Author:
Cherryl Rego
It didn’t seem so long ago that you painted the living room and relaid the carpet, then all of a sudden you realise your house is looking a little tired. Once you’ve noticed it, you can’t un-notice it. It’s time to put on your overalls and get to work.
The same can be true of your business’s website. It might not suffer scuff marks and coffee stains, but there are plenty of signs it’s not as fresh as it once was. Maybe the colours and fonts look dated, or it’s become slow to load.
The problem is your prospective customers will be noticing it too. In fact, they probably noticed before you did, in the same way a nosy neighbour picked up on that crack in the kitchen wall you’d learnt to live with. And just as that nosy neighbour might form an opinion based on that crack, your customers will be judging your business based on your website.
So how do you know it’s time to revamp your website? Here are five signs that it might be time for a redesign.
You know when you’ve stumbled across a site that’s hardly been updated since the early internet. Blocky, stiff colours and blue hyperlinks aplenty. It’s off-putting. Not a source you would inherently trust.
Web design evolves. Ten years ago, gradients and glossy buttons were the height of sophistication. Now, people expect clean layouts, generous white space and smooth, intuitive interaction. If you’re not offering that, they’ll probably opt for a business that is.
Here’s a quick sense check: If your homepage still features a slider with five rotating banners, or your logo looks fuzzy, or if it just seems jaded compared to the competition, you’re probably due for a refresh.
With mobile devices accounting for over 60% of global traffic, your website must display clearly on a phone screen.Â
That’s not always the case, especially for older websites. Try it out. Open your homepage on your phone. Do you have to pinch and zoom just to read a headline? Are buttons too tiny to tap? Or worse, overlapping? Does the entire format change and look no better than a Word document? If so, you probably need to update the website.
What’s more, Google switched to mobile-first indexing a while back, so the mobile version of your site is now the one the search engine uses for ranking purposes. This means if your site’s not mobile-friendly, you’re never going to rank highly in the search results – that’s a loss of valuable traffic and leads.
Modern responsive design doesn’t just shrink your website to fit smaller screens; it takes into account unique mobile device browsing habits. That means intuitive fingertip navigation, images that load fast and text that appears big enough to read but not so large as to overwhelm the screen.Â
If your site thinks mobile phones are still the size of a briefcase and only good for calling, it’s time to bring it up to speed.
Like all things internet, content ages – and fast. It might be that you followed a listicle trend that, in a modern light, looks a bit too ‘click-bait-y’. Or you were writing in a robotic voice geared to SEO, which nowadays doesn’t matter so much for ranking and doesn’t sit well with customers. Your content could just be plain out of date, offering obsolete solutions.
Content needs refreshing regularly. That means addressing your customers’ desires and concerns as they stand now. It also means speaking in a voice that follows current trends. For instance, the current customer tends to value transparency and trust, so copy that is overly ‘sales-y’ will likely be off-putting.
Needless to say, your content must be well-crafted, grammatically correct and display images of more than a few pixels that happened to find themselves together.
SEO is essential for online visibility, but it has also changed a lot over the past few years. If your website hasn’t been optimised recently, it might be lagging behind competitors who’ve kept up with Google’s updates.
Google is constantly improving how it views content. For example, whereas once keyword stuffing was a viable SEO tactic, now it’s more likely to cost you rankings. Video, imagery and brand mentions are also increasingly important, and factors such as load times, internal linking and metadata are constant fixtures in SEO.
It might be a case of simple optimisation and a general tidy-up, but if you’re sensing your website needs an overhaul anyway, some restructuring and rewriting might help.
Word of warning. Making significant changes to your website can weaken search rankings if not done correctly. For instance, it’s important to preserve URLs and redirect as necessary. If you or your web designer is unsure, consult an SEO specialist.
You log into your site’s content management system (CMS) and everything grinds to a halt, or a dozen pop-ups appear asking you to update numerous plug-ins and address critical errors. And when you get past all that, the interface is confusing and unwieldy. When you change a line of text, the whole web page shifts and slides. It all seems too much of a hassle, so you log out, promising to post that blog another day.
Web technology has come a long way in recent years, and updating doesn’t have to be so tiresome. Platforms like WordPress now have intuitive block editors, while Webflow and Squarespace let you make visual changes without touching a single line of code.Â
If you find yourself postponing even minor edits because it’s too much trouble, that’s a clear sign your infrastructure needs attention. Your CMS should be there to help, not intimidate or frustrate you.
You might be surprised that with a new backend, you’ll actually want to update your site, breathing new life into your business and brand.
If you recognised even one of these signs, maybe it’s time to take a good look at your site. Ask yourself: Does it still reflect who you are now? Does it make visitors feel confident in your business and comfortable to pick up the phone?
If not, a little renovation might be precisely what it needs.
Running a business can feel like spinning plates. Accounts, marketing, recruiting, inventory, prospecting – the to-do list goes on and on (and on…). And then on top of it all, another problem lands in your lap; a one-star rating on your Google Business Profile.
You’ve invested time and money into your website, and you’ve dabbled in SEO. The homepage looks good and appears to be ranking okay for the right keywords. But you still have a nagging concern: Is the website generating enough leads?
It’s 9 am on a Tuesday. You’ve barely touched your morning coffee, and already your inbox has three new messages….
At times, a Google Business Profile (GBP) can feel like a website in its own right. It appears when someone searches your business, it displays your hours, phone number, directions, reviews and photos.
Between managing your fleet, sorting permits, handling logistics and juggling customer service, marketing can easily slip to the bottom of a skip hire company’s to-do list.
Changing agency wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. Really, it wasn’t. But your incumbents have decided to drag their feet because – well, just because, and it’s all turned into a bit of a nightmare.
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