Keeping your website’s design up-to-date and en vogue is quite important if you want a successful and approachable business website. Studies show that people are far less likely to trust business and buy products if the website isn’t intuitive and modern. You’ll probably make back the money you probably spend on updating and customizing your website. But how to go about it? How do you know when is it time to update your website? When do you know when it is time to customize certain aspects of it? How do you know if the money you spent on the customizations and updates was worth it? This article aims to help you answer these questions.
When Is It Time to Update and Customize My Website?
Customizing your website is a large commitment – most larger businesses have days-long processes before they decide to change a simple thing on their website because if it goes wrong, you could potentially lose on substantial amounts of revenues from your website – here are the signs that you need to update and customize your website:
-
Your site has high and increasing bounce rates: the bounce rate refers to the percentage of your website’s visitors that visit your website one way or another and immediately leave without visiting any other page. A high bounce rate represents a failure of design rather than content because most people who immediately leave are making that judgment based on superficial things on that certain page rather than your services or products. That’s why a high bounce rate overall on your website means that your design is failing to attract customers and retain them, and a rising bounce rate spells even more trouble. It is generally a good idea to customize your design and update it when you see this.
-
The theme you’re using is obsolete: things change fast in the tech world, and it is likely the theme you’re using for your website, if it isn’t custom-made, will become obsolete in a year or two. Developers usually make a theme obsolete because it lacks certain features, doesn’t attract customers, and underperforms. This should be a clear sign that you need to start customizing your website.
-
Your site is lacking features your competitors have: you should always know what your competitors are up to. If you want to keep succeeding in the market, you must ensure that you keep up with your competitors and don’t fall behind in the services you offer. That’s why it is important to check up on your competitors regularly and customize and update your website when you see that your competitors have implemented features that make life easier for customers and bring in more revenue.
What Should You Do to Ensure the Customization is Successful?
Now that you’ve decided you do want to customize your website, you now have to take steps to ensure you don’t randomly change things and your customization is actually successful:
-
A/B testing: it is absolutely vital to perform testing before making any change to the design permanent. A/B testing has proved itself to be the most effective means of testing for design-related stuff – in A/B testing, you do all the necessary changes, and then randomly show users visiting your website either the updated design or the old design. All the while you measure the performance of each design and the visitors’ responses. If you see improvements in bounce rates, time spent on the website, etc – these mean the changes you did had a positive result. If, on the other hand, you see a worse performance, you obviously don’t want to implement the new design.
-
Hiring a development agency: as you might be able to tell, it is quite hard to update your website and get things right. There are a lot of rooms for error, and due to how important is the design, you can’t afford a lot of mistakes. That’s why the best route for most people is to hire a development agency to take care of the customizations. An agency like Acclaim will be able to pinpoint the shortcomings in your design, compare it with your competitors, and devise an actionable plan that will reinvigorate your website.
