How do you know if you need a new website?

How can you tell if you need a website redesign? For most businesses and nonprofits, we often think that if our website is still functioning well, then it doesn’t need an update. The problem with this line of thinking is that as design trends change and new technologies become available, your website can become outdated. It’s important to keep things up-to-date and make sure your website meets changing requirements.

The general rule of thumb is to do a redesign every 2-5 years to stay modern. I personally believe that 3-5 years is a bit more realistic in most cases.

Let’s take a look at five reasons you may want to redesign your website.

It will load quicker

As web design trends change, web designers are constantly improving their techniques to load faster. You may have a website that’s not built with the most modern technology and therefore takes some time to load even on high-speed internet connections. In general, sites tend to slow down over time, which leads to a bad user experience and a bad impression. It also hurts your rankings in search engines.

With 2021’s Core Web Vitals update from Google, loading time is more important than ever before. Fortunately, that means that many agencies are now better at creating websites that load quickly.

It will be more mobile-friendly

Mobile website traffic has been growing exponentially and is now a significant percentage of most website visits, sometimes even eclipsing traffic from computers. This means that if your website isn’t mobile-friendly it won’t be seen by as many people. In fact, Google began using mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in 2015 to help improve the user experience for searchers on their smartphones.

I’ve found that when a website is updated to be more mobile-friendly, the mobile traffic often increases and those visitors tend to spend more time on the website. So the mobile usage will increase after a redesign.

Design trends and expectations change

Design trends change over time, and those changes also shape the expectations of the visitors to your website.  It’s important to keep up with these changes and not have a website that looks like it’s from the early 2000s.

One of the best ways to stay on top of design trends is to look at other websites in your industry or field and see what they’re doing. It’s likely yours will not be the most out of date, but there’s also a good chance that many of them will look more modern than yours.

Your needs and priorities change

Over time, you might use your website for different things. For example, new features become available that would be useful to your organization, but your current website doesn’t support them. Or over time the goals of your organization likely change and you need to market yourself differently than you were before.

Redesigning your website gives you a good opportunity to re-align both the design and content with those changing needs and priorities.

Your website will eventually break

Finally, websites eventually break. Even if you’re not noticing any problems with how your current website is functioning now, there’s no guarantee that things won’t break in the future. Often your web team may be able to fix whatever breaks, but eventually, your website will break in such a way that it’s not recoverable.

If any of those sound like compelling reasons to you and the situation your organization is in, it’s time to think about updating your website. If the idea of creating a new website sounds overwhelming or if you need help with web design and content creation, reach out to a professional for help. Of course, my team and I would be happy to talk and see if we’re a good fit for you and your organization.