Technology

3 Huge Signs Your Website Needs A Makeover

Are you having problems with your website? Whether you’re noticing small glitches, inconveniences on the back end, or you’re just not getting the results you want, your site might be due for a makeover.

Here are three signs that indicate your website might need some changes.

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1. You’re Not Getting Many Conversions

The whole point of having a website is to get conversions, whether you’re aiming for sales, email signups, video plays, downloads, or something else. Whatever you want your visitors to do – if they aren’t doing it – something is wrong.

Tweaking your website to increase your conversion rate isn’t hard, but you need to diagnose the problem first. For example, you might be working with sales copy that just isn’t persuasive enough to convert. To get persuasive web copy that converts, you’d want to hire a web development company with a professional copywriter on their team.

Another example would be if your email signup form just doesn’t work. If there’s a technical error or glitch in your system, that’s generally an easy fix. However, if you’re not getting many signups, it might be that you don’t have an enticing offer. In that case, you’ll need to come up with an irresistible offer that your market can’t refuse.

2. You Have A High Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate (more than 70%) indicates that something about your website isn’t working as it should. It could be that you’re targeting the wrong visitors, there’s a technical issue with your website, or your visitors aren’t interested in exploring your website further.

Here are some ways to figure out why your bounce rate is high:

Check your bounce rates in the Audience Overview tab within Google Analytics. This will tell you your bounce rate for individual pages and tell you where to look deeper.
Look for yourself. Visit your web pages with a high bounce rate and see if you notice anything right away that would make people leave. If you have an entry pop-up, for example, check to see how easy it is to close. If it’s hard to close or the “X” isn’t visible, you’ll want to change your pop-up. Also keep an eye out for issues like 404 errors, blank pages, and scripting errors.
Check and fix your page loading speed. Google places a strong importance on site speed as part of its ranking algorithm for a reason – people want pages to load quickly. A slow-loading website can create a poor user experience. If your web pages take too long to load, visitors will bounce.
Check your Time Spent on Page and Average Session Duration metrics. These two Google Analytics metrics will tell you if your visitors are bouncing because they’ve gotten what they need. For instance, if you have a lot of information on your pages and people are staying for five or ten minutes, they’re likely absorbing your content and your bounce rate for that page isn’t a problem.
Revisit your title tags and meta descriptions. Visitors see your meta description and title tag in search results, and these elements need to be accurate. When visitors read this information and click on your link, they expect your content to match. If it doesn’t, they’ll usually bounce. If these elements don’t match your page content, either adjust them or change your content to be a better match.

Most of the time, you can fix a high bounce rate by improving your site’s content and/or design and user experience.

3. You’re Not Getting Organic Search Traffic

Unless you’re in a massively competitive industry, you should be able to get at least some organic search traffic. If you’re not generating a decent amount of traffic despite SEM and SEO efforts, there could be technical issues with your site.

The first place to start is to perform a site search in Google to see if your webpages are indexed. In your browser’s address bar, type the following and replace ‘mydomain.com’ with your actual domain name:

site:mydomain.com

Your search should return a list of results of all your webpages that have been indexed in Google. If you don’t see many of your pages, it means your site isn’t getting indexed, which means your site isn’t coming up in search results.

If your site is getting indexed, you probably just need more aggressive SEO from a professional marketing agency.

Pay Close Attention To The Signs

Most of the time, you’ll know when your website needs a makeover. For instance, you might notice a dip in sales, your visitors will bounce, or you’ll get multiple emails about technical problems. Pay attention to the signs and investigate because the sooner you fix the problem(s), the sooner you’ll get better results.