There’s nothing more exciting — or nerve-wracking — than redesigning your website. It’s an opportunity to reinvent your brand’s look and give your users (read: potential customers) something pretty to look at. Some businesses redesign their website a few times a year, convinced that they just haven’t found the right look yet. (Don’t be that guy.) Other businesses go too long without a site refresh. How often should you be redesigning your website, and what are the reasons to do it?

How Often Should You Redesign Your Website?

To be clear, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach here. However, as a general rule of thumb, you should redesign your website once every two to three years. This is simply because if your website is three years old — a lifetime, in the digital world — odds are it’s outdated. Geriatric. Old and crusty.

What was attractive and aesthetically pleasing three years ago likely isn’t today.

That doesn’t even scratch the surface of the functionality, which will definitely be outdated after three years with no changes. Remember when the mobile versions of websites used to have a different web address? This still haunts our dreams.

However, there are more specific reasons why you should consider refreshing or entirely redesigning your website.

Why Do You Need to Redesign Your Website?

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Is your website overdue for a redesign? Here are a few signs.

1. You Still Don't Have a Mobile Friendly Web Design

This one is huge. Why? Simple: It’s because these days, for most businesses, the majority of their traffic comes from mobile. As of 2017, some research said mobile devices accounted for as much as 77% of internet usage in the United States.That number has likely gone up. Have you optimized your website for mobile experience? If not, you have some catching up to do. 

2. You Get Lots of Traffic But Have a Low Conversion Rate

 Are people visiting your website and then leaving without taking action? Do you have a high bounce rate? Are people spending very little time on your pages? 

This means you’re making it easy for people to find you, but you’re ultimately not delivering to them what they’re looking for. This could be a sign that your website needs a little (or a lot of) TLC. 

You website should be accomplishing a goal, whether that’s getting visitors to shop, read your blog, or call you. If that’s not happening, you need to change something, because your site isn’t converting.

3. You Don’t Get Traffic… Period

If your website traffic is non-existent, something is seriously off. Maybe the content isn’t optimized. Maybe you’re doing something to tick Google off — like failing to address broken features and duplicate content. Maybe the design is plain old outdated.   

Any way you cut it, if your only site visitor is you, something needs to change.

No Matter What, Website Maintenance is Ongoing

Regardless of when you decide to redesign your website, know this: you will always be conducting website maintenance and making minor improvements. This is for a number of reasons.

For starters, as your business evolves, so too will your website. If and when your services, team, mission, products, branding, or prices change, you will need to update your website to reflect that. 

Secondly, Google changes, which means you need to keep up. As they update their algorithm — which happens all the time — and change SEO best practices, your website needs to reflect that. Once again, think about the massive shift we’ve seen over the years, with desktop traffic switching to mobile. This meant businesses needed to start prioritizing their website experience for smartphones.

You should be able to make basic changes to your website, but some of the bigger updates are best left to the pros. Contact the Las Vegas web design experts at LSM today at 702.988.2119 to discuss you next web or software project!