Here are 11 signs that your website needs a redesign to promote your coaching, consulting or teaching business. Let’s dive in…
1 You Are Hesitant To Make Any Changes To Your Website
One change and everything crashes? If you don’t dare to add content to your own website or change design features yourself because you are afraid that something might break and you can’t fix it anymore, then your website is running on an outdated, not user-friendly content management system. And it hasn’t been maintained well over the last few years. This is always the most obvious sign that your website needs a redesign.
Maybe you even want to consider a new website with an intuitive, easy-to-use backend. For example, I offer my tech-shy clients a simplified backend where they can easily add content themselves. While I keep a separate administrator account where I keep all the more challenging backend tech. That is why my clients can work on their website content completely independently, knowing that everything else won’t cause them any trouble.
2 Your Website’s Design Is Outdated
Your website is the gateway to building relationships with potential clients. However, if your website’s design looks outdated, it can negatively impact their first impression of you and your business.
As new best practices evolve, the design and functionality of a website should be upgraded to match the raising expectations of your future clients. Keep in mind that modern website design isn’t just about how good your website looks. It’s how it feels to use too. This is what “shouts” professionalism.
With this in mind, think about if your website needs a redesign to let your content shine so that potential clients are enticed to learn more about you and your services.
3 Your Website Is Difficult To Navigate
How using a website feels, is also down to its navigation. The navigation can affect nearly every aspect of your website’s performance – from the overall user experience to its search engine ranking.
When a potential client visits your website, they should be able to find your most important content within a few clicks. Also, you might have quite a few different types of users visiting your website, each expecting something different. Does your current website cater for all of their individual needs? Can people easily complete the actions you want them to, e.g. contacting you or booking a free consultation straightaway?
If you are not too sure about that, redesigning the navigation and structure of your website is the answer. Mapping out the client journey on your website should be your starting point.
4 Your Website Is Not Mobile Friendly
More than half of website traffic comes from a mobile device. Most of your potential clients will view your website on their phones. And many of them get the newest phone model every two years.
A responsive or mobile-friendly website automatically changes its layout based on the screen size of any device. This ensures an ideal user experience from the oldest to the newest mobile phones or tablets.
Furthermore, Google ranks the mobile-friendliness of websites when displaying search results. This gives mobile-friendly websites a leg up regarding their visibility on search engine results pages.
If your website isn’t mobile friendly in every aspect, this not only causes a poor user experience. It also limits the number of potential visitors to find your website when searching for the services you offer.
There are great free tools to evaluate your current website’s mobile compatibility: Google Speed Insights or Website Planet’s Responsive Checker
Take the results seriously, as poor mobile friendliness clearly is a sign that your website needs a redesign to make your online coaching, consulting or teaching business successful.
5 Your Website Has A High Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate is always alarming because visitors are leaving your website too soon.
This is something most of my clients aren’t actually aware of. When reading their website stats, if at all, they only focus on the number of visitors each month. But the bounce rate is quite interesting as it is a percentage calculated by dividing the number of single-page sessions by the number of total sessions on your website. So it shows how many people left the website after seeing just one page. They came onto the website and left again without taking any action.
The average website bounce rate is between 40-55%. Ideally, these visitors read at least something on the one page they are visiting before leaving. If your website has a bounce rate of 56% or greater, it indicates that users cannot find what they want. This is a surefire way to push potential clients to your competitors’ websites.
They also might be experiencing technical errors. Bugs happen over time, and there might be quite a few undetected ones. Are your buttons working at all? Is your navigation displaying correctly on any device?
If you doubt it, your website needs a redesign with a clear focus on measuring the bounce rate.
6 Your Website Isn’t Optimised For SEO
A high bounce rate almost always means the content is not optimised for search engines either. Consequently, Google sends only people to your website who are actually looking for something else.
Or Google does not send anyone at all which is also harming your business.
To increase the ranking, you should do some on-page search engine optimisation across your website. Research and use specific keywords in your content. Also add links within your website and to high-quality external websites too. Next, carry out off-site activities, mainly asking other high-quality websites to link back to your website (backlinks). Read more about SEO-Optimisation for Coaches, Consultants and Educators
All this improves the quantity and quality of your traffic, ultimately leading to more website visitors who want what you offer. As a result, they will spend more time on your website going from one page to the next. Your bounce rate goes down! Google will measure and reward this as well. Eventually, more and more people will be shown your content after all.
Often it is quite challenging to optimise an existing website and its content for search engines because one needs to make radical changes, e.g. rewriting most of the content, exchanging links and simplifying the navigation.
Any new website will be outlined to be found on Google right away.
The takeaway here is: never skip SEO. Through a good selection of key words and great backlinks, you will gain a constant stream of people visiting your website for a reason, meaning you’ll be generating lots more leads – it’s simple maths, really.
7 Your Website Is Slow To Load
Page speed is another factor that Google measures. It is part of the so-called core vitals (key performance indicators) a website should achieve to rank high in search results. Meaning: You can have the greatest content but if your website is loading too slowly, Google won’t send anyone your way.
While this sounds very unfair to website owners without a profound technical knowledge, Google is only responding to today’s expectation that a website loads nearly instantaneously. According to a study, 55% of visitors abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Additionally, a website’s conversion rate (measuring if visitors buy something on a website) drops 5% with each additional second of load time.
Again, it is very difficult to increase the page speed of a heavy old website running on an outdated system. So if the majority of your web pages take longer than 3 seconds to load, you should consider a complete relaunch with designing for page speed being the top priority.
8 Your Website Has Broken Links
Broken links, leading to a 404-error page, create higher bounce rates but also can negatively impact your google results. Google is counting them!
To check if your website has any broken links, enter your URL at www.brokenlinkcheck.com Once you find some broken links, go and fix them. Redirect any old URLS to their new target URL so that people coming via a search engine don’t land on your 404 page. (And by the way, your 404 page needs a good design too. Add some links to redirect to your main pages, so that lost visitors quickly find something.)
However, if you have a larger website full of broken links, this clearly could be a sign that your entire website content needs an overhaul.
9 Your Website Contains Outdated Content
This brings us straight to the next point. Unsurprisingly, a website with outdated content will struggle to attract and retain visitors. This is usually accompanied by the fact that you do not offer any new content, giving visitors no reason to ever return.
Taking the time to produce up-to-date content at least monthly will increase your website’s google ranking and improve the overall quality of your website. Furthermore, your target audience may have changed over time, so there’s a good chance your website content needs to be refreshed in this respect too.
But again, only a website with a clear structure, fast page load speed, and a convenient content management system will be able to take on lots of new content. Therefore, before producing any new content, your website needs a redesign. Consider a new website as it will offer you more room to grow – your content and your business.
10 Your Website Doesn’t Have Any Call-To-Actions
People might visit your website, but are they also doing what you want them to do? Booking a session with you or signing up for your newsletter?
If the majority does not, then you need more explicit call-to-actions. Tell people what to do next. This could be buttons saying “Book Now” or a sign-up form to your newsletter.
Call-to-actions are directly linked to your website’s purpose, presuambly to convert website visitors to paying clients. So all your call-to-actions should lead to a measurable conversion rate.
Conversion also happens when people connect with you and the services you offer. If they don’t connect, they won’t follow your call-to-actions either. A website redesign is the perfect time to re-evaluate your core message. Re-work your copy to ensure it resonates with your target audience and guides them directly to your call-to-actions.
With users making their decisions at lightning speed, it is vital to ensure your core message is sharp and clear, shining through on every page. Every aspect of your website must reflect this message, followed by explicit call-to-actions.
11 You Have Technically Outgrown Your Website
As your coaching, consulting or education business grows, it’s likely that a time will come when you would like to automate specific tasks to save some time. This could mean integrating a shop where you sell your own courses to serve more clients or a password protected area with exclusive or even personalised content.
Creating such higher-level functionality requires a stable technical setup. If your website suffers from any of the points mentioned above, it might be wise upgrade before investing in complex integrations. Thus, a growing business often means your website needs a redesign.
My Website Needs A Redesign. But What Is The Shelf-life Of A New Website?
Because the internet is rapidly evolving, it’s always crucial to employ regular website maintenance and re-assess the design, functionality, and content every few months. This will help you stay on top of the latest best practices and avoid any bugs or poor performance issues.
If a website is a few years old, yet you’ve invested regularly to keep it up-to-date, and you are still converting a high number of visitors into clients, then you could well keep going on like that for many years to come. But if your next website is eventually suffering from any of the same ailments as your previous one, then once more it will be hard to fix all these issues and bugs one by one and a relaunch will be your only option.
Pay attention to your new website’s well-being. Otherwise, after 2 to 3 years, you’re back to square one. Treat your website like your top sales manager, which it is in my opinion, and lengthen its life span acccordingly. In today’s digital landscape, your website is the hub where prospective clients coming from all other channels will visit to learn more details and determine whether they want to buy.
Conclusion
With today’s internet users dipping in and out of their devices, your website needs to be fast, super-easy to navigate, and an enjoyable experience. If not, you’ll lose potential business – no question about it. You website needs a redesign or even more? Check out my Website in a Week offer or meet me online for a free consultation. Happy to help!
