Within your company, it should be instinctive to evaluate and upgrade ineffective, antiquated aspects. Just as you replace malfunctioning equipment with superior alternatives, or adopt improved processes to overcome obstacles, applying the same mindset to your company website is vital.
Embracing this perspective is crucial, as an outdated website can have significant financial repercussions in today’s digital landscape. Is your outdated website costing your business revenue? We will delve deeper to comprehend the compelling reasons why updating your company website is important.
Why Updating Your Outdated Website is Crucial?
An outdated website can lead to reduced conversion rates and traffic, resulting in fewer customers and sales. It also increases security risks and your brand reputation suffers. Therefore, preventive measures are vital. Our discussion highlights the importance of successful website development and provides actionable tips for boosting business success.
1. Losing Traffic From Mobile Devices
During your site’s last design iteration, terms like ‘mobile devices responsive’ or ‘mobile friendly’ likely cropped up. These refer to sites adapting and resizing for seamless navigation on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
If your website is outdated and its pages lack mobile device optimization, you’ll suffer significant losses in traffic and sales from mobile users. The inability to access your website on mobile devices leads to increased bounce rates and potential customers turning to your competitors.
In 2015, the shift from desktop to mobile users dominated internet traffic, prompting a shift in Google’s and other search engine rankings criteria. Just as Google prioritizes swift-loading sites, it also elevates mobile-friendly or responsive websites. This hierarchy renders non-mobile-friendly outdated websites increasingly obscure.
A non-mobile-friendly website guarantees the loss of prospects, customers, and sales. Hence, updating your outdated website is crucial.
Checking Responsiveness for Mobile Devices:
Take your smartphone and go to your website. If a website’s content appears minuscule, necessitating zooming for legibility and navigation, with links proving finicky to select using fingers – essentially a shrunken desktop version – your website lacks mobile-friendliness and responsiveness.
2. Unsupported Flash
Mobile users visiting an outdated website with Flash elements won’t be able to see it. To address this, consider replacing Flash with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Embracing responsive design to adapt your business website to all screen sizes is highly advisable. A responsive website automatically adjusts to various resolutions, ensuring optimal display on any screen size.
3. Losing Social Media Traffic
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube connect global audiences, offering significant promotional potential for your brand.
Social media marketing drives website traffic and customer acquisition. Leveraging these platforms as communication tools enhances your brand presence.
To optimize results, integrate social media sharing buttons into a blog with regular updates, facilitating rapid content dissemination and engagement. This amplifies visibility and supports broader business promotion efforts.
4. Negatively Affecting Your Brand
Crafting a remarkable business brand is challenging. Brand building demands patience, dedication, knowledge, experience, and skills. Establishing brand awareness can be time-consuming. Effective brand promotion attracts new and repeat clients.
Yet, an outdated website impedes brand awareness growth. Undoubtedly, it detrimentally affects brand and business success.
5. People Will Think You Are Out of Business
An inactive blog on your business site might lead customers to think your business is inactive too. An outdated website discourages purchases. So, you have to demonstrate ongoing improvements by regularly publishing fresh content, ideally weekly.
This commitment reassures prospects and existing customers, encouraging them to choose your products or services confidently.
6. Your Website Can Get Hacked
In 1996, ‘Hackers,’ a cult film, prophesied cyber-terrorists overrunning us, clad in lycra and dial-up connections. While that image has faded, the menace of hackers endures, posing a potential threat to your website. Google’s data reveals a 21% surge in hacked sites in 2022, with projections of continued increase in 2023.
What’s a hack? If your business website falls prey, it signifies unauthorized entry, often with malicious code installation, compromising your website and users’ devices, potentially leading to ransom scenarios.
Hacks employ various tactics, but laxity in safeguarding private data or letting your website languish invites breaches of security protocols. An outdated website becomes vulnerable to hackers, necessitating regular updates and the installation of up-to-date security plugins.
So you have to prioritize periodic password changes, enhancing website security and substantially reducing hacking risks.
Relevance to Search Engines Rankings?
With hacking incidents on the rise, search engines like Google and Bing now prioritize secure sites. Installing an SSL certificate, which encrypts your site’s data through a secure remote server, safeguards sensitive information for you and your visitors. The “year of SSL certificates” in 2017 reflected Google’s emphasis on SSL-certified sites, fortifying their status over unsecured counterparts.
Is Your Website SSL Certified?
Ideally, you’d recall arranging SSL installation with your IT department. The simplest method to confirm is by inspecting the URL: the presence of “https” instead of “http” indicates an active SSL certificate.
7. Slow Website Speed
We’ve each encountered the frustration of waiting an eternity for a page to load or, worse, believing it’s loaded only to have the layout jolt due to delayed elements. Tardy loading doesn’t just vex your visitors; it adversely impacts your search engine rankings. Search giants like Google aspire to present top-tier websites to users.
Consequently, if your website drags its feet, Google favors faster competitors. As rivals refresh and enhance their sites, your website lags, resulting in relegation to second or third-result pages. A perilous position, given that first-page contenders capture nearly 95% of traffic.
So, prioritize updates and speed enhancement for your outdated business website. Trim large media files, use speed optimization plugins, and consider a faster server. Swift action is crucial for optimal website performance.
Detecting Slow Website:
Speed assessment entails employing Google’s PageSpeed Tool: You can input your URL and click “Analyze.” Google’s analysis calculates your website’s speed. Scores under 60 warrant contemplating a website overhaul.”
8. SEO Neglect and Outdated Website is Costing You Money
Search engine optimization (SEO) encompasses diverse strategies that elevate your website’s search engine ranking. Unless you face zero competition, Search engine optimization is imperative for the visibility of your own website.
Outdated websites can significantly hamper your SEO efforts, whether due to non-SEO and mobile-friendly platforms, sluggish performance, lack of responsiveness or mobile device compatibility, or heightened vulnerability to hacking. The subsequent sections elaborate on these aspects.
SEO Feasibility Hindered by Platform Constraints:
Evaluate whether you or your team can enact changes to your current website. Is there a webmaster handling updates? Has the website remained static? Can access to the website be established? If your website’s creation dates back several years, its user interface might not align with contemporary design norms rendering it dysfunctional or inaccessible.
Alternatively, the platform it’s built on could impede even skilled SEO specialists from optimization attempts. Vital to search engine optimization and discoverability is the ability to update content. An outdated website or unsuitable platform hampers your business’s visibility.
9. Design Matters:
Aesthetics hold weight, though it might be an unpopular opinion. Imagine hiring someone for a job and they arrive disheveled, bloodshot, and reeking of alcohol. Their impressive resume would likely lose impact. Even in gritty professions, donning a uniform or presentable appearance during interviews remains an expectation.
Similar principles apply to your website’s appearance. Regardless of your enticing offers or compelling content, an unattractive and outdated website deters potential customers. Your website mirrors your professionalism; keeping it contemporary and appealing is paramount.
This is especially critical if your brand’s visual identity has been revamped elsewhere but not on your website. Seamless coherence across all marketing facets is anticipated by consumers – from ads to commercials, business cards, and notably, your website. Neglecting to align your website with a rebrand is akin to preparing for a major business meeting but forgetting to wear pants.
How to Tell if Your Website is Unattractive?
While some aspects involve personal taste, compare your website with competitors, particularly those who have updated theirs. Does theirs appear more inviting and mobile-friendly? Is readability improved? Do you envy its appearance? Are you hesitant to share your URL? If these resonate, your website might indeed need a makeover.
10. Complex Website Navigation:
Website navigation’s impact is subtle: when it’s overlooked and flawed, it disrupts everything. A poorly structured navigation of an outdated business website obstructs users from accessing desired information or revisiting viewed pages.
Navigation here refers to on-page links guiding website visitors between pages. Effective navigation features sticky menus with vital links on every page, aptly displaying parent pages after navigating through multiple layers of content. It’s about projecting organization, and structure, and offering web users a website roadmap.
Outdated Websites often harbor broken links, a common ailment. Causes range from content relocation without proper redirection to update-induced link malfunctions. A website riddled with broken links deeply discourages mobile users, prompting them to exit and seek alternatives.
Detecting Navigation Challenges:
Invite a friend unfamiliar with your website to navigate it and locate specific content. Their feedback will swiftly reveal usability or navigation hurdles.
11. Website Content Falls Short:
Few things frustrate me more than unfulfilled promises. Similarly, if your website’s content lacks value or fails to deliver on assurances, it taints your company and brand with negativity.
For instance, imagine clicking an article titled “Is Your Outdated Website Costing You Business Revenue?” You’d anticipate insights on how outdated websites affect business revenue, right? Yet, if the article merely advertises improving your new website without substantive explanations, it feels deceptive, leaving web users with adverse impressions of your brand.
Outdated content can initially attract but rapidly repel visitors. Moreover, an infrequently updated website suggests a lack of effort, leading customers to question your business’s vitality or even its existence.
Being perceived as outdated and uninformed is detrimental. An outdated website with outdated platforms or trends from years ago undermines your business’s credibility.
Detecting Outdated Content:
If it’s been six months or longer since your last update, your content might be out of date. Regularly revisiting your content is wise, especially in industries subject to evolving processes, ensuring accuracy.
Don’t Want to Update Your Website?
It’s tempting (and occasionally valid) to leave your website untouched as it ages. You might be reasoning: “We revamped it not long ago.” “The prior overhaul was pricey.” “We maintain it mostly due to tradition – our primary clientele comes via referrals.”
Unfortunately, the longer your website remains outdated, the more it jeopardizes your earnings. If you’re perusing this piece, it’s evident that the way information is sought has fundamentally transformed – people now resort to the Internet for nearly all significant decisions and transactions, including business-related ones.
This underscores the pivotal role your company’s online presence plays in your success, as technology forges ahead. The revenue potential is substantial.
What’s worse, an obsolete, antiquated, or outdated website isn’t a passive element on your business periphery, awaiting attention. It actively undermines growth by deterring clients, and potential hires, and hindering online discoverability.
Your website’s financial impact stems from two main sources: invisibility and customer aversion when visible.
Outdated Website is Costing Revenue Loss Due to Customer Turn-Offs
By some stroke of fortune or enchantment, your outdated website could land on Google’s first page. Promising, right? Yet, when visitors click and promptly exit, that’s a concern. Obsolete or unattractive websites repel visitors for various reasons: the dated appearance is unappealing, navigation is cumbersome, or the new website fails to offer frequently asked answers.
