3 telltale signs that you need a new website

These days a stylish, functional website is crucial if you want to excel in business and/or self-promotion.

But on the flipside of the coin - a poorly designed, outdated website can do serious damage to your brand or reputation.

Here are 3 key signs that you urgently need to overhaul or rebuild your website…

1- Your website has no clear function or purpose

Regardless of whether you build your website yourself or you hire a web designer to do it for you, one of the first things on the agenda should be some form of website mission statement. This mission statement should clearly express what you or your business hopes to achieve through your website.

Identifying your mission goals early in the planning process is critical because they should dictate the overall design and structure of your website.

So, take a good, hard look at your existing website. What are its mission goals? Is it achieving them?

If you find that the answers to these questions are vague at best then you definitely need a new website.

2- Visitors aren’t responding to your website’s ‘calls to action’

Ok, so you made it past the first sign and you can clearly identify your website’s function and purpose. This being the case, your site should feature numerous ‘calls to action’ consistent with your website’s mission goals.

So take a look at your website and identify the ‘calls to action.’ Now look at your overall traffic (Google Analytics is a great tool for this) and calculate how many visitors are actually responding to your website’s ‘calls to action.’

If only a tiny percentage of visitors respond to your ‘calls to action’ then you need a new website because your current site just isn’t doing its job.

3- You can’t update your own website content

Fresh content is vital if you want keep visitors coming back to your website. The single best way to administer website content is with a content management system (or CMS).

There are loads of content management systems out there. The best ones feature user-friendly, browser-based interfaces making it easy for anyone to manage and update content without requiring any particular technical expertise.

With a CMS you’ll also save yourself a lot of money by not having to call in a web designer every time you want to change something on your site.

So, does your existing website feature a content management system?

If it doesn’t then you could definitely benefit from a new website built around a content management system.