How to Convince Your Boss It’s Time to Redesign Your Website
A website redesign can be a hard sell. It takes time and it’s costly. But as your organization’s most important digital platform, if your site is falling short, it’s not doing its job.
By Colleen Ringer
In all likelihood, you already have a website. Great! Now, take a step back and give it a long, hard look. Is your site user-friendly? Is the navigation intuitive or clunky? Does the content reflect your current branding and organizational priorities? Is the backend flexible and easy to update? If the list of issues just keeps growing as you click around, it’s time for a website redesign.
“Website redesign” can be daunting words for upper management to hear, but not if you know how to talk to them about what a redesign really means and how it can strengthen the bottom line.
These six persuasive arguments can help you convince your boss it’s time to fix your website issues with a redesign.
Your website isn’t responsive.
Your website may look good on a desktop computer, but if the design doesn’t translate to mobile (think: pages not scaling correctly or need-to-know info getting lost in a sea of scrolling), you could be losing users within less than a few seconds of them arriving. Consumer activity on mobile devices surpasses that of desktop usage, so it makes smart business sense to invest in a mobile-friendly design.
Your website isn’t user-friendly.
Nearly 40% of users will leave a website if it takes too long to load or is difficult to navigate. Basically, if your site isn’t functioning the way it’s built to operate, users will have a negative experience and they’ll leave. Invite your boss to play around on the website as if they were a first-time visitor, and give them specific actions to take (the same ones you want users to take). Ask them to look for these possible issues that show your website needs a redesign:
- Broken links
- Error messages
- Slow load times
- Missing pages
- Photos or graphics that don’t load
Your website is out of date.
We don’t mean that the site employs old-school fonts or a 1970s color palette (although we’ll get to visuals later). We’re referring to out-of-date content, which conveys the message that either you don’t care about the website enough to keep it fresh — which can translate to you not caring about your target audience — or that you’re out of business.
As you guide your boss through the site, ask yourselves these questions:
- Is the staff list current?
- How old is the most recent blog post or news item?
- Are addresses and phone numbers up to date?
- Are the testimonials relevant?
- Is the product inventory updated?
- Does the copyright date represent the current year?
Your website ranks low for SEO.
If Google gives greater visibility to your competitors than it does to your organization on its search results pages, then you’re not ranking for the keywords that are relevant to your business and industry. Ask your boss to spend 10 minutes searching for terms that they think should be bringing awareness to the brand. A little online sleuthing can reveal where you rank — and where you don’t. A new website optimized for SEO goes a long way to improving where you land in Google search results.
Your website isn’t visually appealing.
First impressions matter. Let’s say your website checks all of the above boxes — it’s mobile friendly, the content is current, and it’s ranking well on Google — but if it isn’t visually appealing, you could be losing big on engagement. That’s because 75% of users admit to making judgments about a company’s credibility based on its website design. To help explain why you need to do a website redesign, suggest that your boss look for these design no-no’s:
- Content clutter
- Inconsistent use of fonts
- Hard-to read or overly small fonts
- Dated color schemes
- Dated graphics
- Stock photos
- Blurry photos
- Default icons instead of custom icons
Your website isn’t accessible.
All users should be able to access and navigate your website, including those using assistive technology like screen readers or speech-to-text software, as well as users who might have visual or hearing impairments. This means that your site needs to follow accessibility best practices, like including alt text for images, providing transcripts for audio and video assets, ensuring functionality via mouse and keyboard and more. You can test your current site’s accessibility here.
Does Your Website Need a Redo?
We build websites that are visually engaging, responsive, search engine optimized and accessible. Let’s discuss how we can strengthen your biggest digital asset.
Colleen has worked with clients large and small for more than a decade as a writer, editor and content strategist. She has managed content marketing programs for national and global brands, including hospital systems, universities and nonprofits. Before entering the world of content marketing, Colleen lived in the land of magazine publishing and wrote about architecture, design and travel.
As a mother of a video game-obsessed son, Colleen spends part of her free time learning about Fortnite and the other part trying to recruit her son to root for the Arizona Cardinals. She loves a good book, a strong iced tea and when her Fantasy Football team is winning.