Having a website for your business is important because it reflects your brand's image online and more importantly, helps you to land new clients.
However, your website will get outdated over time and needs to be maintained and updated regularly.
In this article, we will look at 6 signs you might need to update your website to prevent it from looking like it's from the year 2010.
Outdated website design will affect your brand's image online and how people perceive your business.
If you have an outdated website design, you may have a hard time attracting new clients because people might just click away from your website due to the outdated design.
Outdated website design is not pleasing to the eyes and makes it very hard to read. Outdated website design may also give the impression that your business is not up to date and modern. For example, Apple's old website:
Bright colored backgrounds, tacky font styles, cramping every bit of information together in tight spaces are design trends of the past, and signs that you need a new modern website design.
Less is more. The desired web design should be minimal and easy to the eye, making it easier to read the content and enjoy the design of the website better.
Slow website loading speed is one of the biggest reasons why people click away from a website.
We now live in a fast-paced world and the attention span of humans is decreasing every year, from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 seconds in 2015.
To maintain the interest of website visitors, the website needs to load fast. 38% of visitors leave a website when it takes 5 seconds or more to load.
Many factors can affect a website's speed, from image size, caching tools, all the way to hosting providers.
To check your website's load speed and possible solutions, you can use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
A responsive web design means your website will adapt to different screen sizes from different devices such as desktops, mobile devices, and tablets.
Around 40% of website visits are from mobile devices. If your website is not optimized for smaller screens, the users will leave your website due to bad user experience.
Besides, a mobile responsive website also improves the user experience. This is because users do not need to constantly zoom in and out of the website just to read small texts that are meant for computer screens.
Google will also rank mobile responsive websites higher than non-mobile responsive websites because Google's algorithm for SEO prefers responsive websites as it improves user experience.
A not secure website is considered outdated and will affect your business negatively.
People will not want to visit your website and your SEO ranking will drop because Google's algorithm for SEO prefers secure websites.
A secure website normally means having an SSL certificate. If you are using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), you will have HTTPS (Hypertext transfer protocol secure) in your web address, making the website safe and secure from hackers.
Browsers nowadays will warn users and prevent them from browsing websites that are not secured. This will discourage users from visiting your website.
Your website URL should have a padlock icon next to it if it's secured by SSL like this:
If your website URL looks like this:
You need to contact your hosting provider and buy an SSL certificate immediately to keep your website safe.
Most websites have a copyright disclaimer in the footer, which should include the current year. However, some websites still have copyright disclaimer of previous years.
This is often overlooked but can make your website looks outdated and gives the impression that your website is unchanged over the years.
To keep your website looking new, it is important to keep the year updated. To do this, you can either change it manually every year or use a time shortcode for the year to change automatically (if you are using WordPress).
If you find it hard to add new content, create new pages, and are limited to what you can do to customize your website, then you might want to look at a new website CMS (Content Management System).
Examples of CMS are WordPress, Wix, Joomla, and Drupal.
Each CMS offers different functionality, and some are better depending on the industry you're in.
If your website is built on a custom CMS, it may be hard for you to make changes to the website without some coding, which can be overwhelming.
Using well-known CMS such as WordPress instead of a custom CMS makes it easier to edit your website, and at the same time, improves your SEO.
In conclusion, you should treat your website like the apps on your phone and update it regularly. If your website is outdated, it will affect the user experience, SEO rankings, and your business altogether.
If you are looking to update your website, Mono Ninja Web Design Malaysia can help you to do so. To learn more, kindly contact Mono Ninja as I am more than happy to help.
