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How Your Outdated Website Design Can Negatively Affect Your Business
If your website is the backbone of your business - then why are you ignoring it?
Your website should reflect the rapid changes that the economy and global markets are experiencing. The average website needs major updating of its platform, function, and design, every 3-5 years.
We constantly come across websites with content and functionality that are sadly out of date. A website experience needs to be memorable, reflect your brand, and attract the right clients at the right time.
As a creative digital agency, we know it starts by understanding your client's journey from search to engagement and conversion. If there are inconsistencies between your brand and online experience, you are undoubtedly losing potential clients every day and hindering your business more than you think.
If you haven't thought about updating your website since Carlton won a Premiership, here is where you need to begin.
Website Design & User Experience
Is your website driving more people away than it's attracting? It's surprising how many little things can turn your customers away from your website - before they've had a chance to discover all the advantages your business has to offer.
eCommerce industry research suggests that 90% of consumers will not buy from SMB websites that appear outdated or neglected.
An obsolete website reflects as unprofessional, tired, and undervalues the client experience in providing a poor experience.
You need a competitive advantage that speaks to your clients before they see the products.
Content - fresh original images or licensed stock photography, engaging innovative experiential and informative videos, antiquated fonts, modern colour schemes and design function, enticing product information, and compelling blogs and FAQs.
State of the art design - Aesthetics - This is where you make your first impression for your brand and business and where your user can visually connect to your products.
UX / Navigation - How your user interacts with your website, the customer journey and final conversion action is the paramount reason for updating your website. Buttons, links, interactive features, check out procedures - anything that causes friction in the conversion process needs to be addressed. Drop off rates should be carefully observed, and processes addressed and corrected.
Technology Speed & Functionality - Google suggests two seconds is the threshold for eCommerce website page speed acceptability. Google says we should be aiming at under a half-second.” Your site speed, web apps, and other site technology need to be powered up to their full potential. Users will no longer tolerate the long loading and processing times. Your need to shore up your processes, checkouts and conversions for fast frictionless transactions.
Search - you need to be visible in Search platforms, use SEO for organic search, exceptional content, schema mark-up, and update your metadata and content often to provide relevant information to your users. Many sites that are over 3 years old have no metadata or schema present, and it's easy to fall in rankings and into search oblivion because bots aren't crawling your pages anymore.
100% Responsive - Mobile First Design - We’ll talk about this until we’re blue in the face. Your website MUST be fully responsive and mobile-friendly. Since the iPhone launched in 2007 the push towards mobile dominance resulted in mobile traffic surpassing desktop in 2016.
“Globally, 68.1% of all website visits in 2020 came from mobile devices—an increase from 63.3% in 2019” (source)
The truth is - if your business isn't optimised for mobile you are losing conversions.
100% Responsive design, images, AMP Pages (speed), and site assets will all help your customers stay on your site and make the conversion you are looking for.
eCommerce industry research suggests that 90% of consumers will not buy from SMB websites that appear outdated or neglected.
Website Security
Your website is vulnerable if you haven’t been regularly patched and applied security updates through hosting, web platforms, and CMS. It’s a worthwhile effort to benefit ratio if your website is hacked, subject to DDOS attack or goes down without a backup.
Statistically speaking - it's only a matter of time.
Here is the very minimum of what you need to be doing to maintain a secure environment and protect your online business:
Using HTTPS with an SSL Certificate - This is an added layer of encryption between your server and the user and a non-negotiable for Google Search rankings.
Software updates - Performing regular software updates, maintenance, and platform security patches. Hackers are on their toes. You need to be, too.
Cloud and VPS servers - when your business is ready to grow and move from a shared server environment, these 2 options will allow you to scale with more flexibility and security.
2FA and passwords - Most online platforms now require a longer more complex password including symbols, numbers, capitals and minimum length. Better still is implementing a two-factor authenticator like Google Authenticator. It’s that simple extra step that will truly secure your logins.
Browsing and antivirus - Viruses and malware are still out there and even the biggest institutions are still vulnerable. Educate your employees, using spam filters, and being ever vigilant of any outside phishing links.
Your website on Google
Your appearance on any of the major platforms, search engines or browsers corresponds to the effort, relativity and budget afforded. When updating your website the backend deserves as much attention as the front end.
Organic Search Engine Optimisation
We go into this in further depth about SEO in this article but in review here are the top items you need to be concerned about.
Your website ranking is determined by website rank, URL age, backlinks, metadata, search relevance (bounce rate) and page speed. All of these factors will determine where and when your website is shown, how often, and in which position when someone is searching for keywords that you use in your website metadata.
The better your site is optimised (SEO, site speed) and the more relevant and engaging the content (people stay for longer) the better your site will rank for organic searches.
Google's prime focus is to make sure that the user is getting the best websites showing the most relevant information. If your website is out of date and does not provide value to the user, then you are losing searches and business.
PPC Google Ads
We talk to clients about this every week. Get the content and conversion right, then launch your ads. Sending traffic to a website that has no clear call to action or purpose is throwing money into the wind. That traffic you are paying for is going nowhere. You need to have a VERY clear landing page that immediately tells the client what they are supposed to do.
Your Google Ads will be successful based on a combination of factors but mainly
- Page Rank = the quality of experience, relevance, and conversions created on your landing page.
- Ad Quality - the quality, relevance and strength of your Ad copy.
- Bid Strategy - how you are bidding for keywords, audiences, demographics, time of day, location, and placement.
Freshening your content, providing relevant information around intent, and a great experience to your users will help you drive your paid and organic traffic to the conversions that you need to grow your business.
Many start-up businesses think it's more important just to get something up and online, quickly rather than careful consideration into planning this journey and dismissing the importance of having a website that truly addresses the needs of their customers. Alternately, many well-established businesses don't take the time to make sure their website stays in line with their brand movements.
To ‘future-proof’ your brand, you need to align your assets and activities with future growth in mind. Without doing so, you're limiting your businesses ability to quickly adapt to new technology trends, user experience losing consumers to your competitors.
Other important aspects a business should focus on is completing regular reviews of its website and surrounding online activities to determine if alternative or new technologies could further enhance its online presence.
Above all, businesses who re-assess their current website and decide to refresh or even start from the ground up, can rely on improved site performance, features and functionalities that provide a more personalised experience. You are more likely to convert your leads, better ROI, and more sales. And let's face it - that's why we're all here - right?
If you're ready to learn how to improve your website performance - or thinking about a website refresh, reach out to our digital agency Melbourne creative team, we'd love to hear from you.
