world is constantly changing and evolving. Web standards shift each year, dictating new tools and technologies for building a good website. Your clients’ preferences and tastes shift even faster. What was trendy yesterday, may not be next week. Hence, if you want your business to succeed, you need to be agile with your visual presentation and website design.
If you’ve built your website over 4 years ago, most likely it’s far behind in terms of looks and functionality. It probably has outdated code that can slow down its loading speed or the way it responds on different devices. It may also not be compatible with some of the latest popular browsers.
Bottom line here, if it’s been a while since you’ve built your website, start looking for website design inspiration and a more modern template to use as base.
5. Mobile Friendly
I sure hope this is not the case, but if you still don’t have a mobile friendly website – get a new one NOW! Even if you do have a responsive or adaptive design, you still need to keep up with the latest trends. Newer themes include modern css code which allows your website to adapt nicely to any device. They also allow you to hide certain page blocks for mobile and ensure a faster and smoother user experience. Also, you must know that Google cares about the experience you offer to your mobile guests, since over 50% of website traffic comes from portable devices.
Mobile is important and it won’t go away in the next years. Don’t leave money on the table with a poorly performing mobile site, it’s one of those crucial business aspects that you can’t ignore anymore.
6. Your Website Loads Slow
Aim for a loading time under 4 seconds. If you’re not sure how quickly your website loads, use tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix to check how long it takes for your website to load, and which files are the troublemakers. Poor results could mean you have some work to do. Slow loading speed could be caused by a number of reasons: heavy, unoptimized images, underpowered hosting and even an old, poorly performing theme.
7. Security
To be honest, new or old, any website can be hacked. The experience is stressful and painful, especially when you lose information, or/and have to rebuild everything from scratch. However, older websites rely on older technology, therefore chances of security breach are higher. Make sure your theme is updated.
8. SEO
Let’s start with the basics. Do you have a blog? You should, as it’s a powerful marketing tool to drive more traffic and users to your website, through keywords, internal links and backlinks.
You also need to know that search engines love good, updated content. Every time you make an update to your website, Google and other search engines crawl and index your pages, thus your site ranking gets recalculated. If you keep your content updated and GOOD QUALITY, you increase your chances of getting noticed on Search Result pages. Pair that with a charming, good looking website, and you’re guaranteed more attention.
9. Do I need Call to Actions?
Of course you do. And it’s not just a button or link added here and there. It has to be placed strategically, to keep your users engaged with your website and browsing through more content. If you’re current website is limited in CTAs (Call to Actions) and doesn’t allow much customization – it’s time to get something more flexible and powerful.
Never leave your website visitors wondering what they should do next. If it’s not subtle and intuitive, they’ll leave and never return. And that’s sadly a lost business opportunity.
How we can help
The point of this article was not to convince you to update your website just for the sake of changing. While a website redesign is an important and complex process, which requires some time and effort – think about the reason you got a website in the first place. It exists to promote your work, help customers get to know you as a brand and as a person, as well as get them excited to work with you.
We at 5th Brand the Top Branding Agencies in Kenya put much thought and expertise into each of our products. We create good looking and powerful tools to make website building simpler, more fun and empowering. If you’re wondering whether Flothemes is a good fit for your business, whether it will be easy to built a website on your own, or if you simply struggle with choosing the right template – message us, or schedule a free consultation
