Is Poor Web Design Hurting Your Conversions? 5 Reasons To Have A Website Re-design

Your conversion rate is not what it could be – and you know you need to do something about it. Top of the list should be your website. Is it converting visitors effectively?

An average life expectancy of a company website is 1-2 years. Which can seem very short but if you look at major brands in the UK they can redesign their website on a 6 month basis, depending on conversion rate goals. 

Getting potential buyers to your website can be a hard and costly task with PPC, SEO and Social Media promotion but all of this effort is wasted if your visitors get to your homepage and leave faster than a scolded cat.

As your business evolves and develops, your website will undergo regular content updates, but how do you know its time for a re-design? Read the sections below to find out if it’s time for a website re-design to improve your conversion rate.

Updating your website is impossible

Website CMS's (Content Management Systems) have changed dramatically in recent years, similar to the rise of smartphones, CMS are constantly evolving to make content changes to the website easier and quicker. CMS systems such as wordpress, Hubspot and Opencart ensure that you can easily update and change your website to meet the needs of your buyer persona's or target market.

Can you make changes to your website easily? Do you need a degree in website coding to make a simple image or text change? Then it’s defiantly time to look to re-design your website and update your CMS for the website. If you carry on with the poor system you are going to constantly struggle to attract new leads and keep current customers happy.

Eventually they will seek out your competition to do business with.

Bounce Rate High

It’s simple to understand that if your website visitor time is low then your conversion rate will be low too. If you have a high bounce rate then its time to act now. Simply put, if your bounce rate is high that means those potential customers are going to your competition and spending money with them!!!!

A high bounce rate on a website is usually a combination of factors:

• User experience is poor
• Poor design
• Not mobile responsive
• Never updated with fresh content

If your bounce rate is high then it is time for a re-design. If you want to help reduce your bounce rate here is a great article - 7 Steps To Reduce Bounce Rate And Get More From Your Marketing Budget

Poor experience, poor brand

There is nothing worse than finding a website with the exact products or service you were looking for, but looks unprofessional and untrustworthy. You will most likely leave and find another website. Not only does that website miss out on the sale, but also the brand image in your mind is poor and you wont return to the website.

Areas of concern:

• Poor Navigation
• Poor Images/Product Images
• Payment options/Gateway looks untrustworthy
• Broken links and pages

if any of the points mentioned above hit the mark with you, then it’s definitely time to look at a re-design of your company website.

Blink and you will miss it!

We live in an internet age where we ‘Google' things. We search for things online without knowing the exact website address we are looking for. With this, we come across websites we don’t necessarily want or need and quickly click onto the back button to move on. We make this decision in 3-5 seconds and sometimes even quicker than that.

What this has evoked is the need to attract the attention of the a potential customer quickly and ensure that they stay on the website to read your message.

The design of your website is vital as you only have 3-5 seconds to convince that person to stay.

So if you website fails a simple blink test, then its time to look at a re-design to increase your conversion rate. Learn more about how website load speed can impact your website - Can Website Load Speed Impact Customer Sales?

Websites on the move are vital

I can guarantee that you have heard this everywhere but it is vital, your website needs to be optimised for mobile devices. More and more of your buyers are looking at your website on mobile devices in the office, on the move and even at home whilst watching their favourite programme.

If your website isn’t mobile ready, you need a website re-build now! Fact

To ensure your website works correctly on mobile devices, you have two options. What is the best way to increase conversions on your website? Responsive design or adaptive design. If the information needs to remain the same across desktop, tablet or mobile, a responsive design will lead to the best conversion rate across mobile platforms, which means restructuring your existing content into a mobile friendly format.

If your target market/buyer persona's use mobile to perform different tasks or access different information, an adaptive design might be best suited to get the best conversions and brand strength. Ryanair, for example, use their desktop website to promote bookings and deals, whereas the mobile version is more focused around accessing flight information and boarding passes.

It's key to provide the best possible mobile experience, expecting your user to pinch and zoom on a mobile device isn’t going to get you high conversions from a mobile device. Find out if your website is mobile friendly today - Have You Done the Google Mobile-Friendly Test? 6 Steps to Becoming Mobile.

Conclusion

First things first, perform a full review of your website to better understand its failings. Use tools, such as Google Analytics, to have a better understanding of its failings and perform a simple blink test. If you can relate to any of these areas mentioned above, it’s time to consider a new website for the company. When approached in the right way, with conversion rate optimisation in the forefront of your design process, the increase in new leads and the nurturing of current clients will far out weigh the initial cost.

Plus, as mentioned previously, if you don't ensure your website meets the needs of your buyers then you can guarantee your competition will be getting ahead of you.

See how JDR could help you with your next website design - go to www.jdrgroup.co.uk or call 01332 343281