Your Website Sucks! Five Signs That Your Business Needs A New Website In 2022
First impressions are everything. A website that takes forever to load doesn’t reflect your brand or isn’t optimized to show up in Google searches can be detrimental to growing your business. Not to mention it provides a poor experience for customers and employees.
You see your website every day, so it can be difficult to determine if it’s underperforming. Whether you’re updating or redesigning an existing website or developing a new site from scratch, use these exercises to evaluate key areas of your site to see if need an update:
- Slow Performance
- Can’t Access
- Non-Responsive Design
- Out-Dated Branding
- Don’t Rank on Google
1. Slow Performance: Web pages take over 3+ seconds to load
Slow load times mean unhappy users. 32% of visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, with 90% leaving after 5 seconds. Lagging sites can be caused by many reasons that can include:
- Outdated WordPress technology
- Outdated website theme
- Having too many plug-ins installed that are not vetted,
- A poor-quality web host
- Images and videos not optimized for the web
- Failure to enhance code post-launch for caching and other tasks
2. Can’t Access: You don’t have any access to the backend of the website to make changes
Do you want to update content on your site but can’t get in? Has your website developer gone missing abroad? Here are a few more reasons why might be locked out of your website:
- Locked out of WordPress due to a lost username and passwords
- Locked out of the admin section or backend of the website
- Don’t own your web domain name and/or hosting
- Website hijacked by a vendor
- The developer won’t contact you back or takes weeks to respond
- Website hacked by a third party
- Can’t load a backup of the website or locate the files
3. Non-Responsive Design: Not website is designed for mobile and tablet browsing
Does your website look bad and hard to read on mobile phones? 68% of visitors globally use mobile phones to access websites and a whopping 98% of Gen Z’ers use a smartphone, making it critical that your site is optimized for mobile users. Here are a few signs that it isn’t:
- Your site is not responsive in design with the ability to show and hide sections
- Content not loading correctly on different operating systems like Apple IOS, Google Android
- The site is not optimized for top web browsers (Chrome is the most used browser, with most smartphone visitors using Safari)
- Confusing website navigation with too many items or not enough
- Missing contact information from the website header and footer
- No clear call to action or quote button
4. Out-Dated Branding: Lack of custom content for your products and services
What is your website saying to potential customers and employees? Has it been more than two years since you last updated the content on your site, or worse, are you using stock photography? As your company’s products and service offerings evolve to meet customers’ needs, updating your website is critical to communicating and promoting these changes. Here are a few areas to review:
- It more than two years since you lasted updated the website
- Lack of custom content like photos and videos that represent your company. Video can increase landing page conversion by up to 85% and 90% of customers say product video helps them make buying decisions (Forbes).
- Using old content or stock photography
- Your site doesn’t reflect your branding elements
- Updates to product/service offerings reflect the changing times.
- A new target audience or customer persona focuses on landing pages
5. Don’t Rank on Google: Your site doesn’t rank for key search terms about your business
Is your website not ranking well on online search engines like Google for keywords surrounding your products and services? On average, 64% of consumers learn about local companies through an online search. Think about the last time you looked for a new product or service. Often, a website is missing critical metadata information and setups with search engines that can prohibit the site from being found online. Here are a few areas to review:
- Missing metadata title and description
- Missing ALT description on images
- Missing keywords from the body copy
- Not using heading tags H1, H2
- No use of HTTPS SSL certificate
- No backlinks or internal links
- Not set up of Google My Business
- Lack of online reviews
- Not set up Google/Bing Analytics to track performance
Get A Free Website Performance Audit Today!
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Contact us today for a free website performance and SEO audit.