How Often Should You Redesign Your Website

Most of us know of people who never say anything new and always wear the same clothes. They come across as unengaging and seem almost invisible at social events. Likewise, websites that never update their content basically have nothing new to say. Websites that haven't had a design makeover in years are essentially wearing the same old, tired-looking "clothes." Just as dull people generally fare poorly in sales positions, so too do dull websites perform badly at turning visitors into customers. As a business owner, this should raise some red flags.

Engagement

Visitor engagement is the key to converting your traffic into customers. This means that visitors are actually engaging and utilizing your site, rather than simply skimming over it. Engagement causes some people to make quick purchasing decisions. Others require repeated exposure to your website before converting. A large percentage of your traffic fall into this second category. If your site fails to engage and doesn't change, these people simply have no reason to make a return visit.

What kind of change is necessary for this? First, you should update your website's content on a regular basis. Things probably change often within your business such as new products and services, price changes, and special offers. Update your website content to reflect this. If you have an active marketing team, their campaigns should be a source of a lot of your content updates. Make useful information available to your visitors so that they have a reason to be there and to come back again.

Content

Finding things to write about amounts to paying attention to what's going on in your business. You can even take your content production one step further by blogging about industry news or about your customer's concerns. If your content updates are keeping pace with the changes in your business or market, then there's no danger of your website content becoming stale. Search engines also pay attention to how often you are updating your content, and looking at the wording of the content to determine where your website falls within the search engine rankings. For more info on this, read up on the basics of SEO here.

Your website's design should also change. Of course, it won't have to change with the same frequency as your content, but you should be aware of what a good, effective website looks like at any point in time and try to judge your own site based off of your expectations of other sites. How often you should redesign your website will depend on your business and market, with tech related businesses needing to stay at the cutting edge of design. A website design that hasn't changed in two or three years is "pushing it" for most businesses. A website is more than its content however, and it should have visual appeal. Even websites with appealing designs must eventually change them however, because they lose their impact after repeated visitor exposure.

If your website's content or design isn't current, it's doing little for your business and may even cause harm. If you don't have the time, inclination, or skills to keep your website relevant and engaging, we at REM Web Solutions can help. Contact us to learn more.