A website is a big investment. For some small businesses, a website may be one of the largest startup expenses. According to Medium, the cost of a new website can range anywhere from $3,000 – $60,000 – so it’s no small financial undertaking. But an effective website can bring in tons of new business making it a worthy investment.

If you already have a website, how do you know it’s time for a redesign? Time alone is not necessarily a good indicator. Better indicators include navigation challenges and high bounce rate. We’ll go through five of the top signs it’s time to redesign your website.

1. Your website doesn’t match your brand identity
   Just like a physical catalog or business card, a website represents your company to the world. A cohesive brand identity (logo, color palette, voice/tone and imagery) across all platforms (print and digital) helps the customer recognize your brand and tells them you are a trustworthy, reputable brand.If a customer regularly visits your brick-and-morter location, they are likely familiar with your logo, store colors, signage, etc. If your website’s brand identity is incongruent from your brick-and-morter identity, customers may think they’re in the wrong place and abandon the site. This leads us to our next factor – bounce rate.
2. Your website has a high bounce rate
   You can determine your website’s bounce rate by looking at the Google Analytics. If you don’t already have Google Analytics set up for your site, here is a helpful article to get started: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015?hl=en.A high bounce rate is generally an indication of poor user experience. For example, if a customer visits your site and feels like they’re in the wrong place, they may abandon the site after only a few seconds without visiting any other pages. Bounce rate can also correlate with ease of navigation. Maybe users know they’re in the right place, but can’t quickly find what they need – that’s also a problem.
3. Your website is hard to navigate
   According to marketing expert Neil Patel, “[navigation] is critical. The design of a website’s navigation has a bigger impact on success or failure than almost any other factor. It affects traffic and search engine rankings. It affects conversions and user-friendliness. Everything important about your website is connected to the navigation, from content to the URLs.”He asserts there are several common mistakes that companies make that affect ease of navigation including using a non-standard style that users aren’t familiar with and having too many items in the navigation.
4. Your website has broken hyperlinks
   If users are consistently running into dead links, or pages with 404 errors, it’s inevitable they’ll have a poor user experience. Bad user experience can cause potential customers to abandon your website, costing you money in lost sales.To improve user experience, it’s imperative to fix broken hyperlinks. The most common and easiest way to fix a 404 error is to redirect the broken URL to another related URL.
5. Your website is not optimized for mobile
   According to Statista, “mobile accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. In the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 54.8 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017.”All websites should allow for responsive design on mobile devices. Responsive design uses proportional units of measurement, rather than fixed units, to achieve a dynamic layout that automatically adapts to the device on which it’s viewed. Customers should be able to intuitively find what they’re looking for just as easily on their cell phones as they can on their desktops.

Aside from looking at the Google Analytics, you can determine if your site needs a redesign by conducting a Website Usability Test. Usability testing evaluates how easy it is for end-users to use your website. It involves a group of test subjects performing specific tasks and giving feedback through interviews or questionnaires about your website’s performance. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial from Hostinger Tutorials on conducting a usability test.

Usability testing can help you find:

• Areas of your website that are hard to navigate
• Content that is outdated or irrelevant
• Broken links that you didn’t realize existed
• Spelling or grammatical errors and more!

Your existing website might have cost you a lot ten years ago, and it’s hard to think about spending more money to update it.

It might also be difficult to admit that your website is outdated or hard to navigate, but if your website is not performing the way it should, or could, it’s time to consider a redesign. Think of it as an opportunity to improve your credibility in the marketplace and grow your revenue!