Is it time for a makeover on your website? Here’s 7 telltale signs you need to get a new web design.
Get Refreshed–Get a new web site
Links are broken
Broken links are detrimental to your SEO rankings. If the bots can’t establish a link, then it’s as good as not having one in the first place.
Your site looks outdated
Looking outdated is very subjective. After all, how necessary is it to change a theme? Amazon would say once per decade. But you’ll have a better idea of whether it’s outdated by running it through a free trial of PEEK. The feedback you’ll receive is totally objective; there’s no axe to grind and no ass to kiss, just pure, honest feedback about the look and functionality of your site.
It doesn’t have many features
What markets of potential customers are you missing because you don’t have features as simple as a search bar or social media sharing as part of your features? It’s one thing to tell a great story about your hotel or campground; if customers can’t book a room or campsite online, you’re losing them. Same with service-centric websites–your customer should be able to book an appointment with you right away. That’s just on the front-end.
There are numerous plugins on the back end to make publishing easier. The first two that come to mind are Yoast SEO and Leenk.me. Yoast SEO coaches you to improve your SEO practices with every post and page. Leenk.me is a wicked plugin which adds the ability to automatically post to your social media accounts anytime you post something new on your website.
You’re not showing up in search engines
If you’re not showing up in search engines, as yourself “why?” Is your site mobile friendly? What keywords are you using? Are you making any effort to publish articles that would be of interest to your target market customer? SEO ranking is being taught in school! A quick search for “improve your search engine ranking” brings up a plethora of articles. Really, at the end of the day, it boils down to these five things being taught in schools right now–
- Publish relevant content–there’s no such thing as too much content. This is what drives visitors to your site!
- Update content regularly.
- Metadata–title, description and keyword–fill in all the metadata you can!
- Be link-worthy. Create relevant links on your site that make sense for the content you’ve written.
- Use alt tags. Describe your videos and media files.
Michigan Tech 5 Ways to improve SEO rankings
Your site isn’t visually interesting
A boring, text heavy site is NOT visually interesting. It’s definitely time for a new web design change if the majority of your site contains primarily text. Jazz it up a bit with a magazine themed-layout. Do something simple such as adding relevant photos to all your posts. Anything!! Get rid of all the reading!
It takes too long to load
Load time is imperative to web design! Visit speed site testers. Images are usually one of the highest offenders which slow down a website. Grab some plugins to help you out. Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer or Panda JPEG/PNG compression (I call it Panda, but it’s really called “Compress JPEG & PNG images” on the WordPress repository) plugins will help a lot. Don’t use all of them at once though!
If you run through the speed tester again, further down the list of things slowing down your site, you’ll find java & css handling messages. To correct these things, make sure you’re choosing a WordPress theme which minify’s, uses bootstrap or places code in the proper order.
You’re not getting many visitors or interaction
Lack of visitors or interaction can be solved by driving traffic to your site. One method is through paid efforts such as Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Facebook “Boost this Post” type of advertising. You’ll want guidance from a professional such as The Marketing Girl to help you decide what keywords are best to invest your hard earned marketing dollars into.
Or you can make it interesting by constantly adding content and share it and get your audience sharing it! A minimum of weekly additions of content should be enough to gain you some visitors. Don’t be shy either; ask your friends to share your content on your behalf. And make sure you’ve made it simple for your visitors to share by adding social media sharing options.
If you need help with a new web design, give us a buzz at Orange Ambition. We are here to help. You can even make an appointment online.
