Four reasons you might want to look into a website revamp

Even if you already have a website, the work of maintaining and optimizing it is never done. Your business changes, your audience changes, the market as a whole changes...nothing ever stays still. Sometimes with all of the changes that happen at such a rapid pace, your website falls further and further away from being the shining, polished property that you once were so proud of.

Revamping a website is a common practice and one that usually happens several times over the lifecycle of a business, with complete redesigns happening as often as every 2-3 years. Completely revamping a website sometimes isn’t necessary, but once it is, can have huge short term rewards and sets a business up for a successful next several years or gets it ready to launch to new heights. In this article, we’ll lay out four common reasons that your business should consider a complete website revamp.

Reason #1: Your website traffic has started plateauing or declining

When you first launched your website, you may have seen website traffic and conversions that inched higher for a period of time. Then, over the next several years, traffic, conversions, and paying customers seemed to plateau or even decline. This is a great indication that your website needs a revamp. With changes in the algorithms of search engines, the changes in how your audience is searching and buying, or the market moving in a different way might not be well represented on your site. When you’ve been looking at the same website for so long, it’s difficult to see how these little changes add up over time.

Revamping your website if you’re seeing traffic and conversion stall or fall is a great way to start fresh and re-evaluate the path that your visitors follow to get to your site, indicate interest, and purchase your products or services. It also allows you to go back to the drawing board to make sure you’re describing your business value in the best way knowing what you know about the successful customers you have. These things are often difficult to do without engaging a true redesign of your site and now might be the perfect time to do it.

Pro tip: If you’re going to revamp your website because of stalled performance, read our previous blog post on how to use customer stories and testimonials, as well as other effective content types, to add high-value content to your new site!

Reason #2: You are thinking about an entire brand revamp

Revamping an entire brand is a major undertaking for a business. It gives a business an opportunity to completely redefine how they describe themselves, their products and services, and their business value to a market. An entire brand revamp is a great idea for businesses that are in a certain lifecycle stage or need a boost to take them to the next level. A total brand revamp usually includes hundreds of items on a project plan - one of the most important ones being their website.

Your newly branded business is going to need one property where people can go to learn more information about your brand change, what value your business has now, and why you’re the best in the business at what you do. That property is going to be your website. You want your website to reflect your entire new brand perfectly and be the best representation possible of why you decided to revamp your brand. It is the central most important market-facing piece of a brand revamp and you want it to be flawless.

Reason #3: Your business has hit a milestone of success

In one of our previous blog posts, we discussed the different options for building a website, one of them being using a free website service. That option is definitely one that is commonly chosen by new businesses that have cash flow concerns, and rightly so. However, it’s quite common to achieve business success with a website built off of a free service and when that happens, your website usually starts to drop down the priority list because of all of the time it takes to keep running a successful organization.

When your business has become successful enough to have hit a particular milestone, whether it be a number of customers, revenue figure, or other achievement, it is a great time to start looking into taking your website from a free service with common templates to a custom, personalized, and unique website that truly reflects what your business value is. You can start the next stage of your business evolution with a property that you will be proud of and your prospects and customers will love, showing the world that your business is a story of success.

Pro tip: If you’re revamping your website for this reason, look into a service like Moby’s that can not only revamp your website, but also manage things like hosting, maintenance, etc. for one low price, giving you more time to focus on the growth of your core business.

Reason #4: Your website goes down often or has technical issues

If your website has issues with being inaccessible due to technical issues, or has problems loading or being generally usable, it may be time to look into a complete revamp, complete with the underlying service the site is built on. It’s common (especially for DIY website services) to have handfuls of plug-ins, bolt-ons, and add-on services that make your website less like a well-oiled machine and more like a Frankenstein of technical components. Or, the service your site is built on could be just plain old and outdated. Whatever the reason, these technical problems your website has can hinder your SEO strategy, drive visitors away if they access your site, and overall, be disastrous for your business growth.

Rather than take the time to troubleshoot what all of the technical issues with your site could be (which can take many, many hours) and try to tear down and rebuild small parts of your site until you get it just right, the easier and more cost effective option could be a complete website revamp. A revamp will ensure that your site is built on the newest technology, with the latest tools and features, to keep your site accessible and running smoothly without any attention from you. It will save you time and money in the long run as well as give you a great opportunity to re-evaluate hugely important things like content, imagery, general branding, and more.

A website revamp is not always required for businesses that might be experiencing any of the situations described above, but it is always a good idea to explore the idea to see if it has benefits over trying to fix things ad-hoc. If you do find yourself in one of these situations and would like to explore the benefits of completely revamping your website, reach out to the experts at Moby and one of our consultants will explore a website revamp that will help alleviate any of the issues you’re experiencing and set your business up for success.