How to Determine That You Need a Website Refresh. Checklist

Ten years ago your company invested in the site development significant resources, now you have got some revenue from it. This was expressed both in new customers who came through the site and in the ability to quickly inform existing customers about your products and services.

Anyway, as any modern technology, web development has frequent changes. Your clients don’t spend time with computers, now they travel with tablets and explore sites with smartphones. To adapt to new habits of customers, you should refresh your web site, shouldn’t you?

There are old school companies that don’t need to implement innovation in their resources, no question. For example, the richest company in the world Berkshire Hathaway has the website developed in 1996 and today it does the job well. It provides an annual report to investors and this is all.

So, let’s check why you need to refresh your website

1. High Bounce Rate

High bounce rate. Bounce Rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site. If your audience hasn’t been changed in the last years, and you had had the increase of bounce rate, it’s the alarm. Go to Google Analytics > Aquisition > Overview and estimate the engagement audience divided by channels.

2. Increasing the number of technical bugs

From time to time look at Google Search Console > Crawl Errors. If you noticed the accumulation of server responds 404 errors, you had got to do something. For example, hire the developer to fix everything. But it’s not like to “mark as fixed” in Search Console, the technical website audit and explanation of every error should be provided.

3. Low page load speed

Google makes the favor for web pages that have comprehensive content and fast response to a web browser. He is angry when you forget to optimise the image size and provide a user with full of megabytes pages instead of bytes.

Even so Google’s mood isn’t such terrible as your attack on the users’ patienсe. If your page loads 4 seconds, but you competitor site loads 2 seconds, they got to competitor’s resource with a high probability.

There is a tool to check the speed of page loading. Chrome PageSpeed Insight Tool. If there is needed internal documentation you can generate a report with GTMetrix.

4. Google Mobile Friendly Page

More than 60% of search queries come from a smartphone today. Is your web page ready to changes? To check it is possible with Test My Site tool ( testmysite.withgoogle.com. ). If the website gets the low score, it’s time to change the adaptive design.

5. Old design. Maybe it’s time to create something new

You know, design depends on the website business functions. If some multi-billion companies can use old-school pages, it doesn’t mean that your customers would be satisfied such approach. Designers should know the rule of thumb. If a user cannot click the icon by means thumb on the smartphone screen and font is too small and tedious for reading, that means you need a redesign.

To get qualified redesign you need to ask help to specialists that have great experience in adaptive development and testing laboratory with real devices. Actually, I speak about the team of developers because it’s so hard to have the deal with a huge testing system on a big variety of devices to one specialist.

6. Is the website respond to current business tasks

Let’s try to answer the question is your website responds to new business challenges comparing with 10-years-old deals. If the needs change very frequently and you want the web source keeps up with the times, suggest your web provider change approach and use RAD (rapid application development) technology. In addition it;s time to think about the implementation of a business process leading to the alignment of website respond and internal business needs.

If company process has changed completely, you had needed to think over redesign at the point of view “what benefits my business will get with help the website”. After all, all web applications and web sites are developed to adapt the business to new challenges.

Let’s sum up. Actually, there are a lot of facts pointing on redesign or modernization of your web page. It’s better to take into account all of them and not to get stuck doing the same things. Your website need refresh if:

• Google Analytics recorded high bounce rate comparing with previous analytical period
• * Google Search Console notified about increasing of technical bugs
• * Page loading speed doesn’t coincide the users’ expectations
• * You haven’t mobile friendly web pages
• * Website doesn’t respond your business current tasks

Originally published at blog.active-bridge.com.