The question for this episode comes from Ogden, Utah.
I’m asked not to use a name on this, so we will oblige. This is a great question that has an awful lot of answer to it. These answers are very quick and short, and if we get more detail from some of the questions about the questioner’s business, we can do an even more detailed response, but this is a great question and it brings up a lot of information. The question is; how often should our website be redesigned?
This is a great question in particular because small businesses are not using their websites to their fullest. It’s a crime because your website is the place where you get to do everything you could possibly want to do. Social media sounds great, and it is great as a marketing tactic. However, you are limited in your ability to brand yourself. You’re limited in the amount of content you can provide, even the amount of verbiage, and the size of images, and everything.
It’s all very limited as where on your website, you can do whatever you want. Just as an example, if you’re a restaurant that hasn’t had a website redesign in a while, or you don’t have a website, over the last year with the pandemic, you’re a dinosaur. You lost more business than you can possibly imagine. That even goes for people who say, “I have a website, people are ordering off my website,” but it hasn’t been redesigned and made current so that it’s easy to do things like order online and do business with you.
You are a dinosaur and you are absolutely losing money. I guarantee it. How often should your website be redesigned? In my opinion, a redesign should occur every 12-18 months. Now, of course, you can Google all of these questions and you’re going to get a myriad of answers. Here’s the thing, be careful of who’s giving you the answer.
If it’s a website design company, which I have owned by the way, then you might think, or have to assume, or at least consider that the website design company is saying, “You need to have this done more often than you might need it done,” because that’s the service that they sell. Now, the reason I say every 12-18 months is because over time, if you are using your website to its fullest, first of all, it’ll be one of the most effective and most cost-efficient marketing tools you have.
Investing in it should not be difficult. That doesn’t mean go break the bank every year, but what it does mean is the reason I say that every year, year and a half, someone needs to redesign their website is because of this; technology changes so fast. There are always new tools and throughout the course of a year or 18 months, there are going to be new needs and you’re going to shoehorn them into your website.
Your website is going to start having content that isn’t formatted all that well, and it just doesn’t look as great as you’d want it to. It’s not going to be the representation of your brand, the way you want it to be the reputation of your brand over time. It happens to everybody happens to me. It happens to me. It happens to every business I have ever worked for, so don’t think that you’re going to escape it.
Now, if you’re a designer and a website designer, of course, you can redesign your website whenever you want. Now, that’s not very many people in this question and answer is not for you, but at the end of the day, you have to realize that this is the center hub. When you’re on social media, for the most part, you’re sending them to your website. When you’re advertising in any other way, shape, or form, you are sending people to your website.
Your website is the center cog in people finding you through search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It is a vital component to marketing. If you are struggling with marketing and you have a crap website, or you have no website, I can tell you that’s where you need to start. It makes advertising a million times easier. I can give you my story in one sentence and say, “Read more here at my website where I can tell you the whole story ad nauseum.”
In my opinion, every 12 to 18 months, some companies, if a website isn’t your primary thing, and let me just say that that’s not up to you, whether it’s your primary thing. It is up to your customers and your prospects as to whether your website should be your primary vehicle. Not up to you at all. Stop thinking if your customers need to access a website in order to do business with you. Then you need a website, and you need to maintain it. If you have lower traffic, and there aren’t a ton of people coming to your website all the time, then I would say you can go two years. More than that, you’re going to start looking dated and more than that, you will have things crammed into your website that don’t fit anymore, that don’t look good that are going to make it look like junk. You don’t want to look like junk.
Answer to the question, how often should I redesign a website? In my opinion, if I’m giving a broad based answer across the board, I would say every 12-18 months. Thank you for your question, and if you have a question, you’re welcome to go to totallyhype.com and fill out our question form and I will answer your question as well.
