How Old Is Too Old for a Website
One of the big mistakes companies tend to make is waiting too long to revamp the design of their website until something affects business, causing them to drop the neglect of their site.
A brick-and-mortar retailer will clean up their store every day they show up to work, but it’s normal for a business website to go months without an update.
Is Your Site Mobile-Friendly?
One of the easiest ways to find out if a site is outdated is to check if it is mobile-friendly or not. This means assessing how well the site displays and performs on both tablet and smartphone screens.
At present, mobile-friendly websites usually get between 50-70% of traffic coming from mobile gadgets. Therefore, if your website does not use a mobile responsive design, it could end up costing you a lot of potential web traffic, and consequently, good business since it will also be a cause of frustration in the customer experience you offer your clients.
Are You In Need of Maintenance?
Managing your website involves checking up on the pages regularly. It is not a “set it and forget it” effort. Just like you would with a physical storefront, you need to do maintenance checks ever so often in order to keep the website functioning as it should.
This will help you provide your clients with a satisfying customer journey. A poorly maintained website will only result in a site that is very slow and in extreme cases, does not load at all.
At times, such problems are the result of poor hard-coding from certain customized features or functionalities, or outdated plugins. It could even be large-sized images in a blog but these issues often end up being server-related and you’ll have to reach out to your web hosting service provider.
How Secure Is Your Site?
Evaluating a website’s security will most definitely affect your website’s overall performance. Unfortunately, this is another area of expertise that involves a competent web developer.
Even if your website is performing well, security checks a few times every year is a good idea. You need to confirm if your website’s security systems are up to date. You also need to check if your site is being backed up, how often it does, and that the server hosting your website is secure
Your website is your digital office. The slightest ounce of protection can cost your small business a lot of money.
Does It Work as You Want?
It may come off as a stupid thing to ask, but how many times do we find a business owner with a website in a state of denial about if one of their most significant assets is efficiently serving his or her business needs and goals.
Most times the answer is a complicated one since there is a lot of room for “potential”. This assessment needs the expertise of an internet marketing expert who is well versed with search engine optimization (SEO).
Is Your Website’s Design in Line With Existing Trends?
It may come off as a surprise, but it’s not by accident that this is the last concern on our list, and here’s why.
For starters, if your website is not so outdated and you started this list with updating your website’s aesthetics as the first point, you may not have made it to number five to realize that your website is truly in dire need of some crucial maintenance or a complete web overhaul in total.
Let design follows function as far as websites go. In light of the recent focus on mobile technologies, a good website must be designed for smaller screens. The traits of good design nowadays boil down to navigability, clarity, and simplicity.
There is, however, a significant amount a web developer would have to do to evaluate the functionality, long-term reliability, and security of a particular theme.
As such, you need to consider these five factors first. You may come to discover that what is holding you back from progress in the digital space has more to do with how your website works than what it looks like.