Do you have a website or intend to create one? Business websites differ from other types of websites considerably. While blogs, news websites, and eCommerce websites have a clear line of focus, a business website requires a bit of everything.
The bigger concern, however, involves business website redesign projects. How should you time it? When is the right time and approach? How much more different should the new website be from the old? This article responds to all such questions.
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Contents
Need for a Business Website
According to Canada Post, 89 in 100 Canadians intend to maintain or increase their online spending in 2024. This expenditure translates to big online business, especially as 2024 averaged about 27.4 online purchases in 2024 compared to 16.6 in 2019. For comparison, 33% of online customers make between 25 and 75 orders in a year.
The figures show that Canadians are increasingly doing business online. Your website has thus become the main storefront. With such importance, however, simply showing up does not count for much. Just like the high street shops, your website must compete and do well in user experience and functionality to stand a chance of drawing in business.
It’s therefore imperative that your business website be easy to find, easy to use, and able to meet customer expectations. Website Design Kinston recommends using a simple domain name, master basic SEO practices, and adopting consistent branding as the ideal starting point.
But, how do you know when it’s time for a website redesign?
5 Reasons to Redesign your business website
Despite small businesses operating on a tight budget, there arises a situation where obtaining a new business website becomes necessary. Here are reasons why and signs that a website redesign is now needed.
Source: Medium.com
1. Outdated website design
Who wants to use an ugly website with unappealing graphics? A more important question, however, is why any customer would even dare use your depressing website when your competitors have an attractive, easy-to-access website.
Chances are that your unattractive website interface also runs on outdated technology. Even if this weren’t true, your boring interface will definitely cost your business website a lot of visitors. And with it, valuable business leads.
For this reason, having an outdated interface is sufficient reason to redesign your business website. In fact, working with an experienced website design agency like Rank by Focus ensures your new website receives critical value-added services, including SEO, paid advertising, and social media marketing for years. The bonus? The new website will have better technology to improve your customer experience.
2. Poor customer experience
The last thing you want is to build your business website and end up with a flawed product. Because your business now lives on the internet, it is paramount that it thrives there too. This includes giving your customers a great experience while using your website.
According to RankbyFocus, a web design agency offering Web Design services in Toronto and other major cities, a great customer experience starts with the user interface. It is then complemented by top of the range performance to appeal to customers as well as deliver a memorable service.
It follows therefore, that you’ll need to redesign your business website if customers aren’t enjoying their experience on your business website, while ensuring it performs just as well across such metrics as…
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3. Poor performance metrics
There is no such thing as a free lunch in business, and even a great website is not enough per se. As is the case with perfect markets, your competition will always gravitate towards perceived market advantages, essentially wiping them out. This is true with eCommerce too, and explains why your website performance often declines with time.
Most significant metrics, such as website traffic, page bounce rates, and traffic conversion rates point to both opportunities earned and or lost. Ideally, business owners should minimize their lost opportunities by taking such remedial actions as better UI/UX design, SEO optimized website pages, and using reputable web hosting.
Similarly, it is imperative that your business website is optimized for local, on-page, off-page, and technical SEO to position the business as a leader in your geographic area.
More importantly, a website with longer page-load times, weak website security features, and limited web storage space will necessitate a redesign to help improve performance.
4. Need to refresh content
Would you perform a website redesign just so you can refresh its content? It all depends on you, in the most part. Most people would rather update the content without spending on the oft-costly website redesign.
But what if your new content strategy conflicts with existing styles? Website Design Kingston found that existing content could be revitalized to create 3X more impact through a website redesign. Crazy, right?
Then consider this. If you have high-quality content that ranks moderately on search engines, would you remove those articles and lose that traffic? Which would you rather do; remove average ranking pages or redesign your website with better off-page and technical SEO and boost your “average” ranking pages?
Furthermore, a content refresh with a mobile-responsive design will benefit the business a lot more.
Source: Medium.com
5. Brand upgrades or changes
Successful branding contributes to business success. Given that startups now recognize it’s never too early to brand the business, branding mistakes are inevitable. Similarly, even the successful branding of a startup business does not impact its future trajectory. Hence brand changes and rebranding campaigns.
You will need to redesign your business website if your brand colors change. Further, a business that pivots to a different line of business will most likely require a new website. As mentioned previously, changes in business content also necessitate an accompanying website rebrand.
In this case, the newly designed, SEO-optimized website would seek to solve existing design shortcomings, including removing outdated and cluttered elements, updating the CMS, and realigning business communications with the new brand voice.
