When to Update or Rebuild Your Website

The world is moving and changing faster and faster these days. Studies have shown that you have only three seconds from the moment a visitor lands on your website to convince them to stay and investigate further. In this fast-paced world, first impressions are paramount. Of course, this means that it’s extremely important for your website to grow with you, your business, and the latest technology.

This leaves many wondering: Is it time to update my website? Or start from scratch with a whole new website? Here are some general guidelines:

Things that require a website facelift:

New Content
If the content on your website no longer accurately reflects your business and your mission (or if it never did!), it’s definitely time to update. If you’re happy with the overall structure and flow of your website and you have a responsive website (see below), it’s possible that you can just give your website a facelift instead of rebuilding the whole thing. These content changes may include a new logo, new color schemes, and new written content, among other things.

Adobe Flash
Flash has had issues for years, ranging from security to performance. With many superior alternatives available, there’s no reason for Flash to be on any website.

Things that might require rebuilding your website include:

Advances in Technology
It seems like there are new technologies and ways to improve your website every day. But every once in a while, one of these improvements gets adopted en masse. For example, it wasn’t all that long ago that websites were not responsive (automatically adjusting content for screen size). But once that technology became readily available, almost overnight, almost all new websites were responsive. And not too long after that, Google decided to give priority to responsive websites in searches. So at that point, if you had an older, unresponsive website, you were at a huge disadvantage. This type of thing would be an important reason to upgrade to a new website, even if all of the content remained the same.

Functionality
If your website cannot support all of your business’s online needs in an intuitive, user-friendly way, you should look into rebuilding. Maybe you need an online store or to accept appointments through the website. Maybe your site just needs to be easier to navigate. Occasionally these kinds of things can be incorporated into an existing website, but they will often require (re)building a site from scratch.

Because nobody can predict what advances will be made in the future or which of those advances will have a large impact, it’s a good idea to keep your finger on the pulse of new technology. This will help you determine when you may need to look into something a little further, or even update or rebuild your website. Of course, staying subscribed to our newsletters is an easy way to do this. Since we eat, sleep, and breathe website design, we are always researching the latest and the greatest ways to give our clients the most up-to-date advantages possible – from cyber security and search engine optimization to social media marketing and branding.