You may have built your website using the latest techniques in web development and designing. Unfortunately, this fast-paced world can turn so fast and leave you in the dust if you’re not ready to keep grinding the gears. There isn’t a rule of thumb that you can follow to the core to make a schedule to know when correctly you should upgrade your website.
Your website revamp or rebuild depends entirely on the business model you’ve built and imagined.
I recommend that you take into consideration your business goals, objectives, website functionality, and other economic factors when you’re planning an upgrade. It’s quite easy to know that your website needs a rebuild if it’s older than a decade.
The visible indicators are relatively clear, but when you want to be the best, you’ll have to read between the lines.
Deciding whether your website needs a complete revamp or a simple upgrade is quite essential. You don’t have to waste thousands of dollars every few months.
Take stock and only consider an upgrade when you start noticing that your website is inadequate for its intended purpose. Note when it isn’t promoting the outcome you have in mind.
Upgrading your website can simply mean keeping up-to-date with consistent content updates, and new features slowly added after a bit of experimentation.
You want to be able to see your website from the eyes of a customer. You need to view it from the vantage point of a site visitor to truly understand what kind of a first impression your website is leaving on your audience.
We’ll be giving you some tips that should help know when and how often you should upgrade your website.
Outgrowing a website
Your website may have been perfect and updated consistently with content when you were a smaller business. When your business starts growing substantially – and does so in a relatively short period – the sudden rise in traffic can negatively affect your website.
This is especially true if you are on a shared server which can only handle a moderate amount of traffic.
If there is one downside to your business becoming more prominent, it’s having to rebuild it; you may need to re-host it as well. According to Mangomatter Media, search engines can assess millions of websites by a lot of parameters to rank them perfectly.
It’s also good for your site ranking in Google as newer and more modern websites are considered.
Redesigning the website
You don’t always have to rebuild your site to meet the market’s demands. Sometimes a simple redesign can turn things around for your business.
New branding usually comes with a new color palette, and that should be extended to your website, not to mention the new color standards. If the rate of people who visit your site and bounce off almost immediately is too high, the external design of the site is probably the culprit.
An intricate redesign can help make the website look more alive and modern so your customers wouldn’t feel that your business is still living in the past.
Mobile functionality
This is considered one of the most important features a website should have. Since most of the browsing done on the internet is done on mobiles, your site must be mobile optimised.
Unfortunately, this kind of fix requires a complete rebuild to accommodate the different operating systems of mobiles.
Many recommend not using flash in the design of the website as Apple devices do not support it. Not only that, but it actually slows down the site by quite a bit.
Integrating a content management system on your website should aid you with most of the minor updates you should need.
Ease of use
Older websites didn’t consider the user experience as a determinant factor in their designs. All a website needed back in the old day was some text with information about the business.
As people are spending much more time on the internet, it’s become essential for your website to provide a purpose for multiple purposes.
Your website needs an upgrade if:
- Finding information is difficult
- It’s hard to navigate
- It lacks online payment options
- It’s not accessible to all devices and,
- Not easily found through Google search.
Many of these features do not require a full-blown upgrade, but if you lack more than one, it’s recommended to consider a website rebuild.
Lead generation
If your website is made for making sales, it has to be able to use modern tools to collect visitors’ information to help you grow. Online forms and call to action buttons are all modern digital strategies that help you capture leads from your visitors.
This can help you grow as the traffic to your website increases by helping you understand bit-by-bit how your potential customers interact with your website.
If the website is too old to integrate the tools required to capture leads from your visitors it may be time for an upgrade.
New search engine algorithms
The way search engines look, and mine for information has drastically changed over the years. Your website may have been the top ranking for years, but after a few search engine algorithm updates, it may have fallen back in the results.
If your website is too old and not in harmony with the latest search algorithm, it will soon be buried under a pile of superior websites.
Make sure your website incorporates features like meta descriptions, title tags, balanced keywords, and other algorithm-related features to rank well.
The degree of the upgrade depends on the age of your website. You need to decide whether it will be a simple update or a full-on rebuilding.
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