When you step back and take an honest look at your website, are you happy with what you see? Or are you disappointed in the out-of-date style and frustrated by the navigation?
While these are excellent reasons to consider a website refresh, there are other factors at play behind the scenes that are begging for an update. A refreshed website will not only provide a modern look and feel, but your users will thank you and the search engines will bless you with more traffic. But not every website refresh will reap the same rewards – you’ll need an experienced team with some serious development, design, and SEO chops to lead your project.
In this article, we’re diving into 5 key reasons why you should consider refreshing your website:
Get a Speed Boost
There’s nothing worse than browsing the internet in pursuit of something that interests you when you encounter a painfully slow website. While users generally had plenty of patience online a decade or two ago, today the expectations are for lightning speeds. In a 2022 study by Digital.com, more than half of participants expected pages to load in 3 seconds or less. Plus, about 20% reported slow pages as their top source of frustration online. And while this study was focused on e-commerce sites, we can presume similar urgencies, frustrations, and expectations from users just looking for information. People expect a page to load nearly immediately, and if it doesn’t, there’s a good chance they’ll give up on you entirely.
There are a number of factors that could be slowing your website down, but the most frequent offenders are super large images (over 500MB), inefficient code, poorly written themes, and total plug-in overload.
In 2024, page speed is a double-headed beast. Of course your users are concerned about websites loading quickly, but these days the search engines are giving priority treatment to websites with high speeds. Page speed is an important part of the SEO puzzle, which means a slow website is costing you mega traffic – and potentially mega dollars.
SEO Has Been Neglected
Search engine optimization is a complicated game that is always changing the rules. That’s why it’s risky to choose a website development company for your refresh without dedicated SEO experts overseeing the process. These skillful individuals will ensure all the boxes are ticked, giving your website the best opportunity to please Google and rank higher in the search engine results page.
Without the SEO experience, it can be difficult to know what exactly you need to focus on. There are a number of ways to optimize your website, but there are a handful of high-priority SEO items that can be addressed above others to not only move the needle but give you some quick wins.
That’s why our SEO team jumps at the chance to refresh a website. It gives us the opportunity to evaluate the current state of SEO and make any necessary changes to get your site performing as strongly as possible. From an SEO perspective, there’s plenty to do with any website refresh, including:
- Optimizing page titles and meta descriptions for better keywords
- Fixing broken links
- Creating powerful call-to-actions (and putting them in the right places)
- Resizing large images to a more manageable size
- Adding missing meta data and image alt text
- The list goes on!
Prioritize Mobile Users
In the early days of the internet, there was no such thing as a mobile user. Even when smartphones were welcomed into the world they were pretty much dismissed as a priority by web development. But today, in 2024, the mobile experience is one of the most vital pieces of SEO that Google and other search engines have their eye on.
Website visits from mobile users have been creeping up to desktop users for a while now, and in 2024 mobile is expected to grab 56% of internet traffic. For good reason, Google is placing a ton of value on these mobile users who have taken over to represent the majority of internet traffic. For Google, the world of ‘mobile-first’ is here, so you either get with the times or get left behind.
When web designers, developers, and SEO people talk about “mobile-first” or “prioritizing the mobile experience”, what they’re often referring to is a concept called ‘responsiveness’. Responsive web design is an approach that empowers your website to automatically adjust and adapt to the screen its currently being served on.
Beyond responsive design, prioritizing mobile users means a couple of things. First, it means making sacrifices with content – not everything that fits on your desktop size makes sense to present to mobile users. It also means ensuring mobile users have the info they need at the top of the screen. The idea is to reduce scrolling time and present people with a call-to-action when they first arrive on your website.
New Features & Integrations
By refreshing your website, you also have the opportunity to add valuable new tools, plug-ins, and integrations to your site. These add-ons have the ability to do almost anything you’d like, from performance to data collection to content management. Many of these plug-ins and integrations require additional code on your website along with design tweaks on the front-end. That’s why a website refresh is your chance to jump on new functionalities and features, such as:
- Enhanced security – ensure your company and client data is safe with the most up-to-date security plug-ins
- Social integrations – make it easy for users to interact with your social channels and follow along
- Payment systems – if your website wants to sell goods and services online, you can add advanced payment systems to your site
- Better forms – all of your forms and submissions can be managed with plug-ins
- Tracking and analytics – gain important insights on website traffic and user data with the help of comprehensive tracking and analytics
It’s Time for a Rebrand
In the ever-changing realm of digital marketing, an outdated website tends to stand out like a sore thumb. As much as we’d like to believe that our digital presence is fine on the back burner while our products and services do the talking, first impressions matter. And that first impression is bound to reflect back on you and the business.
To elevate a first impression, websites have two options. They can either go through with a full rebranding, which includes colours, fonts, logo, and everything, or they can go for a refresh in line with current branding. But there are a couple good reasons to consider kicking off a complete rebranding.
Rebranding – when done right, has the ability to do a few things. First, it’ll ensure that your business stays up to date on modern design trends. Your customers, casual browsers, and employees will notice when you’ve left design out in the cold. A rebranding is also an excellent opportunity to bring your brand into the future by reflecting your current values, customers, technology, and product/service offerings. Yesterday’s branding won’t always be synced up with your business of today – especially if it’s been ten years.
If you’re ready to refresh your website, give Caorda a call. Our specialized teams of website developers, designers, and SEO experts have been delivering highly functional and beautiful websites since 2003. Contact us today to kick off your website development project: