If you're asking yourself whether it's time to update your website or not, chances are that your online presence is probably already behind the times. Rigid frames that don't reflow properly on smaller screens, elements that are misaligned and other design flaws are cues to redesign your website. The following are a few criteria to consider when contemplating whether it's time or not to redesign your website.

Is your website responsive?

Over 50% of all web visitors use mobile smartphones or tablets. When they reach your site, will they be happy they visited, or will they instead be disappointed that your website doesn't resize to fit their screen? Websites that were designed even a few years ago probably didn't have mobile website visitors in mind. Because these websites were designed with large monitors in mind, they tend to look bad when viewed on smaller screens. To optimize for mobile website visitors, consider addressing the following aspects of your website design:

• Use the proper image formats on your website. Traditional photos are most efficiently displayed using the JPEG image compression protocol, while design elements of your website are generally smaller and less complex and better served by the PNG file format
• Make sure to compress all of your images. By optimizing your image sizes, you'll make your website easier to load for mobile visitors. Smartphones use cellular networks, which are slower networks
• Use a mobile responsive design for your website. It's important for your comments to lay out properly on a smaller screen just as well as they do on a desktop computer

Does your website look modern and appealing?

You don't want customers to form bad opinions about your company just because your website is out of date. It's best that your website follows modern conventions of proper design. What looked good 5 or 10 years ago probably looks dated today.

Is your website easy to use?

Websites should have a visitor-first orientation where the emphasis is on improving the website visitor’s browsing experience. If your visitor can't easily navigate to where they need to get to, then you'll likely need the services of a web designer to redesign your navigation menus. It’s important to work with a web designer to craft the overall flow of your visitor path after they land on your site.

Web designers often look at your analytics to check your bounce rate, which is a measure of how fast visitors are leaving your site. A high bounce rate suggests that something's not quite right with how your website is converting a visitor into a customer.

Is your website fast enough?

Amazon dropped a surprising nugget of information when they revealed that every 100ms of added latency cost them 1% in sales. For a company that generates billions in sales every year, that’s a lot of money potentially being lost to poor site speed. You should work closely with your web designer to make sure all your web assets load as quickly as possible. Some additional measures you can take to improve your site speed include:

• Using hosting that scales. Cloud hosting has become increasingly popular as customers are able to increase their hosting resources on the fly as their traffic increases
• Implementing caching. A cache saves the server work by being able to serve up popular files without burdening the server. This could be implemented as a database cache like Memcache, a PHP cache like Zend or a reverse proxy like NGINX. Ask your developer to suggest the best caching implementation based on your website size and usage patterns

Does your website design focus on conversions?

Companies use a website as their online business card to gain new customers. If you have an outdated website design, it may have lost touch with its marketing goals as evidenced by low conversion rates. When you do a website redesign, make sure that it's easy for a prospective customer to contact you or buy your product.

A more basic consideration is to ask yourself if your website still reflects your product offerings. Your website might be so old that your product or services no longer match what you advertise. Addressing this issue might be as simple as changing some text, or completely redesigning your product information pages.

Do you agree with these telltale signs of website redesign? Let us know in the comments below! If you’re ready for a website design that can be a powerful customer magnet for your business, contact Milwaukee marketing agency, Accelity Marketing.