If your company website hasn’t undergone any significant changes recently, it’s time to consider doing something about that. In fact, you should redesign your website every five years. Doing so can improve user experience, decrease costs, and help you keep up with the latest features and technologies. Keep reading to understand why.
Improve Your User Experience (UX)
Visitors who encounter an optimized user experience are more likely to engage with your content. Meanwhile, visitors who have a terrible experience will become frustrated and leave, never to return.
When redesigning your website, you can improve UX using modern, well-researched design principles. A well-designed website that is easy to navigate can increase engagement and conversions.
Achieve Better SEO Results
Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to driving traffic to your website. Websites that aren’t optimized for search engines are unlikely to appear in the top results for relevant search queries.
SEO is a field that’s constantly changing. If your website was optimized for search engines years ago, it might not achieve the same results today that it did in the past. Search engines like Google and Bing constantly tweak their algorithms, and website owners must keep up with those changes to stay relevant.
When you redesign your website every five years and keep SEO in mind, you help to improve your search rankings, increase traffic, and generate more leads and conversions.
Mitigate Costs
But it’s much costlier to redesign a 15-year-old website than a 5-year-old website.
Processes, such as a website redesign, require more labor and time on old interfaces. As software evolves, your old website gets further and further behind.
When a redevelopment project is underway, more of the website must be rebuilt from scratch. Here are some examples.
- Data Migrations: More work will need to be done to migrate old content into a new system because the old and new databases don’t match up.
- Old Code: Old technologies, plugins, and code libraries will no longer be applicable and must be replaced.
- Information Architecture: The website’s structure, such as its information architecture, URLs, and navigation, might need to be reworked entirely.
- More significant Design Project: A complete website redesign, rather than a facelift, will be necessary to refresh the look and feel.
- Editorial Experience: New systems must be implemented to meet your editorial needs, which will have evolved in the years since your last website development project.
You’re better off having a website redesign performed every few years rather than every 10-15 years. But suppose you get to the point where you haven’t redesigned your website in a long time. In that case, it’s an excellent opportunity to do a significant overhaul and rethink all aspects of its design and functionality.
Take Advantage of New Features and Technologies
If you haven’t redesigned your website in 10 or 15 years, you’re missing out on the latest developments in web technologies. Here are some examples of technologies you can take advantage of now that your old website isn’t capable of.
- Headless WordPress: You can use WordPress as backend software to manage your data and content while using other technologies for the frontend display of the website.
- React and other JavaScript Libraries/Frameworks: JavaScript has evolved at a breakneck pace over the past 10 years, and libraries like React are used to build interactive user interfaces and web applications quickly and efficiently.
- Blocks and Site Editing: WordPress is undergoing a significant shift and now includes a block editor that allows content to be easily arranged and edited in a whole new user experience.
- CSS3: The latest innovations in CSS give developers access to tools like media queries, CSS Grid, and Flexbox that significantly improve responsive layout and design. CSS is now capable of animations, which could previously only be done with JavaScript. Designers and developers can create interactive and visually appealing websites with less work.
- WordPress Plugins: You can accomplish much more with your WordPress plugins. In the last 10-15 years since you overhauled your website, new plugins will have been developed that solve your business needs, and existing plugins will have been updated with new features.
Updating your website more often will allow you to keep up with emerging technologies and trends in web development. You don’t have to keep up with everything, but you also don’t want to miss out on technologies that would benefit your business.
Move Away From Old Tech
- Discontinued Code: Flash is an excellent example of a web technology no longer used. Flash was popular before JavaScript evolved enough to replace everything it offered, and it eventually reached an official End Of Life and is no longer supported.
- Discontinued Browsers: Internet Explorer was once frustrating for web designers and developers because it was so difficult to support. Microsoft has permanently disabled it and discontinued all support, so it’s no longer necessary for your website to keep it.
- Security Patches: Whether or not you completely redesign your website, keeping up with security updates is essential. WordPress themes, plugins, and WordPress itself regularly release security patches. You’re opening yourself up to many well-known security holes if your website is significantly outdated.
Security is critically important to keep on top of, and developing your website using new features can also eliminate old headaches and streamline your development processes.
Stay Ahead of the Competition
Finally, redesigning your website every five years can help you stay ahead of the competition. If your competitors have recently redesigned their websites and you haven’t, you could be falling behind.
A website developed recently with a modern design and updated technologies will look and operate noticeably differently than a website from 15 years ago. You can either be the business with the current website or the business left in the dust.
A redesign can help you stay on top of the latest trends and technologies and ensure that your website meets your customers’ needs. Now that you know contact WebDevStudios. Let’s chat about your new website redesign.