Inspired by the dawn of the digital era, many entrepreneurs have created a website for their businesses. Some of them invested a lot in design and then launched their sites with fanfare. But as time went on, these sites got stale and ineffective. This is why the web is now full of obsolete websites with the latest update dating back to prehistoric times.
Is your site worth keeping alive, or is it better to create a new one with advanced design and the latest features? In this article, we will lend you advice on how to analyze the effectiveness of your current website, so you can decide if you need a new one.
Why Your Website Fails
Running a small business can be time-consuming, especially if you don’t have many employees from the start. Entrepreneurs are just too busy to take steps to reflect all their business updates on their site. Unfortunately, this might cause them to miss out on potential opportunities. Keeping your website alive is your business’s number one priority.
Let’s start with the basics! There are some must-have features that users expect your website to have in 2020. If they are missing, your site is doomed to underperform.
- Quick load time. Your website speed makes the first impression on potential customers. The ideal load time of a website is no more than 2 seconds. Each extra second of waiting may get users frustrated, causing them to “bounce,” in other words, leave your website and never return. This is why we recommend you to check the load speed of your site with online tools, such as Tools.Pingdom, WebPageTest, and GTMetrix. Every second counts!
Google advises making your website as fast as you possibly can. They also share some advice on how to optimize your website speed.
- Clear navigation. Your website’s navigation has a great impact on conversions, bounce rates, and sales. Make sure your navigation is intuitive. The perfect way to do this is to consult with a usability specialist. If you are on a short budget, you may as well conduct a survey among your users and ask them directly about their preferences. You could also ask some of your friends who haven’t seen your website before to take a quick look at its navigation. Bringing a fresh pair of eyes may help you spot performance issues.
- Social media integration. This is something that your business needs to do if you want to be competitive in today’s market. Integrating different marketing platforms so that your customers can engage with your brand regardless of place, time, and purpose is essential. The basic steps on the way to integration include placing social media and social share buttons on your website, using social login plugins to help users sign-in with their existing profile information, and integrating social media-based commenting systems.
- Mobile version. New technology and innovations have made smartphones more powerful and affordable. In the United States alone, 63% of Google’s visits in 2019 were made via mobile devices. This means that website owners cannot expect to reach the maximum performance without making their websites responsive and mobile-friendly.
We in Boxmode recognize current mobile trends and offer ready-to-use mobile-friendly templates.
- Clickbaity CTAs. An effective call-to-action button (CTA) is the key to getting your website visitors to click, read, download, and buy. A CTA’s main purpose is to encourage users to carry out actions you want them to do. Without thoughtful and personalized CTAs, your visitors will have little motivation to engage with your brand.
The creation of an efficient CTA requires a complex approach. But it’s only effective if you know exactly what you want to accomplish by putting this specific button in this exact place, and what kind of audience is supposed to click it. In addition, you should wisely choose words and colors for your CTAs. Optimizing your calls-to-actions is one of the easiest ways to boost your conversion rates.
- Easy-to-find contact information. Many website owners put contact pages at low priority in terms of copywriting and design, when in fact ‘Contact Us’ is among the most important and most visited site pages. A high-quality contact page usually includes such information as an email address and a phone number with a description of how company representatives can solve visitors’ problems, a call-back request form, and links to active social media accounts. Make sure all of them work correctly as there is nothing worse than false contact information or an idle call-back form. Remember that contact forms are your most reliable lead generation tool.
Providing your website visitors with your contact information has never been easier with Boxmode’s Contact Form widget.
- SEO. It doesn’t matter if you are creating a new website or upgrading an old one, search engine optimization is one of the most crucial investments you can make for the growth of your business. The failure to implement proper SEO can result in weak performance on search engines. Thus, fewer people will know that your website exists.
To improve your website SEO performance, we advise you to begin with a few simple practices:
- Use keywords relevant to your industry and location.
- Regularly update your website with relevant content.
- Use headings and subheadings with keywords to make your content easy to read and searchable.
- Provide your website with quality backlinks.
If you lean toward creating a new website, we are happy to inform you that, in the nearest future, Boxmode users will get advanced customization options and professional SEO tools.
At the same time, there are some features you don’t want to have on your website:
- Flash. The main reason to avoid creating websites based on Flash technology is that it has security issues. In addition, it doesn’t work on Apple mobile devices, and it really slows down your website.
- Autoplay music or videos. Autoplay is a bad idea in terms of both accessibility and usability. It is usually disruptive to a user’s experience and leads to high bounce rates.
- Excessive information and media. No need to scare away your visitors by dumping too much information on them. It is highly advisable to keep your content consistent, relevant, and up-to-date.
Now, you can go through the checklist above and make sure your website has all the key elements that you need for business, while getting rid of the unnecessary features that may block your site performance. If your website matches your business goals and has most of the necessary features, perhaps it will be enough to just slightly refresh its design or add a few new pages you’re missing (like a blog, an “About us” page, etc.). On the other hand, if you realize that your site meets none of the modern requirements, then you should consider a more radical change.
At this point, if you can already tell that your website is hopelessly outdated, and creating a new one is your only choice, then Boxmode will be happy to help you out.
Our website builder allows you to create both simple and complex sites with minimal effort.
In case you need a few more reasons, here they are:
Your budget
All other things being equal, creating a few new pages or updating the design of an existing site costs less than developing a new project. But the more changes you make, the faster the budget grows.
The launch of a new site affects the business more than anything else. So make sure that the desire to save a few dollars today doesn’t put at risk your future sales and marketing potential.
If you decide to create a completely new website, you’ll need to save the budget for the domain name and web hosting. The good news is that Boxmode grants free web hosting to all new users. And with the Domain Mapping feature, you can connect the existing domain name to your Boxmode website in a few easy steps.
Your time limits
If your existing website has been created recently, then you probably have preserved the contacts of the person or agency who was working on it. If so, you could ask them to update your site to your current needs. But what if the website was built a long time ago and the contact with the person or the company that designed it has been lost? In this case, you’ll probably want to start with a blank sheet and create a new website from scratch. But finding a new contractor may take months, and no one guarantees that the site will be delivered on time.
The solution? Create your new website with Boxmode! Our website builder does not require any coding skills, and you can use one of our customizable templates in various business niches. And if you wish to really stand out, you can create your own unique template quickly and effortlessly.
Make the Right Decision!
Remake or replace? Choosing the right option is not always easy. We recommend making your decision based on the goals of your business.
For some offline businesses, it is acceptable to have a single-page website or a landing page with a description of their activity and location. For companies that rely on online sales, their websites are supposed to be rich in content and have multiple pages. In any of these cases, if you are looking forward to creating a new website for your business, you will find everything you need on Boxmode.