You may be proud of the fact that your website is an ancient artifact, perhaps dating all the way back to the 1990s, but, quaint as that may be, that “retro” site will be doing your business more harm than good.
The digital world of today is so vastly different to that of 20 – even 10 – years ago. Old, outdated websites look visually messy and cluttered. More importantly they don’t fit all the technical criteria to be noticed by the search engines, fall down on secure browsing, and lack responsiveness for displaying on all modern devices.
In fact, an old website falls short in just about all the things that make it useful for generating leads for your business. “Old” can be defined as any website that hasn’t been updated or re-designed (technically, aesthetically or content-wise) for at least five years. Ideally websites need a makeover every two to three years.
Signs Your Website Needs a Facelift
Outward indicators that your website needs a refresh will be things like declining visitor numbers, reduced engagement, and a dip in previously healthy conversion rates. In other words your website has stopped working for you, because the search engines have left it behind.
It’s time to make an honest appraisal of your small business website, and if you can tick off any of these problems it’s time to take action:
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Design & Navigation:
A cluttered layout with too many menu options and poorly labelled links won’t be doing any favours for your confused site visitors, who will not have a good user experience and find it difficult to navigate. Modern website design prioritises clean lines and clarity. -
Device Responsiveness:
Most people nowadays access websites via their smartphones. If your website isn’t designed to be mobile-friendly (and of course still display effectively on tablets and desktops) you’ll be losing potential customers. -
Load speed:
The pace of life today is fast-moving, and we expect our technology to keep up. If your old plodding website is taking its time to load pages, users will probably run out of patience and move away. There’s also the fact that Google penalises slow websites when it comes to search result rankings. -
Calls to Action (CTAs):
If your website is lacking in clear, recognisable, prominent and engaging call to action prompts (like “buy now”, “make an enquiry”, “contact us”) you’ll be losing conversions. By the same token, you can overdo the number of CTAs on a page, which can be distracting and confusing for users. -
Content issues:
One of the biggest turn-offs for a website is dated, stale content that has obviously been languishing unloved and unrefreshed for years. Other no-no’s when it comes to content is poor quality spelling, grammar, incorrect information and duplicate content. Broken or irrelevant links in content are a sign that the site is uncared for, and a lack of metadata is harmful in more ways than one.
While its important to have authoritative content on your website, it can be damaging if it is too heavy and difficult to understand, so keep it light and broken up into sections.
These points deal only with the problems you can see – your old website will also be having a negative effect on your business prospects because of technical issues that aren’t apparent from the “front end”, like poor security, outdated plugins and not being compatible with current web browsers.
The Advantages of Updating Your Old Website
We’ve already mentioned the fact that users can be put off by an obviously dated website and move on to fresher looking competitors, meaning you will be losing business prospects and sales.
Beyond the obvious benefit of increasing your website traffic and encouraging conversions, there are other good reasons for investing in a website revamp, such as:
- Add new functionalities to your website (forms, ecommerce etc)
- An opportunity to rebrand with a new look.
- Indicate that you are a professional, credible and trustworthy business.
- A chance to protect your website and obtain visitor data with SSL certificates and other security measures.
- Improve user experience, giving your customers and site visitors a good impression of your business.
- Stay ahead of your competition as far as your online presence goes.
- Make it easier for your customers to get in touch with you.
- Integrate your website with your social media audience through sharing opportunities.
- The chance to audit and update your website content and add a CMS which allows you to amend and refresh the content yourself regularly.
- Make your website technically amenable to the use of best SEO practices.
How to Refresh Your Tired Outmoded Website
Once you come to the realisation that your website has shortcomings, the next step is to ascertain just how much work it needs to bring it up to modern standards – and futureproof it as much as possible for the foreseeable future.
The best way to do that is to contact a professional digital agency like Dentons Digital, who specialise in small business websites and have plenty of experience to draw on – and share with you.
Depending on how old your site is and what the shortcomings are identified to be, it may well be possible to make some cosmetic improvements and technical upgrades to your existing site.
It’s just as likely though that you’ll decide to start again with a new, fresh website – affordable with a flexible payment schedule to fit your budget.
Whatever the case may be, the starting point is a free, no-obligation consultation with Dentons Digital.
