Listen, I get it.
As a busy business owner or marketing manager, you have a million things demanding your attention and budgets are tight. Updating your website often slides down the priority list.
But you’re scanning this article because something hasn’t been feeling quite right. Fewer prospects are converting to sales lately. Maybe your online reviews have taken a nosedive. Or new competitors are eating your lunch.
Here’s the hard truth: Your outdated website might be the problem.
I realize that’s tough medicine to swallow. Most entrepreneurs don’t kick off their ventures to need to refresh their site design every couple of years. Unfortunately, failing to give your website some regular TLC can quietly drive away prospects and prevent new loyal customers from discovering you.
Don’t panic though! I’ve helped dozens of small business owners transform outdated websites from repelling visitors to magnetically attracting a surge of ideal prospects who convert. In this post, I want to walk through five symptoms of a website turning customers away, and how a website refresh solves them.
Think of it as a candid website health assessment. Be honest as you scan these symptoms – ignoring them won’t make things better! But the good news is they are all treatable conditions with the right web design prescription. Let’s check your site’s vitals…
Symptom 1 – Poor Mobile Responsiveness
If your site looks terribly awkward or dated on smartphones, welcome to the 21st century my friend! Mobile internet usage now accounts for more than half of total traffic. And the large majority of smartphone users instantly leave sites that aren’t mobile-friendly.
Without a mobile responsive design precisely tailored for thumb use, your site literally can’t serve most prospective customers today. Just a few tweaks often cure sluggish mobile load times, inconvenient scrolling, squeezed images, tiny buttons, and the inability to easily complete forms or purchases. The patient’s prognosis looks good!
Symptom 2 – Weak Calls to Action
Think of your website as one side of a conversation trying to connect with the ideal customers you most want to serve. Clear calls to action are how you direct their next move. But way too many business sites suffer from poor CTAs!
Symptoms include vague CTAs like “Learn More” instead of clarifying the actual next step like “Start Free Trial”. Or inconsistent styling and placement will cause uncertainty too. Without prominent user-friendly CTAs strategically located, you leave visitors confused about how to proceed. And as they say, when you are confused…you lose.
Updating call-to-action placement, design, and messaging is often an instant cure to boost conversions!
Symptom 3 – Lifeless Text and Images
In the online world, you have just seconds to grab attention before prospects turn elsewhere. Unfortunately, most older website designs suffer terminal plainness and boredom once the rush of launching fades.
Symptoms include dense blocks of unsliced text, questionable 1990s-era clipart, dreary stock photos, and logos badly in need of rejuvenation. Like any first impression, appearances matter! Because no one wants to poke around an ugly site or strain to read unbroken walls of font. A facelift to implement whitespace, high-resolution photography, infographics, illustrations, playful fonts, and videos breathes life back into bland sites – captivating customers once again!
Symptom 4 – Slow Load Times
Wondering if glacially slow load times could explain that dropoff sticking point where most visitors abandon your site? Welcome to the club! Google found that 53% of mobile users will leave a page that takes over 3 seconds to load. And conversion rates plummet as load times increase.
The culprit is often low-quality hosting, unoptimized images, and videos, outdated site builders piled with resource-hogging bloatware, or failing to leverage efficient next-gen web technologies. The cure? Migration to a cloud hosting optimized for speed, implementing image compression, switching site builders, or rebuilding on a modern containerized Jamstack architecture.
Symptom 5 – Aged Design Elements
Let’s face facts…design trends don’t age like fine wine. Colors, layouts, fonts, and other elements eventually appear dated if you don’t refresh them. Think of how geocities-era web design compares to today’s expectations.
Outward symptoms include boxy layouts with awkward flows, fixed width containers unsuited for widescreens, default system fonts like Arial instead of thoughtfully selected font pairings, overused gradient effects, clashing disjointed color schemes, and spammy vibes.
Even if the content remains sound, outdated design aesthetics subconsciously erode visitor trust and credibility. But take heart, bridging outdated aesthetics with contemporary design trends can take years off a site!
The Prognosis
I hope walking through common website health conditions and side effects gives you the confidence to book a design examination! Ignoring the problem only accelerates site deterioration, while a single facelift intervention attracts and converts customers back on track.
Now if only it was as easy to roll back the clock on our actual appearances right? Thank goodness refreshing your website every few years at least keeps it looking perpetually youthful compared to us humans!
The Bottom Line I hope this website health checkup helps you diagnose what subtle issues may be holding your site back from attracting and wowing customers. But if you find the problems too complex, don’t go it alone.
At Pelican Design Group, we specialize in web and graphic design refinements tailored specifically for helping small businesses regain their competitive edge and convert more traffic. Our award-winning designers will conduct a comprehensive design examination of your site, make thoughtful recommendations to optimize conversions and walk you through bringing your web presence back to life – without breaking budgets.
We craft sites visitors love using, and that continually yield results for our clients’ bottom lines. To learn more about our rejuvenation strategies or schedule your no-strings-attached design consultation, visit PelicanDesignGroup.com. We’re always happy to discuss the health of your website and business!