11 Warning Signs That Your Website Needs a Redesign (+ How To Rectify All Of Them!)

1. Struggles To Work Well on Mobile

More than 60% of website traffic now comes from mobile devices, which is why your website must be optimised for all screen sizes. Failing to make your websites mobile-friendly means ignoring a significant portion of your brand’s audience.

If a user has to poke, pinch, and squint at their phones just to use your website, it is time to redesign it. If your website’s layout is hard to navigate, text and images don’t scale to fit the size of the device, or there is a lot of clutter and unnecessary elements on the screen, there are clear signs that you should optimise your website for mobile devices.

First of all, you must use a platform that makes sure your website looks great on every device. Make the text readable and images appropriately scaled, rearrange elements to make them look the way you want, and create a website that is easy to navigate on all screen sizes.

Even Google puts mobile-friendly websites first when ranking pages. If your site is not optimised for mobiles, not only will your visitors suffer, but so will your search results visibility.

2. Has An Outdated Look

We still come across many websites that are still living in the past decade. The neglected content, non-responsive designs, lack of social media icons and CTAs, old-fashioned designs, and other outdated aesthetics are telltale signs that indicate their websites are no longer doing their jobs.

If your website still has outdated branding or aesthetics, it will look unappealing and unprofessional to your customers. The design trends and industry standards evolve quickly, and businesses must keep up with modern aesthetics and designs to align with their branding.

Furthermore, when redesigning your website because of outdated aesthetics, make sure you are practising consistency. Your online presence on all platforms, including your website, must have a consistent logo, colour scheme, and typography, and a strong redesign by professional web designers can fix all of that without any hassle.

3. Doesn’t Have Clear Calls to Action (CTAs)

Calls to action buttons are the most effective way to convert website visitors into leads. CTAs draw out interactions from the users. If a website doesn’t have room for calls to action, it might be time for a redesign.

Businesses that drive a lot of traffic to their websites must have clear CTAs to guide visitors toward desired actions. These calls-to-action buttons tell visitors where to sign up for a newsletter, how to buy a product, or how to contact your team. If a website has poorly placed, vague, or missing CTAs, it means that the business is losing opportunities to convert visitors into customers.

When redesigning your website, opt for clear CTAs relevant to the sales funnel stage, do not overload your pages with CTAs, place them where they are noticeable, and make them large and responsive for mobile users.

4. Pages Take Forever To Load

Do you know that websites that are ranking on page one of Google have an average page load speed of 1.65 seconds. Now imagine if your website is taking 4-5 seconds to load – it will probably frustrate and drive away 40% of your users. Furthermore, slow loading speeds also negatively impact your search engine rankings. So, if a website is struggling with slow speeds, it is not keeping up with modern expectations and hence requires a redesign.

There are many ways in which professional web designers can improve site speeds. Auditing the current performance of websites, evaluating the hosting provider, optimising images, reducing redirects, and limiting HTTP requests are some of the newest strategies web designers and developers are using to enhance website speeds in recent years.

5. Poor Conversion Rates

Simply put, low conversion rates mean that your website isn’t clearly telling your users what to do. Businesses that are experiencing low conversion rates must strive to streamline their user journeys with a web redesign.

Possible causes for low conversion rates include a clumsy and confusing homepage, unsatisfactory search function, unconvincing copywriting, weak CTAs, too many popups, a poor checkout flow, and so much more.

If your website checks all these boxes, you could be losing valuable leads and sales and are in dire need of a redesign. Professional web designers can help you fix these issues by redesigning a user-friendly website, adding compelling content and testimonials, utilising strong calls to action, and continuously optimising your site for better results.

6. Hard-to-Navigate

Poor navigation is one of the main reasons why visitors abandon your website. If your website has a hard-to-navigate layout, a fresh redesign can fix it. A business thrives when its users can easily find what they need on their websites, navigate it, and understand the website hierarchy and logic easily.

However, if a website’s layout is hard to navigate, it can lead to users losing interest and leaving it, because no one has time to dig through multiple layers of hierarchy and navigation.

Organising content on your website logically, simplifying your navigation, and implementing clear calls to action is an effective way to make your website intuitive. A redesign project that fixes all these issues can make any business look professional and authoritative.

7. Low Search Engine Rankings

If a business’s organic search engine rankings are low, it is a big red flag that a website needs a redesign.

If your business is struggling to appear on the first page of Google, it means that your website is doing one of these things; frustrating and sending away visitors, neglecting mobile users of your website, using ‘black hat’ backlinking practices and bad organic search engine optimisation, and lacking social media activity.

Web redesigning can improve your organic search engine rankings. A web designer can implement SEO best practices, limit JavaScript and Flash, improve site structure, and use a responsive design. These redesign changes can improve your website’s traffic and drive more sales and results for your business.

8. A High Bounce Rate

If many users are leaving your website after viewing just one page, it is a key sign that your site needs a redesign now. High bounce rates are very bad for businesses. They tell the search engines that the content on a website is not of high quality. Other possible explanations for your website’s high bounce rates could be slow page load time, blank pages, technical errors, or low-quality content. In short, poor user experience is one of the reasons why your visitors do not want to explore your website.

A professional website redesign can address all these issues. A good UX, which starts with a well-structured website, will lead to a responsive website, clear CTAs, A/B testing, and an optimised linking structure on your website.

Fixing a high bounce rate will result in profitable results for any business, converting casual visitors of a website into loyal customers.

9. Lack Of Essential Security Features

There are many consequences for your business if you have an unsecured website. First, a website that lacks security features can be risky for your potential customers, as their information could be stolen by third parties. Second, users would never trust a business if their website is not secure. Third, even Google dislikes unsecured sites and pushes their rankings down.

So, if your website doesn’t have security features, it is time for a redesign and update!

Seasoned UX designers know how to create a safe as well as secure website. They would implement features that meet the standards of the technical teams and anticipate the risks users are vulnerable to, before they can pose any threat to them.

Designers must consider encryption, two-factor authentication, data privacy, enhanced user privacy, and removal of unnecessary security constraints to make a user’s experience safe and smooth. If a business finds out that its site doesn’t meet these standards, it’s high time that it considers a redesign to enable modern security features and protect its visitors.

10. Doesn’t Scale With Your Business

Your website may have been perfect when your business started, but now that you have grown, your website needs to grow as well. There are many signs that indicate whether your website has fallen behind, and they include; a lack of customer acquisition, failure to represent your brand identity through your site, and stale content that has been there since you designed your website for the first time.

To accommodate modern changes, business owners must begin a redesign process for their website and ensure it scales with their business. Digital customisations, such as online instant quote calculators, quizzes, and other custom plugins, are a great way for brands to create unique and personalised experiences for their visitors.

The redesign should effectively communicate your brand’s values, mission, and the products and services you provide so that you can make an impact on visitors to your site. A website redesign ensures that your online presence still reflects what your brand is today while keeping in touch with its roots and original values.

11. It Is Hard To Make Content Updates

Content management systems make it so much easier for businesses to update content on their websites without going down into the code. However, if a website does not have CMS, is built on an unmanageable backend system, or still takes as long as it did in the past decade to make minor changes, it is time for major redesigning.

Modern websites save time and resources for your business in every way possible. This is why, make sure that after the redesign, you are using an accessible content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Shopify, simplifying your updates routine and keeping your website fresh and relevant all the time even if a developer is not available nearby.