A website is a digital storefront for your business. It helps people know who you are, what you do, and it even allows people to buy your products or services. Websites are major revenue generators and for a lot of companies, the sole window for their business.
That being the case, website designs, and technology that powers them, have grown leaps and bounds. Websites have to be fast, intuitive and must provide exactly what the customer is looking for.
So, it stands to reason that website experience is of huge importance to companies. If you’re a business owner who has had a website for a long time, chances are, it needs a shot of freshness. In fact, there are several indicators that point to whether you need to revamp your website.
Indications that you need to revamp your website
1. Speed and overall performance
A page load speed of 2 seconds is recommended by Google – it is considered as a limit for eCommerce websites specifically. If your website is slower than that it’s probably an indication of a few underlying issues that need to be fixed.
Chances are, your hosting plan isn’t capable of supporting the traffic you’re getting, or your website is too content-heavy for the plan. Whatever the reason, it’s time to revamp your website.
2. Low rate of conversions
A conversion is when a customer visits your website and actually buys something. If you’re able to get people to your website, but they aren’t really buying things, you may need to update your website a bit.
There could be several reasons for this, such as price, marketing content, bad website design, complicated checkout process, slow website — anything, really. You’re going to have to update your website.
3. Your website is just old
An old website isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For starters, you’ve gained people’s trust if your website has been up for a long time. Additionally, it also means that the content that you have on your website is good.
But websites change fast. And people don’t really like to shop from websites that look as if they were designed a long time back. There have been several important developments in website design and technology. So, you just need to inject a bit of modernity into your website, and it’s good to go.
Guidelines to revamp your website
1. Use analytics
User analytics and customer behaviour analysis is crucial for websites these days. You need to know exactly what your customer is looking at and where you’re making or breaking the deal. There are a lot of analytics tools that can help you with this. Google Analytics is the first and most important tool.
Google analytics basically tells you how good your pages are doing. You can know the best and the worst pages – based on performance – on your site. You can also know which pages have high bounce rates and which ones have the best conversion rates. Finally, it also informs you about how people are finding out about you.
The next thing that you can do is to invest in a good ‘heatmap’ tool. These tools take analytics to the next level. They tell you exactly what the customer was and wasn’t looking at. Finally, they also inform you of how the audience behaved.
2. Improve the site SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a huge part of how you drive traffic to your website. It allows your website to be listed high on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. There are several things that you can do to better your SEO, such as optimising your site content, creating better URLs, building better backlinks and so on. A website revamp offers the perfect opportunity to do that.
3. Conduct a detailed content audit
While you’re redesigning your website, it also helps to analyse and understand what should and shouldn’t be on it. As you analyse which pages are doing well and which aren’t, you’ll know the type of content that works with your audience. This means that you can double down on the well-performing content and ditch the bad-performing ones.
4. Don’t change everything
If your website has been up for a long time, chances are, there’s already a pool of people who like what you’re doing. So, there are good things about the website. Also, changing everything isn’t technically necessary. There are some things that are the same today as they were ten years ago.
The fundamentals of what makes a website good haven’t changed. It’s only the minor technicalities that you’re trying to change. However, there are cases when you need to make some fundamental changes. If your website is quite slow, chances are, there are multiple things that need rectifying. In those cases, you need to change a few fundamentals. Other than that, few vital modifications will do the job.
5. Consider changing your web host
If your website is really slow and crashes often, it’s best to simply move to a better web hosting provider. A modern web hosting provider, coupled with a good hosting plan, should end a lot of troubles with website speed and uptime.
Migrating to a better web hosting provider
If it’s the technical problems that have prompted you to revamp your website, it just makes better sense to move to a more reliable web hosting company. We, at HostGator, offer complete assistance for migrating your website from other hosting providers to us. Our 24×7 dedicated tech support will help you with this transition and will accommodate your needs. You can check out our Shared Hosting plans that come pre-bundled with the Softaculous app installer. Get access to 400+ web applications, including CMS applications like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal, etc. The free cPanel control panel enables you to create a website seamlessly and manage it efficiently.
Conclusion
A good website revamp should be a balance between the old and the new. Maintaining brand consistency is important when you’re redesigning your website because people buy from places they recognise, know, and have good knowledge about.
A website revamp needs to be carefully planned and executed. You need to keep your audience, your content, your customers, and your brand image in mind as you make changes to your website. If done right, a revamp can bring more visitors, increase your conversion rates, and help you scale up your business significantly.
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