When is it Time to Invest in a Website Redesign? 4 Signs To Look Out For

Maybe you’ve had the same website for the better part of a decade, or perhaps you have just rebranded and aren’t sure your current website branding matches your business anymore. Regardless of your situation, if you’ve found your way here, you’re asking yourself some variation of the question, “when is it time to invest in a website redesign project?” 

This post will cover the top four signs it might be time to put your old site out to pasture. 

What Goes into a Website Redesign?

Before we dive into our telltale signs that you should invest in a website redesign, let’s first discuss the mechanics of redesigning your website. What steps should you take when conducting a website redesign? To launch your new website, you’ll want to follow this simple, five-step process:

• Analyze: Analyze your site’s current performance. Identify weak points or KPIs that have been slipping. Ask yourself what is and is not working on your current website.
• Prioritize: With the trouble spots identified, your next step is to prioritize these challenges in order of importance or urgency. You can’t fix everything at once—what do you need to fix first?

• Define Goals: Without clearly defined goals, it will be challenging to determine whether or not your website redesign was a success. Set measurable goals and establish baseline metrics to compare. 

• Work in Sprints: Instead of working toward a whole site relaunch for months and then leaving it sit for the next five years, work in short sprints with specific, targeted goals.
• Launch: Launch, iterate, and optimize. When you do this step right, your new site can constantly be improving.

A website redesign requires an entire team of A-players. Who should you include on your website redesign team?  You’ll need to fill five essential job functions for your project to succeed. If you’re working with limited personnel, you can likely have a few team members wearing multiple hats, but you’ll need these functions fulfilled.

• A project manager to keep the project on time and on target. 
• A web or content strategist to ensure your new site's overall strategy and messaging is dialed.
• A copywriter to fill your pages with compelling, conversion-worthy copy.
• A designer to give your site the aesthetics and accessibility it needs to succeed. 
• A developer to handle the back-end technical work that will make your site hum. 

Signs That It’s Time to Invest in a Website Redesign

1. Your Website Doesn’t Provide Value to Visitors
2. Your Site Experience is Subpar
3. Your Website Doesn’t Play Nice with Google 
4. Your Numbers Aren’t Where You Want Them

How Much Does a Website Redesign Cost?

Before diving into the details of our top four signs you need a redesign, let's answer one last critical question: How much does a website redesign cost?

Remember that a website redesign is an investment. You don’t just want a slightly prettier version of your underperforming website—you need a new site that will get real results. That means you must plan to invest significant time and money.

If you complete your website redesign in-house, you’ll need to commit hundreds of hours in employee time. You’ll also need to invest in the appropriate design tools and ensure you have staff with the knowledge necessary to make your new site successful. You can also work with an outsourced web design team, which can run anywhere from $50-150 thousand for a top-performing website. 

How can you determine if a website redesign is worth the investment? Start by determining the lifetime value (LTV) of your average customer. Next, discover how many customers your current website generates by reporting on digitally attributed customers. Then, you’ll want to calculate how many additional customers you expect your website to generate over the next thirty-six months. 

Lean Labs guarantees our clients 10x growth in leads, opportunities, and sales over twenty-four to thirty-six months. Then simply multiply your LTV times the number of expected additional customers to find the anticipated profitability of the new website. If this number is greater than the cost of the redesign, then it’s time to pull the trigger. 

Example: Customer LTV= $5000. Current digitally attributed customers per month: 5. Expected growth in pipeline: 2x. Cost of website redesign: $100,000.

In this example, the redesign would result in an additional 180 customers over 3 years, for a profit of $900,000. The redesign investment would return at 9:1 after just 3 years. 

Armed with this information, we are now ready to dig into our list of the red flags that may show you it’s time to overhaul your company website. 

1. Your Website Doesn’t Provide Value to Visitors

The first indicator that you may need to invest in a website redesign is that your current site isn’t designed to provide value to visitors. 

Related: Price Vs. Unique Value: Which One Really Matters Most?

Brochure websites—or any site structure that screams Me! Me! Me!—just doesn’t cut it anymore. Instead of focusing your site’s copy around your brand and what you want from your customers, flip that idea on its head. What would make your ideal customer start nodding their heads and saying, “these guys get me”? 

Identify your target customers’ chief pain points and build your site to highlight that:

1. You empathize with their challenges, and
2. You can help them solve them.
   
   

2. Your Site Experience is Subpar

How is the user experience on your current website? The answer to this question has multiple layers—let’s examine each.

Firstly, how are the aesthetics on your site? Site experience is about more than aesthetics, but if your website is liable to give a visitor a neon-induced headache or looks like something straight out of a Windows ‘98 booklet, you may need to change.

Next, consider page speed. A full fifty-three percent of visitors will bail on any website that doesn’t load in three seconds. You can have the splashiest site with the best messaging in the world, but if your page speeds are too slow, your visitors won’t stick around long enough to find out. 

You also want to pay attention to the ease of navigation on your site. What are more visitors coming to your site looking for? Are those highly desirable pages easily available on your homepage navigation? If not, a potential customer is likely to click away from your site and go to the next Google result in the hopes that they’ll find what they need more easily there.

Lastly, ensure your site is fully functional on mobile. In the modern age, the mobile experience is critical. More than half of all web traffic is on mobile these days. That means, if your mobile experience is subpar, you’re as good as shutting your doors in the faces of more than half of your potential customers.

3. Your Website Doesn’t Play Nice with Google

As we established in our first red flag on this list, you need to design your site around your target customers… But your customers aren’t the only audience that matters. For your site to be successful, you also need to please Google.

If you’re optimizing for search engines and aiming to increase organic traffic to your site, you already know how important Google is. In short, your site needs to rank on search engines like Google. If you can’t rank in search engine results, new visitors will be hard-pressed to find your site.

Related: How Long Does It Take To Rank In Google? (How To Get The Snowball Effect)

Google takes numerous elements into account, including keywords, page speed, and core web vitals like visual page stability and ease of interaction. If your current site isn’t scoring well with Google, it may be a sign that it’s time for a redesign. 

4. Your Numbers Aren’t Where You Want Them

The last sign that you need a website redesign might just be why you found your way to this blog post: If your numbers aren’t where you want them to be. 

Consider your website metrics like overall traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rates. Are you consistently missing your targets? Has your traffic been heading down for the last few quarters? Maybe your traffic is fine, but ninety-plus percent of visitors are bouncing from your key pages. 

Regardless of your specific struggle, if your numbers are lower than you want them to be, you’re likely getting outperformed by your competitors. It may be time to redesign your website to get back in the game.

When is it Time to Invest in a Website Redesign? Get The Tools You Need

Did you find yourself nodding a bit too much for comfort while reading through this post? If so, then it might be time to invest in a website redesign for your business. When you nail your website redesign, you can enjoy benefits like more traffic, better conversion rates, and higher-quality leads.

If you’re eager to experience these benefits for yourself but know you don’t have the time—or the budget—to do a total overhaul on your site right now, we’re here to help. 

Our Website Transformation Toolkit can show you how to increase your conversion rate within 30 days without scrapping your site and starting from scratch. Check out our free resource today to learn how to turn your website into a conversion machine.