Your website is a living, breathing thing that needs regular attention. You wouldn’t build a house only to ignore it year after year. Same goes for your website. Just like your home, your website needs maintenance, care, and some freshening up now and then. Take a look around your website. How does it look? Is it a current reflection of your business? Is it up to date? Are there any broken links or missing information? Are you proud of the impression it gives of your business? Maybe your website just needs a fresh coat of paint here and there, or maybe it’s time for a major redesign. Let’s take a look at 8 reasons why your website needs your attention.

Reason #1: Your Website Looks Old

Has it been a number of years since you built your website? Has your business grown in that time? Is the look of your website up to date with current web design trends? To keep your website looking professional and contemporary, it’s important to take a look at your website over time and make sure it looks fresh. As your business grows, the likelihood of someone seeing your business for the first time on the web grows as well. First impressions make all the difference. Be sure your website is giving potential customers the impression you want for your business.

Reason #2: Your Website is Not Mobile-Friendly

Offering a mobile-friendly version of your website has gone from being a nice perk to an absolute necessity for every business. Not only will you lose visitors who find it difficult to navigate your website, search engines such as Google and Bing will penalize a non-mobile-friendly website by reducing its rank in a search. To check if your site is mobile-friendly, visit this link and type in your URL. If your site does not pass, just contact Erin Sweeney Design to discuss what you can do to fix this problem.

Reason #3: Your Website is Not Giving You Your Desired Result

Having a live website does not mean everyone will easily find it. To get results, you need to attract, engage, convert, measure, and optimize your website. To begin, make sure you are running analytics on your website. Sign up for a free Google Analytics account to begin tracking your websites’ activity. How much traffic is your website getting? Where are visitors landing? How long are they staying on your site? If your website is not working for you, it needs to be updated. Contact ESD to discuss ways to make your website more effective.

Reason #4: Your Business Goals Have Changed

As your business evolves, oftentimes so do your business goals. Do you target a different audience now? Offer a larger range of services? Does your website reflect these changes? Make sure your website is in line with your business goals at all times.

Reason #5: Your Website Isn’t User-Friendly

This term often confuses website owners. There’s a difference between mobile-friendly and user-friendly. User-friendly websites offer visitors an optimal experience. Does your website use Flash? Are there broken links? Are images not loading properly? Is the navigation confusing? Is your contact information hard to find? If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, now is a good time to look at your website and find the things that are affecting your visitors experience in a negative way. Depending on the severity of the issues, you may need a few simple fixes, or you might want to consider a redesign.

Reason #6: Your Competition Has a Redesigned Website

Every business should be keeping an eye on what their competition is doing, especially when it comes to their online presence. In many cases, without much else to go on, a potential customer will choose a business based on the professional quality of the website. Ease of use, mobile-friendliness, fresh content, optimization, all of these factors affect your rankings in an organic search. By redesigning their website, your competition increases their rankings, thereby pushing your website down. It’s good practice to regularly review the online presence of your competition, not just their website but their social media accounts as well, and make sure you’re not falling behind.

Reason #7: You Need to Add New Functions to Your Website

Do you want to start a blog on your website? Are you now offering a product or service that can be processed online that couldn’t before? Is your business becoming more active on social media and you want to reflect that on your website? Have you been collecting a number of testimonials that you’d like to incorporate into your website? The time is now to update your website to reflect those changes. This is also a good time to check in with a web designer to find out what your options are. A good web designer will be fluent in popular website trends and explain to you what your website should be doing that it currently is not. Contact ESD if you’d like to learn more about what functions you should consider adding to your website.

Reason #8: You’ve Rebranded Your Business

Your website needs to be the place that reflects everything about your business, including your brand. Have you had your logo recently redesigned? Incorporate a new color into your marketing? Are you using different photography in your printed materials? At the end of the day, all of your marketing efforts (in person, on social media, and on paper) should direct visitors to your website. The website is the most important piece of your online presence. To be sure it reflects everything about your business that you need it to, keep it up to date with any branding changes.

Conclusion

Every small business owner wears many hats. It can be very difficult, almost impossible, to be on top of every need for your business at all times. When the day to day responsibilities of running a business take over, your website can end up being neglected. But, just as your business grows, so should your website. Set aside some time soon to take a look around your website. Look at it as a visitor seeing it for the first time. Are you proud of what you see? Does it reflect your level of professionalism? Does it include all of your current services/products? How is it ranking in a search? Staying on top of your online presence as your business grows is a great way to keep your business a step ahead of the competition.