Do You Need to Redesign Your Website?

Here are nine reasons you need a site redesign. If you have even one (especially number 9) you should really consider a site redesign. And don’t worry, we can help!

Full Transcript Below: 

Cris:

Reasons that people would need to redesign.

Andrew:

Your website can get out of sync with your marketing and just the image of your company.

Cris:

Why are people just leaving people’s websites?

Andrew:

And it’s not clear to them that your website or that your products or services really are going to solve their problem or address need.

Cris:

Today, we get to talk about redesigning your website. So we want to unpack reasons that people would need to redesign. We have nine of these. I’m just going to walk us through each of them and we can just basically give our thoughts.

Andrew:

Great.

Cris:

So of the nine reasons that we came up with redesigning your site, number one on the list is brand inconsistency. So for me, I think you might have a storefront business, for instance, and it has a very specific brand. You’re leveraged in a certain industry, everyone knows you like that, and then you say, “Hey, I want to spin up a website.” And maybe you did that inexpensively, or whatever reason, you didn’t put the effort into it and it just doesn’t match. They do not look the same. That can obviously be a big problem and a reason that you might want to redesign your site. What things have you noticed with brand inconsistency that relate to needing to redesign?

Andrew:

That can totally happen. That’s why when we design a site for someone, we ask them, “Oh, what colors do you use? What other marketing materials do you have?” So certainly, your website can get out of sync with your marketing and just the image of your company, and it’s a good time to redo it.

Cris:

It’s also something that we can even introduce because people may not even be thinking of “brand.” And so to even have the idea of, hey, you need to have a brand that needs to be consistent across your storefronts and your website and your mobile app and your marketing materials and so on and so forth, is important. Most people today understand that, but that right there could be a big reason people might be leaving your site quickly.

Cris:

So number two, session time, as we call it is low. So people are going to your website and they’re just leaving. What things generally attribute to that? Why are people just leaving people’s websites quickly?

Andrew:

Usually, it’s they’re not finding what they’re looking for. Right? So they land somewhere, some sort of landing page or your homepage, and it’s not clear to them that your website or that your product or services really are going to solve their problem or address their need.

Cris:

Which leads to number three. It might be your site’s just not responsive. So responsive meaning?

Andrew:

Mobile responsive.

Cris:

Yeah, it could be mobile responsive. It could be, again, some slowness of it. But essentially, it’s not responding to the customer in the way that they need to see their needs. But definitely mobile responsive in today’s times is extremely important. Designing a website 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, no one had cell phones or tablets or anything, so it just doesn’t matter. But today, so many people are working on iPads and tablets and iPhones, and you have to make sure that you are mobile responsive and the site is reacting that way. Otherwise, again, this is going to lead into, I think, brand inconsistency. Someone’s used to seeing your website and they pull it up on their phone and they’re like, “What is this?”

Andrew:

Well, and that’s the whole mobile-first design aspect, is how are people going to be digesting this information in many, if not most, cases? You can tell by using things like Google Analytics, people are looking at it on their phones. Or we have clients, too, where they have some really old website and we’ll ask them, “Do you want to make this mobile responsive?” And they’re like, “No. This is for internal use only. We only use this on desktops.” So you just have to know who’s digesting that content to know if it needs to be mobile responsive.

Cris:

We touched on it briefly, but I think number four here is your website is slow. That’s just going to be a killer. How many slow websites have you gone to and you’re like, “I’m out of here”?

Andrew:

I was using Audible today to manage my wishlist and to delete things, it was painful to remove things from my wishlist. I had 40 books in there and I removed 10 of them. And I was just like, this is taking way longer than I would think a site from Amazon would take.

Cris:

Dude, we are calling out Audible. I love this. This is great.

Andrew:

I love their product, it’s just the website is not that great.

Cris:

It’s a little slow. That might be a reason to redesign, which completely makes sense, which is great. So number five, your competitor’s website may be is just better, which is an ethereal a term, but maybe it’s not as slow, maybe it is mobile responsive, maybe-

Andrew:

Clear messaging.

Cris:

Clear messaging, all these things. Exactly. Exactly. So you, I would say, need to keep a good pulse, and people need to keep a good pulse on what their competitors are doing. Not that you need to be copying your competitors, but you need to be aware of what they’re doing because the audience might say, “Yeah, that’s better over there. I don’t like your website.” And that’s a really good reason to redesign and maybe implement some of that stuff.

Cris:

What about Google ranking? How does that play into… You’re not ranking high on Google. How’s that affecting your site?

Andrew:

Well, that’s a pretty big deal, right? Particularly if you could be ranking high. If you’re this little fish in this massive ocean and you don’t have a focused market segment you’re going after, that’s one reason you could not be ranking high. Or maybe you have done an excellent job of focusing on the customers your product serve, but your website isn’t optimized around that. You could be much more efficiently targeting these people, but you’re just shotgunning to everyone because your site is unfocused.

Cris:

It’s completely unfocused, so you need to redesign it. Google is going to be able to help actually rank that in a much better way, and you’re going to start to see the eyeballs on it that you need.

Andrew:

Right. First, you have to identify who you’re serving, and then you have to make that clear to the search engines the way your site is designed.

Cris:

Gotcha. So Google rankings may play into that design aspect. The obvious thing is just you need features. So there’s the I didn’t do this and now I do this, so, therefore, I need that on my website.

Andrew:

New products, new services.

Cris:

Yeah. New products, new services, all that stuff, which add new additional features. Maybe you were strictly a direct to manufacturer business. Now you’re going to other retailers and other audience members, and you need to basically redo the entire e-commerce portion of how you do your site. So that could drastically change your design because, again, the focus of what you’re building needs to be benefited by the actual design and create a nice user experience of flow.

Cris:

What about security risks? How does that play into design?

Andrew:

Your site could be designed in such a way that it has security vulnerabilities. Or maybe more likely, the way your servers are set up might have some security vulnerabilities. You might be using old packages that are outdated, have security vulnerabilities. Your servers might be using old versions of encryption. You may have fallen out of PCI compliance. Time passing tends to bring up security vulnerabilities.

Cris:

Gotcha. And then I think the last one, which plays into a little bit of everything and is another generality, but you probably want to redesign your site if it’s not converting. This is a hard one because even for us over the years, it’s like you put your blood, sweat, and your tears into a design and a messaging and the thing that you think everybody wants, and it’s just not converting. How do you internally deal with that? It’s difficult. And so I think if your website is not converting, that’s a huge reason to do a redesign.

Andrew:

Absolutely.

Cris:

So other thoughts? Other things that you think that maybe we hit these… Branding consistency, people are leaving because of session times, the website being slow, UI experience, not responsive, all this stuff. Any other things that you might want to take into account when you’re thinking, do I need to redesign my website?

Andrew:

Just really understanding who your customers are, what their demographic is, what are the problems they’re facing. Because if your website isn’t converting, if it’s not appealing to those people, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s just not conveying to them that you really understand their problem.

Cris:

Either the messaging just isn’t there that’s catching them or it’s, again, not conveying that you understand what they’re actually trying to do.

Andrew:

Right. You know that feeling you get when you find a product or a book or something that’s like, this is exactly my problem. They understand me. And you’re like, “Please take my money because I don’t want to have this problem anymore.” Your website might not be doing that.

Cris:

That makes sense. So hopefully we’ll get some takeaways from this and we get some people asking these questions. Hey, is my site slow? How’s my user experience? Do I have security risks? These kinds of things. And that, in turn, will allow people to come and start to unpack these things with us. Because we’re always interested in walking through user experience and the flow of a site and making sure the messaging matches what you’re trying to do. Hopefully, some redesigns will come out of this and we can help customers actually get out in front of the customers that they want to get in front of.

Alexandra:

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Bixly Tech Tuesday, where Cris and Andrew talk about nine different reasons to think about for redesigning your website. If any of those ring a bell for you or they seem like they were true about your website, you should really consider doing some redesigning work.

Alexandra:

If you have any questions at all about what they talked about, go ahead and leave them in the comment section and we’ll get right back to you. And don’t forget to check out the description box down below. We have a bunch of really helpful links for you guys, including a link to our free custom software guide, as well as a link to our free DevOps guide, and a link to our website, P. There’s a link right at the top of our website that says Start My Roadmap. That actually gets you a free 60-minute conversation with Cris to talk about your next app idea. Until next time, this has been an episode of Bixly Tech Tuesday.