Should You Redesign Your Website? 5 Questions to Help Your Team Decide

It’s a common question—for good reason—but there are a few ways you can know if it’s time to redesign or update your website.

Your business website is a vital part of your sales and marketing strategy. About 60% of B2B buyers research two to three sites before purchasing. For B2C, 59% of shoppers do Google research before in-store or online purchases.

So, how do we ensure we’re putting our best foot forward to potential customers? The approach we use is to think strategically about the goals and regularly check those against the results. Whether you are concerned about converting visitors into customers or building brand awareness ahead of a product launch, there are basics to understanding when you’re overdue for a website redesign.

Should We Redesign Our Business Website?

We’ll review these elements to know for sure if your website needs a makeover:

1. Site content
2. Brand and Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
3. Marketing goals or strategies
4. Site traffic and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
5. Mobile viewing responsiveness

So here we go! Let’s dive into five questions to help in deciding whether to redesign your website.

1. Is Your Content Accurate and Driving Sales?

First, before anything else, review your content and make sure every piece is thoroughly relevant. Does your company still offer the same solutions to customers, or have you launched new products or services since you wrote up the current site? Above all, your site should be an accurate representation of what you offer.

Next, think about your bigger pieces of content (blog posts, white papers, case studies, even videos or podcasts you’ve created and included on your website). Content marketing is the process of creating helpful, educational, or exciting content and promoting it to your target audience. B2B content marketing gets lots of traction, with studies reporting that B2B buyers read an average of 13 pieces of content before making a buying decision.

What qualifies as content marketing? Pretty much anything that you create to drive traffic, find leads, and generate sales:

• Blog posts
• Free tools or templates
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Case studies
• Infographics
• Newsletters

Your website should be your best and hardest working salesperson on the team, so you want it to evolve with your company as it grows. With time and experience come knowledge about your ideal customers and how to reach them.

• Have you identified specific customer personas that really dig your business? Use that!
• Are you now thought leaders who can offer blog posts as industry insiders? Write it!
• Do you want to increase signups for your new, fresh newsletter? Push it!

If your website content isn’t taking advantage of content marketing, or it’s out of date in any way, it is definitely time for a website redesign. You don’t need an in-house content creation team for stellar content either; we can help brainstorm, plan, and produce website content to get the attention you want.

Related: Creating A Website That Works Harder For Your Business

2. Does Your Site Represent Your Business’s Brand And Emphasize Your USPs?

Many companies go through developments in business branding, whether they are tiny tweaks or total overhauls. Obviously, a whole new look would require a matching website redesign. However, even small changes to your brand made over time can mean your website no longer fits what visitors might expect…and make them bounce right away from your site. Ouch.

When people think of business branding, they often think of logos and color palettes. Yes, absolutely make sure those all align—but don’t stop there. As your business has grown and gained success, your brand voice and messaging have developed alongside it. While you may have played it safe in the beginning, your brand has the experience and recognition now to shine. You may be using bolder language, or you have landed on specific keywords that zero in on your target audience.

You need to emphasize what you do uniquely well and your customers care about most—those are your Unique Sales Propositions or USPs. Developing messaging to concisely convey your these will go a long way in getting customers to engage on your website.

When you realize your other marketing (social media presence, newsletter, or other content) doesn’t jive with your website, that is a big sign with “Update This Site Now” blinking in neon. For a visitor to truly trust your business, they need to see the same voice, core brand values, and visual brand elements used consistently across your messaging. Otherwise, your business could look unprofessional or even untrustworthy.

Below are some before and after screenshots of a website mintr updated to better align with their brand. Continuum wanted a more modern look that would stand out against their competition and emphasize their dedication to their clients’ patients.

Bold colors grab attention while strong headers clarify who they are as a business. Their company values come through loud and clear, amplifying their brand and what makes them unique. Lots of statistics back up their claims, giving visitors the data they need to make the decision to move forward. Action-based CTAs on buttons encourage visitors to stay on the path, leading them to the pages we want them to engage with, such as the contact page (see that customer journey?).

Related: Build A Better Brand Strategy

3. Have Your Marketing Goals or Strategies Changed?

As your business grows, the company’s goals change along with it. Instead of brand recognition, spreading the word about your bigger, better, stronger business becomes a priority. You want a boost in site traffic, more efficient lead conversion, and a streamlined sales journey for clients. An updated website can certainly help you meet those goals, but it has to be designed for it.

What is a customer journey? A website’s customer journey (also sometimes called a sales funnel) is when and how customers interact with your business, helping you determine what information they need to follow through on your calls to action (CTAs). By developing a website to support that path, you can help visitors become customers and reach your conversion goals. You want to build the journey based on their needs. Ask yourself, how much do they know about our company? What information or data do they need to make a decision? Expect some customers to go rogue so you can guide them back to the path with your CTAs.

Think of the following as an outline for your website goal strategy:

• Ensure your goals are current
• Define your customer journey
• Develop content to support that journey
• Design and develop the website to put everything in place
• A/B test to confirm final decisions

If you need help defining your annual marketing goals or enhancing your website to reach those goals, connect with our founders, Leigh and Dallas (they love talking strategy).

4. How Much Relevant Traffic Are You Getting?

The amount of website traffic and its relevance to your business are supercritical for high conversion rates (you can’t make sales if no one is coming to your site or they are looking for something else). One consideration is bounce rate.

A high bounce rate—the percentage of people who leave your site without doing anything—could be a sign that you have a problem:

• Irrelevant content based on customer search criteria
• Low-quality or limited content
• Terrible page loading speed
• Lack of mobile friendliness

So what is a high bounce rate? An average bounce rate is typically between 41 and 55 percent, while an ideal bounce rate is in the 26 to 40 percent range.

If you have a high bounce rate or aren’t seeing the conversion you’d like, consider an audit of your site’s SEO. This can quickly determine what issues are bogging down your website so you can redesign exactly what you need to. With the help of a proper strategy developed by an SEO team and web developer, you can quickly and efficiently make the most effective adjustments.

You’ll want an audit that covers all the basics and offers actionable steps forward. Contact mintr for a free SEO website audit to see exactly what your site needs for a boost in SEO.

5. Is it Optimized For Mobile Viewing?

More people are doing real product research on their phones or tablets, and it is web design best practice to account for how potential clients can interact with your site on mobile devices. According to Google, about 50% of B2B queries are made on smartphones, and that number is predicted to rise as digital natives take over more buyer positions. This means you are missing out on a big chunk of potential customers when you overlook your site’s mobile responsiveness.

Additionally, mobile search engine optimization (SEO) influences your site’s Google search ranking; the search algorithm uses mobile responsiveness as one of many signals to determine your site’s place on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). When is the last time you looked past the first page of a Google search? That is exactly why you want to rank high on the SERP.

Unsure if your site is optimized for mobile devices? Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

• Copy and paste your url into the bar.
• Google will give you a list of usability errors, everything from clickable elements that are too close together to plugins that are incompatible with most mobile browsers.

Above everything else, you want to give visitors a top-notch mobile user experience (UX) so that they can quickly navigate to the information they want:

• Easily recognizable menus and navigation
• Keeping copy concise for a positive mobile experience
• Designing for mobile users’ goals
• Making touchscreen targets the right size
• Using common and intuitive gestures, such as swiping
• Keeping touchscreen targets in the “thumb zone” where most people can reach them

Bonus Q: Is It In The Budget?

Yes, a whole website redesign can be an investment in your business, but don’t sweat it if you don’t have that kind of capital to spare at the moment.

Even a simple website refresh can do wonders for your traffic, lead conversion, and business branding cohesion. Updating your services, results, and testimonials can keep it from feeling stale. Add a new blog post, then share it across social media. The almighty algorithm loves active and engaging sites, so these updates are excellent SEO value as well.

We’d love to help you on your journey, so feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat.

If you are looking for support to create bold marketing and drive real growth quickly, contact the mintr team for a free product marketing audit.