It’s a common question for many website and marketing professionals. How often should I update my site? Should I consider a website rebuild? You should update your site every few years. Five years on the web is a very long time and your content can become stale and outdated. It’s important to update your website even if you don't have many competitors as many of the UI/UX standards change regularly. Along with UI/UX standards, technology also changes rapidly. Making sure your website is responsive is an important factor when considering a website rebuild. Let’s jump into some of the important factors when determining if you need to take the steps in rebuilding your site.

Improve SEO and Site Performance

Is your site buried underneath search results? Are your pages mainly image based? Do users find it tedious navigating to your site? Chances are search engines are also finding it difficult to analyze your site. Consider adjusting the length of the copy on your website. Make sure you are informing users and providing unique content that is geared towards your business. If your website is supposed to inform users, make sure it’s doing that. It would be ideal to have an experienced web developer or a technical Webflow SEO expert help you for a website rebuild. But if you don’t, there are resources online that can help you create high-performing and high-ranking pages.

Improve Usability and Flexibility

Adding on to the previous point. Make sure your website is physically welcoming and presentable. Your old site may be confusing for users to navigate, and your site may be displaying old info. Ultimately causing users to leave your site. Think of your online site as a “brick and mortar” store. You want users to have a pleasant journey and to fully understand the voice of your company. Not only should you make your site pleasant for external users to navigate, make sure your site is easy for your marketing team to update. Creating a new landing page, changing the formatting or sequence of page elements and adding new assets are all crucial tasks that a marketing team should easily be able to do. An old/outdated website can make this very difficult.When doing a website rebuild, make sure you use a content management system that can be accessible from the back-end of a website. This reduces the need of asking for a developer to make minor changes on your website. Here at Red Shark Digital we utilize Webflow. Webflow has a CMS that is easily accessible to internal marketers making it easy to adjust/update content on websites.

Improve The Quality and Volume of Leads

You may notice with an older site that your inbound leads have become stale. Inbound leads are important to any marketing funnel and your outdated website may be the reason they are being stifled. Consider expanding the type of content that is found on your website. Revamp your case studies and previous work to show what caliber of clients you work with. Consider utilizing video to help showcase your work. Video has been proven to capture audience attention quicker and hold the attention of users for a longer period of time. Ultimately it may come down to A/B testing to see what works best for capturing new leads. Do some testing before you perform your site rebuild so you can start reeling in valuable leads

Communicate Brand Values

Maybe your website simply doesn’t convey what your company is all about. Do users struggle to know your values when they read copy on your website? Freshen up your content with language that reflects your company. Update the structure of your site to provide a fresher, brighter look into the story you're trying to convey. Words matter just as much as a logo. Make sure you are consistent with your message throughout.

Is a Website Rebuild For Me?

Sometimes it may be beneficial to do a website redesign versus a complete website rebuild. Maybe your company just needs to update some content within your site or restructure the data you are showing to your users. It’s important to build your site with tools that will allow you to easily update your content. Tools like Webflow, a design tool that allows you to build websites visually make it easy to update and restructure your content. Contact Red Shark Digital today to see how we can help with your website rebuild!