6 signs that it’s time to update your website
6 signs that it’s time to update your website

By on in Branding, Strategy

6 signs that it’s time to update your website

If your website feels like an old shoe—comfortable and familiar, but maybe not the first choice for making a first impression—you may need to look at it with “outside eyes.” See how it stacks up against these indications that you need a fix:

1) You don’t support mobile. You can look at your own user data, but chances are, roughly 60% of your visits come from mobile devices. Shrinking your horizontal page design into a 3″-wide space immediately signals that you’re behind the times, no matter how good your actual offering might be.


Think of it as you would curb appeal—if the front yard and exterior are unkempt, you expect things to be shoddy inside the house, too.

2) Your site feels meh. If your site feels out of date or evokes the same response as the word “beige,” it’s time. The level of saturation in the market—any market—means you need to stand out. You can do that by being clean and fresh or bold and vibrant, but you can’t bore anyone into hiring or buying from you.

3) You’re not supporting search. Is traffic down? Do you have lots of pages nobody visits (or they leave the moment they arrive)? Are you optimizing for important phrases related to your business and the terms people actually use to find you? It may be time for a thoughtful content audit and update. It’s not just search that might be suffering—it can be your whole user experience.

4) Your site is hard to update. This is a tough one, because it often means you spent a lot of money on building from scratch. You don’t want to feel like you’re throwing it away. But what you’re thinking of as protecting your investment is really just racking up technical debt. High-performing websites get updated regularly to keep content from getting stale—any disincentive to update is going to get in the way of engaging with customers and prospects.

5) Your code is old. Broken links, unsupported plug-ins, below-par security and privacy practices, and slow performance are all big turn-offs for site visitors. It sends the wrong message. Think of it as you would curb appeal—if the front yard and exterior are unkempt, you expect things to be shoddy inside the house, too.

6) Your business or customers have changed—but your site hasn’t. Are you the same company you were five years ago? Do you sell and stand for the same things? It’s doubtful. Even if your products and business model haven’t changed, the world and your customer knowledge have evolved.

Make sure your objectives are aligned with your content, your calls to action reflect what you really want people to do, and your data collection processes support your internal teams.

If it’s been more than a few years since you really dug into your website, it’s time. Talk to FATFREE about the most efficient ways to refresh.