Eleven Signs Your Website Needs a Facelift

Having a great website is something that will never go out of style.

After all, your website is the face of your business to the world.

It’s your brand.

And the world is watching.

The trick for a lot of small businesses is finding high quality website design and development that is also affordable.

Affordable web design and development is my specialty.

Unfortunately, a lot of small businesses neglect their websites.

They build them, publish them, and move on to the next task.

That may work in the short term, but certainly not in the long term.

In the following paragraphs I am going to outline what I consider to be the eleven most obvious signs that your website needs a facelift.

If your website suffers from any of these signs, please contact me and let’s get you back in the game.

Sign #1 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
Your website looks and feels out of date

Let’s start off with the obvious.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Or is it?

The look and feel of the Web as a whole changes over time.

If you are not updating your website on a regular basis, slowly but surely, visitors are going to take notice.

This makes your business look lacking in terms of professionalism.

If your website looks like it was built in 1995, your website needs a facelift.

Learn about how to create a great user experience in my blog post on small business SEO tips.

Sign #2 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
Your contact form is broken

I can’t tell you how many websites I have looked at that have contact forms that are not working properly.

You fill out the form, click the “Submit” button, and then…

Nothing.

Broken contact forms are often the result of business owners not maintaining their websites properly.

You may need to update a plugin, or there may be a DNS setting that is not configured properly.

If you are having delivery issues with your contact form, potential clients may get frustrated and leave your website.

If this is happening, it may be time for you to upgrade your website.

Sign #3 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
Your website is not mobile-responsive

Having a mobile-responsive website is not optional in today’s world.

If you are going to have a website, it needs to display properly on smart phones, tables, and desktop computers.

More than 50% of traffic to most websites comes from mobile devices.

If mobile visitors are not able to find your contact information, or your website is not displaying properly on their devices, you are definitely losing business.

Often times the amount of new business brought in by a new website more than offsets the price of the web design.

Under conditions like these, you can’t afford NOT to upgrade your website.

Sign #4 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
Your bounce rate is very high

A “bounce” is a visitor that lands on one of the pages of your website and then leaves in very short order and without visiting any other pages on your site.

This goes back to the look and feel or user experience of your website.

If the visitor feels as though your website was not created using modern standards, he or she is going to be less inclined to stick around.

So much of website design comes back to trust.

If your website looks outdated, visitors are not going to trust you as much as they would if you had a more modern website.

This leads to a high bounce rate.

Sign #5 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
You are embarrassed to tell people your web address

If you are reluctant to give people your web for fear that they will visit your website, it might be time for an upgrade.

I have run into this problem many times since I started doing web design and development.

It’s easy to procrastinate when it comes to updating your website.

Then the problems start piling up.

Before you know it, you are feeling reluctant to pass out business cards at your business networking group.

This can be fixed by giving your website a facelift.

Sign #6 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
Your URLs are not user-friendly

If you cannot tell where you are on a website by looking at the address bar, your URLs may need to be optimized.

For users to feel confident in navigating the pages of your site, they have to know where they are at any point in time.

If your URLs contain special characters like question marks and underscores, again your URLs need help.

By having an intuitive URL structure, such as www.companyname.com/blog/blog-title, you are also effectively communicating to Google what your pages are about.

With Google able to understand your content, it is then much better able to find the users who are interested in your pages’ content.

This is a win-win-win for you, your website visitors, and Google.

Sign #7 Your Website Needs a Facelift
You don’t have an SSL

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it is used on almost all modern websites.

An SSL protects your website visitors from being attacked as they are viewing your website.

Without an SSL, browsers will display that “not secure” message on the browser address bar, along with the “unlocked” icon. This can and will affect the trust factor of your website visitors.

Botton line, if you don’t have an SSL on your site, it may be time for a facelift.

Sign #8 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
You are not collecting visitors’ contact information

If you do not have a way to collect visitors’ contact information without having them fill out the web form on the contact form, your website is not performing at a high level.

One good way to collect visitors’ contact information is to offer them something of value.

This is ofter called an “opt-in” or a “lead magnet,” and websites that have them do much better than those that do not.

Now, instead of coming to your website, looking around for a while, and leaving, visitors will have a way to keep in contact with you, the website owner, after they leave.

And what’s more, you will have a means of contacting them.

This keeps your brand in the forefront of clients’ minds.

When they think of the product or service that your business offers, they think of YOU.

If your website does not have a means of collecting visitors’ contact information outside of the contact form, your website needs an upgrade.

Sign #9 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
You are not able to make your own edits

If you are not able to make simple edits to your website, it may be time for an upgrade.

Changes happen frequently in business.

Having to contact your website developer for small changes to a page can really add up over time.

This puts you behind the eight ball and gives your competitors a distinct advantage.

If you are not able to make changes to your website, it may be time for an upgrade.

This is directly related to our next sign…

Sign #10 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
You’re not using a content management system (CMS)

Using a content management system opens many doors when it comes to website design and development.

If you want to add functionality to your website, such as the ability for clients to schedule times to talk with you, a CMS can work wonders.

Content Management Systems also allow you the ability to back up your website, just in case.

If your website hosting service were to go down, you will be much better suited to getting back into the game.

If you are not using a CMS, it may be time for you to re-design your website.

Sign #11 Your Website Needs a Facelift:
Your competitors are outranking you in the search engines

Last but certainly not least, if your competition is coming up above you in the search results, it could be due to your less-than-stellar web design.

Google keeps track of how many pages users visit when they come to your website, along with how much time they spend on each of your web pages.

These are known as “user experience metrics” and Google uses them to rank websites in the search results.

If a user returns to the search results for a certain keyword phrase after visiting a page on your website, again Google notices.

Users are much more likely to convey poor user experience metrics to Google if your web design is not up to snuff.

This can push you even lower in the search engine rankings. Some businesses go into a death spiral.

If you are having trouble with your search engine optimization campaign, your website may be due for a remodel.

Learn why SEO works the way it does in my blog post Why Your SEO Sucks.

Contact Scott today for a free, no-pressure assessment of your current website.