When is it time to upgrade your website?

Once our websites have been online for a while we start asking ourselves if it’s time for a “revamp”. A redesign, a rebuild, a brand new website, as it were.

Sometimes it’s because we can’t leave well enough alone, but often it’s due to the simple fact that our websites have aged and something about it requires updating.

So, if you find yourself asking why your website isn’t performing better, or realize that it does need improvement and you’re simply not sure where to start, continue reading…

Let’s determine if it’s time to upgrade your website!

When it’s time to upgrade your website

The following scenarios are typically what predicts a website redesign or rebuild, and you’re likely to fall into one or more of these categories:

Brand change

Undergoing a new logo design, changing your branding colours, fonts, and other visual assets may have you contemplating redoing your website as well.

Content overhaul

If you’re revising your sitemap, pages, and copy, it may feel like a great time to redesign and develop a new iteration of your website that aligns with your new strategy.

Service or product change

Launching a service or product may require a revised look for your website to better showcase and feature the newest contribution to your brand.

Technical SEO requirements

If you’ve had a website audit come back outlining some functional improvements to how your website is fundamentally built, it may be worth investing in a new website altogether.

Responsive/mobile requirements

While rare these days non-responsive websites mean they load well in a desktop browser but not so well in a mobile browser. Your website should be user-friendly across all devices!

💡 Tip: Some analytical traffic tracking tools can identify what device and/or browser users have installed when viewing your website. This can help you recognize how much of your website traffic is on desktop vs mobile, or if an untested browser is heavily used.

Accessibility requirements

Depending on the level of violations that a scan marks for remediation, you may opt to rebuild vs editing and testing for accessibility.

Outdated frameworks, limited functionality or security

If your website relies on keeping databases, servers, frameworks, and plugins fully updated (hint: all WordPress sites do!), it may be more cost-effective to start from scratch than to fix an outdated server.

When it’s not time to upgrade your website

While there are lots of scenarios to argue for upgrading your website, there are plenty of cases where you’re better off not…

Budget

If edits to your existing website are cost-friendly by comparison, and they resolve any outstanding priority issues, stick with what you got!

Until you have a strategy, there is no sense in reinventing the wheel without a driver.

Using a Theme

If your website was built utilizing a theme or customizer of sorts, it might actually be possible to change layouts, swap colours, try different fonts – all without installing something new.

💡 Tip: A staging server can be good to use in this scenario as it will allow you to build, edit, and test your alternate website on a separate URL from your live site, then you can replace versions as needed. Check with your hosting provider for staging server access.

Missing assets

There are steps that you should complete before ever reaching the design or development stage of your website, and this includes revamps.

You may already know your website is outdated. It lacks responsiveness on mobile devices, the logo is low-quality, and the content hasn’t been edited since it originally launched. Your first step is NOT putting together a new website right away.

You should be tending to your logo file, content and copy, sitemap, and a few other steps before concerning yourself with what your website even looks like.

Spam submissions

Just because you received an unsolicited email addressed to Sir/Madam that proceeded to lay into your website, whether it was about a lack of SEO, video, or poor content, doesn’t mean it’s real.

Scare tactics are used in spam, especially if the spammer is trying to get a response or have you click a link of some sort.

Generally, if a legitimate professional is going to cold-call someone, they’ll sort out the name of the person they’re reaching out to, at the very least. So, most of these can be ignored.

Are they wrong? Not necessarily. You might happen to have ways to improve your SEO, or you might already know video content is popular on social media, none of that is rocket science.

But these random emails should not be what lights that fire under your you know what.

How to review your website for upgrade needs

If it’s been a decade since your website was made, it’s likely time that you invest in a new one. But what about the in-between? The times when you’re mulling over a website redesign but just aren’t sure…

Manual website review

While you may not notice some intricacies that a professional will, you can come up with a lot of great feedback and scope of work by manually reviewing your website.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you use CTAs (call-to-actions) throughout your site, inviting users to take action whether by internal links, buttons, contact/email, phone calls, etc.?
• Do users have to scroll too far before there is a break-up of content and layout?
• Does each page have its own focus content, or are multiple topics competing with each other for value on the page?
• Are any images, text, and other content elements difficult to see or read?
• How does your website respond when it’s viewed on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices?
• Do you notice any errors in functionality or layout when viewing your site?

While answering these questions, start making notes about what you find as these will potentially help you form your search engine queries when troubleshooting how to remedy.

Example:

1. After reviewing your website you’ve determined that you have some images that appear pixelated (low-quality) and other images that take much longer to load than others.

2. You make notes and search for something like “how to resize images for my website”. The search results then give you information, helpful resources, and supply working examples. Like my post, Edit and optimize images for web and social media.

3. You learn the difference between JPG and PNG, why images need to be saved at smaller dimensions for web than for print use, and you optimize and reupload your website graphics ensuring the quality and loading times are good. Well done, you!

I could easily keep adding to the list of example questions to ask yourself, because the tricky part about manually reviewing your website to determine if it requires a redesign or rebuild, is that you don’t know what you don’t know!

Some web designers and developers like myself offer consulting or AMA (ask-me-anything) hours to help clients like yourself determine choices and recommendations for their websites.

I started doing this because, like myself, many other small business owners and creatives are DIY-ing when they start out, whether for budgetary reasons or, more popularly, because they have an initial interest in working on their website. At least the “fun” parts, anyway…

So, by offering 1:1 coaching services, individuals have the opportunity to sit in on a virtual call, share screens, and review some of the more perplexing steps they’ve encountered while working on their website alone.

This could be a great compromise that allows you to continue working on your own but have a mentor or check-in to review your work, answer your questions, and help you brainstorm throughout the process.

Professional website review

There’s much to be said for experience here, because a lot of different areas can be covered in a professional website review.

An audit will essentially give you a report, outlining what your website can improve upon. These recommendations typically cover:

• Accessibility
• Search engine optimization
• Design, user experience
• Responsiveness
• Content, copy, voice
• Technical functionality

You’re likely to get a lot of feedback you wouldn’t have come across in your own review unless you were aware of what to look for, this is where a professional website audit can be extremely helpful.

While you are paying a fee to essentially get information back, it could be what saves you more money from sinking into an outdated build, or inflating your website budget when you don’t need to.

An audit can also be budget-friendly by taking the manual review off your plate, simply giving you the results to consider, and saving you the research time to educate yourself.

Once you have data and information back about your website review, you can easily start separating the steps that you are familiar or comfortable doing versus outsourcing. At the very least, you’ll already have a plan when sourcing external support.

So… when is it time to upgrade your website, again?

I’ve covered when you should upgrade your website, from massive brand or content overhauls, to outdated technicalities and accessibility concerns.

I’ve also covered when you may not necessarily need to upgrade your website, like when you don’t have the budget, or are missing important project assets.

No website and scope is created equal. Your website could very well use a revamp, but if your budget doesn’t allow it then it is best to see where else you can make improvements.

Making a priority list or tracking the reasons that have led you to assume you need a new website can be helpful for you, and to the professional you reach out to.

Because at the end of the day, there is more that goes into your website than just the design and build.