Is your business outgrowing your website?

Change is a part of growth. As your business has evolved, the way you talk about yourself and your offerings has changed too. Maybe the market scenario dedicated it, maybe your customer feedback did.

All businesses naturally evolve, and if your website was built a few years ago, it might feature old messaging, or even older logos, colors, and other branding elements. While all your other marketing materials reflect your evolved brand, directing prospects to a website that doesn’t match is an obvious problem and could mean the difference between a conversion and a prospect losing interest.

Your website should be your number one marketing tool. So if you find yourself making excuses to avoid sharing it with potential customers, that’s a clear sign that it doesn’t hold up to what your business has become. As your business evolves and grows, your website should match the look, tone and information that you want your audience to see when they interact with your brand.

All (or most) of your online marketing activity should point to your website, and if that’s not up to the mark, you’re seriously limiting your potential.

Being able to manage your website and keep it up-to-date is important. If you can’t easily go in and add new sections, upload blogs, pictures, information about new products or services, then there’s a very good chance you put off doing it because it’s too complicated.

Updating your website to integrate an easy-to-use content management system will allow you to make updates more easily, and will make sure you’re empowered to keep your website current.
Besides, older websites that aren’t updated regularly are a security risk. Your website could face hacking and phishing attacks that could damage the reputation of your business.

Using web templates and designs ‘off the shelf’ is what a business that’s just starting out might do. And while it might have been fairly unique when you picked it, over the years, competitors and other businesses in the same industry might have used the same template for their websites.

And now, your website looks just like everyone else’s.

Some templates and designs become quite popular within an industry. While your website might have been unique a few years ago when you got started, today it’s probably not memorable, and just doesn’t stand out.

A professionally designed website could solve this problem, and make sure your website is one-of-a-kind, clearly communicating your unique value proposition with your customers.

Mobile devices have been responsible for around half of all internet traffic since the beginning of 2017, and that percentage is only growing each year.

If your website isn’t mobile-optimized, there are three ways your business might be affected:

• Disappointed customers who reach your website can’t get to what they need.
• Google isn’t too fond of websites that aren’t easy to use on mobile devices, and that’ll be clear from how your website performs in search rankings.
• A recent survey found that 54 percent of people wouldn’t recommend a business without a mobile-friendly website.

Whether it’s to make your life easier or to offer your customers something new, you might want to integrate a feature that didn’t even exist when you built your website.

And while you might be able to patch on the new features, and get them to work, websites built on older technology will have slower loading speeds, restricted functionality. Including modern features might slow it down further.

If this is the case with your website, it might be time to upgrade to a newer one.

Just like your business is constantly growing and evolving, your website needs to grow, evolve and stay relevant to remain useful.

Depending on the platform you’re using, you should have had fairly regular software updates to make keep your site working as it should be, and secure it from threats.

Adding new content regularly, whether it’s blog posts, new offerings or updated information, is a great way to ensure your website stays relevant. If this is something you haven’t been doing with your site, it’s quite likely you’ve outgrown it because while your business has been growing, your website stayed the same.

Is your website bringing in business?

If your audience isn’t being convinced to buy from you even after landing on your website, you might have to improve certain areas to ensure that your efforts driving traffic to the site aren’t let down by a website that isn’t up to the task of converting visitors.

And if you aren’t getting enough traffic to your site, you’ll have to investigate why your SEO efforts aren’t paying off.

Google Analytics can tell you how your website is performing, what’s working, and what’s not.
You can use this data to figure out if your website is making you money and if it isn’t, what needs to change so it does.