10 Signs your Website Needs a New Design
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10 minutes reading

Websites are not forever. Although it would have been convenient to build a website and leave it for eternity to drive traffic, convert leads, and bring profit, the sad truth is that a website needs constant maintenance. However, just like with cars, simple maintenance is not always enough. There comes a time when your website needs a major fix-up. One that you can’t just sweep under the rug or patch. This is when you must think of completely refurbishing your online home.
Your website plays a vital role in your business and brand. Even if purchases from your business are made offline, your website still represents your company. Consider it your online office—a place where customers can get more information, ask questions, and make decisions. Thus, having an outdated and poorly maintained website is like having a messy office surrounded by muddy streets and potholes and situated in a run-down building. It’s all about presentation.
So, having an up-to-date, fresh, and visually pleasing website is a must. It will help you drive your credibility, authority, and performance up. Indeed, the process of refurbishing your website every now and then is time- and resource-consuming. However, considering the importance of your website’s appearance, that’s not something you can delay forever, especially if one of these ten signs is already apparent.
Your website simply looks old
This is probably the most obvious red flag you should notice. If your website looks as if a toddler did it while messing around on their parent’s computer, you haven’t had it refurbished in quite a long time. It’s time for a new look, not only because looking old and fragile is not a great look for your brand, regardless of the product or service you offer. More importantly, your SEO, load time, and all relevant stats will suffer significantly. Not to mention that your customers will have doubts whether your website is still active and up-to-date.
This is definitely not the “retro” view you should be going for. Yes, nostalgia sales, but when it’s done with a modern touch. Simply staying in the past will only harm your chances.
Unlike offline fads, online trends change based on user behaviors. In other words, if your website is outdated, it will simply deter massive numbers of your target audience from considering your product or service as a solution to their problems. Adobe research showed that 38% of people stop engaging with a website if the layout or content is unattractive.
So, if your website feels and looks old, it’s time for refurbishing. Check out the latest trends and start planning what you want your new website to look like.
You are lagging behind your industry
Being unique is important both in the real world and on the internet. However, lagging behind your competitors is anything but unique. That’s simply giving up. Having a business requires constant monitoring of your competitors: what they do, how they perform, what they offer, what their advantages are, and most importantly, what their weaknesses are. Naturally, monitoring their website and its performance should be a top priority. After all, for an online business, the website is the touchpoint between the customer and the brand.
But surveilling alone won’t be enough. You need to analyze their UX, follow their performance, and see if you are not losing customers to them due to their new look and features.
This being said, not every change is a positive one. Some changes may tarnish the brand’s performance and reputation. Still, if the entire industry is following a particular direction and it’s evident that the target audience is intrigued, lagging behind will cost you customers and revenue. So, while being one or two steps behind your competition is not the end of the world if you notice you need to catch up in design, features, or UX, it’s best to follow the lead and change your website’s design.
Your bounce rate is too high
A high bounce rate is often associated with problems on your website. It usually indicates a problem with speed, usability, content, or responsiveness. Users don’t need much to close the tab on your website. Keep in mind that often, people have 10 to 12 open tabs when searching for a solution to their problem. Having one of them unresponsive, with confusing design or content, is quite enough for them to bail.
Now, there are several ways to combat this high bounce rate. We actually have a pretty detailed article on the topic, and we urge you to check it out.
Still, if the problem persists, chances are, your website needs refurbishing. Fixing your website’s usability, content order, and overall design requires a more substantial endeavor. However, leaving it as is will prove detrimental to your business.
Your conversion rate has plummeted
Your website design has a lot to do with your conversion rate. No matter how good your advertisement and on-site content are, converting a user into a customer also requires visual persuasion. Nothing can create a customer journey quite like a website’s design, visual hierarchy, and colors. All these aspects make high conversion rates possible.
Just like customer preferences and behavior change over time, so do the requirements for a successful website design. Naturally, you need to be on top of the trends. Don’t allow your overall conversion rate to plummet. Of course, some deviations are quite normal. If you have been in business for some years, you know how the months and seasons affect your conversions. Even so, if there is a slight conversion rate decrease, there is no reason to panic.
However, if the numbers consistently fail to reach the baseline, it’s time to take action. Assess your current customer journey and find out what’s causing this conversion rate to decrease. What aspects of your website can you improve, and what content is outdated?
Just starting refurbishing without doing your homework first is a recipe for disaster. Find out what aspects of your website need an update and how to please your customers. Creating a customer journey map is an excellent way to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and get some first-hand data.
The navigation is a labyrinth
Navigation is among the most critical aspects of your website. Having a labyrinth-like navigation will decrease your overall performance. Your conversion rates will plummet, and your bounce rate will skyrocket. Moreover, your website’s usability will suffer, causing penalization from Google and other search engines.
Modern website navigation rarely has this problem. Current trends require a minimalistic approach. In other words, having a 20-page spreadsheet of menu options is unacceptable.
You need to categorize your content to suit your customers’ needs. As we already explained, however, customers’ needs are often fluid and change over time. Now, not all navigation changes require a total website refurbishment. However, once these changes become significant, you might want to start all over. Otherwise, you risk leaving something out of touch or, worse, sanding your customers to a 404 page. These types of sloppy mistakes will ruin your credibility, authority, and customer loyalty.
Your content is out of date
Speaking of bad navigation, the only worse thing than it is out-of-date content. This will ruin all your SEO efforts, and even content that was once at the top of Google’s SERP will eventually go into oblivion. This is natural, as people seek current information. For example, if you’ve used statistics from 2010, they are hardly relevant today. Can you imagine using statistical data for internet mobile use from the year 2000? A quarter of a century has passed since then.
So, having outdated content is a clear sign that you need some website work. However, with content changes, there are usually some graphics and images that need changing, too. This can mess up your overall layout, especially if your design is based on your content length and width.
Moreover, if your content needs to be updated, chances are your overall design needs to catch up to current trends. More importantly, it fails to meet user’s requirements and needs.
So, if your core content needs to be updated, your homepage is ancient, and your landing pages focus on no longer relevant features, consider refurbishing your entire webpage. Bringing a fresh new look with brand new content to your website will boost not only your SEO score but also your overall performance.
You have gone through rebranding
Almost all points in this list start with how certain aspects of your business change over time. That’s not coincidental. Your brand as a whole is fluid and must follow the shape and form of the market it serves. Thus, brand changes are inevitable. Your brand may take on a new path, introduce a new value system, or even change its look. There are countless examples across all industries. Rebranding is part of business growth. Resisting it will only harm your business goals.
This is true for small businesses as well. However, many inexperienced small-time business owners somehow forget that rebranding is not only changing a few words. Rebranding means the creation of a whole new brand persona, new voice, new values, new everything. Naturally, this means your website’s design should change as well.
A brand’s website reflects its persona, voice, and values. It represents the brand through colors, structure, and content. So, transforming your brand also requires changing your website.
Often, small-time brands forget to allocate the needed budget for this change, resulting in swapping the brand’s logo and nothing else. However, this inevitably leads to poorer performance, as the messages throughout the brand’s channels won’t be synced. The voice of your website won’t respond to the new company outlook. This will inevitably cause a loss of trust and credibility.
So, whenever it’s time to rebrand your company, make sure to allocate enough resources to refurbish your website as well. It needs to correspond to your new outlook.
Your business is growing
Your business doesn’t need to suffer for you to change your website’s look. In fact, if things are going great, that’s also a great reason to change your overall design.
Whenever we start a business, we have one goal – to grow and expand. A proper business plan will help you plan this best-case scenario. However, whenever your brand is growing, so should your website. For example, if you start offering new services or products, you must include them. Depending on how your website was built, this may be impossible to do with a quick fix. In other words, if your website was constructed like a freelance website, it can’t accommodate all the company’s needs. Growing your website’s content will always require a new design.
Moreover, new functionalities will also become inevitable with the growing demand for your time. For example, adding a new scheduled meeting calendar will give your audience instant feedback when they can arrange a meeting. This will save them time, thus making your website much more convenient to use. However, you can’t just put this feature anywhere. You need to plan your website’s customer journey anew.
So, while your business growth is excellent news, it requires some extra effort, especially for refurbishing your website.
There are one too many small changes
Now, when we are talking about completely building a new website, we refer to massive mandatory changes to keep your customers and expand your audience. However, most of the time, these can be achieved by small fixes along the way. For example, if your product is already on the market, and you’ve noticed people being excited about a particular feature, you might change your content to focus on that feature.
Or, if your content is outdated, you can always update it by changing a few statistics and words.
However, over time, these small changes start to pile. Just like a shirt that has been patched 100 times is no longer presentable, your website will also have the same problem. It will look worn out, overused, and overfixed. Moreover, some problems may occur due to coding errors, created by constantly changing aspects of the website.
So, when these problems become too many, it’s better to scratch everything and start anew. Though this may sound time-consuming, at a certain point, it becomes far easier than finding all related issues following a small fix. Thus, don’t hesitate to simply build a new design, incorporating all the previous changes, without the negative effect of the patching.
You’re website is loading too slowly
Now, this is one serious issue that definitely requires your full attention. Slow loading speeds can desolate your entire business in a matter of days. Statistics have shown that 53% of users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. This means effectively losing half of your potential customers over slow speed. Moreover, each second of delay causes an additional 5% drop in your conversion rate. It’s obvious that your website’s availability at a moment’s notice is detrimental.
Unfortunately, old websites often have messy codes, especially those that have switched between many features before finding what works for them. User browsers take longer to read this messy code, resulting in longer loading time, customers losing patience, and a massive decrease in your conversion rates.
So, if your website’s loading speed is abysmal, refurbishing your website is mandatory. Moreover, it’s a wise idea to consider switching your hosting provider to cloud-based hosting. HostArmada, for example, offers cloud-based hosting solutions that guarantee lightning-fast top speed, top-of-the-line security features, and 99.9% uptime. Joining HostArmada will give you an edge in building your new design. We will even transfer your website as it is for free if you don’t want to start entirely from scratch. Check out our plans and choose the one that will fit your needs perfectly.
Conclusion
Changing your website design is more than just a vanity project. It’s a meticulously planned project that requires precision and planning. More importantly, its goal is not just to feel fresher and prettier but rather to fix problems, introduce new features without causing issues, and retain and expand your outreach and customer base.
So, if you have noticed one or more of these signs, it’s time to start planning. Take a look at the current trends, research your competitors, and consider HostArmada as your hosting provider. This will give you the edge you’ve been looking for.