Investing in a website redesign can be expensive, intimidating, and scary. But online sales and the omni-channel experience are crucial to success now more than ever before. Your website plays a pivotal role in captivating your audience and converting them into customers. Is it doing its job? How do you know when you need to do a major overhaul?

If you have noticed these four signs, it’s definitely time to make sweeping changes. Your business can’t afford to ignore them.

1. Your company’s brand doesn’t shine through on your website

2. Your traffic is high but you have poor bounce and conversion rates

3. You need more functionality to service your customers properly

4. Your site isn’t responsive to mobile devices

1. Your company’s brand doesn’t shine through on your website 

Your business is a living and breathing being with a soul. You’ve worked so hard to make it that way so customers get to know, like, and trust you. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’ve experienced growth and change. As you reflect on your journey, you have to ask yourself: Is your website still an extension of your brand?

Remember that your brand is not just a logo. It is the aggregate of your company’s visual elements, voice, and created experiences identifying who you are as a company. That’s what makes it so powerful! Here’s how to examine whether or not your audience understands your brand identity on your website:

• Colors, fonts and photography: Are they consistent with your brand guidelines? Do they match your brick and mortar store’s design and what you put out on social media?

• Marketing Copy: Have you figured out a clear, concise, and scannable way to communicate what customers need to know about you and your products—in your brand’s voice? 

• User Experience: Start with any link you use to drive your audience to your website. Does your website welcome and guide your audience through their customer journey in the same way your best salesperson would?

If your branding needs to be reined in, snag a free branding strategy guide from my favorite graphic designer and brand expert, Letterform Creative.

2. Your traffic is high, but you have poor bounce and conversion rates

Driving traffic to your website is no easy feat. Between social media posts, email and text message campaigns, SEO efforts and more, you’ve put blood, sweat, and tears into getting customers through the door. To make sure your hard-earned traffic doesn’t fall off to the wayside, start with your bounce rate.

Audiences “bounce” when they exit the landing page without interacting with it. The typical e-commerce bounce rate is 20% - 45%. The lower the rate, the better. Is your bounce rate high? Try these tips from HotJar.

When your audience sticks around, but your conversion are below average (estimated average is between 1% - 4%), you may not be attracting the right traffic, your audience may be confused by the design, or they’re not properly led to the next step in their journey to conversion. You’ll need to evaluate the user experience to see if it’s the kind of experience your audience wants.

Use the Shopify Analytics on your Shopify dashboard. Go to your Sessions by Landing Page Report under Behavior to know where customers are landing, and what they do from there.

 Edit columns to view these metrics:

• Visitors

• Sessions

• Bounce rate

• Added to cart

• Sessions converted

• Conversion rate

Sort by conversion rate and check what type of page converts the most. Sort by visitors to check what type of page most of your visitors are landing first. The page types with the most traffic and least conversions should be considered for redesign.

3. You need more functionality to service your customers properly

If you’re a retailer, recreating the IRL experience online is tough. It’s always easier to make a sale with more education or when customers to touch, smell, taste, or hear products. Create a more immersive web experience by adding more functionality. Depending on your product type(s) you may want to consider:

• Video

• Customer Service Chat

• Product Reviews

• Pre-Orders and Restock

• Wishlists, Gift Registries, and Send-a-Hint Feature

• List of Stockists and Store Locators

• Wholesale Accounts

• Loyalty Programs

• Fillable Forms

Don’t forget about design. Adding functionality is great, but every function you add needs to look as good as it works. Think about how your website is your best salesperson on a larger scale. It should always look on-brand while being extremely helpful to deliver a shopping experience that’s easy and enjoyable!

4. Your site isn’t responsive to mobile devices

Mobile Commerce has risen to 38.5% of total retail e-commerce in 2021 and is projected to rise another 5.7% in the next three years. You can see your own mobile device stats by going to Analytics and opening the Sessions by Device report. Just how much more of your traffic comes from mobile devices? 

It’s too easy for Shopify store owners to only look at their store through their desktop. The desktop dashboard makes all the backend work so easy. But in reality, your shoppers are discovering you and shopping your site from their mobile devices. 

Do another test of the user experience on mobile. Are the images, text, and layout responsive to your screen? Are all of the functional features showing up properly? Is the checkout process quick and painless? 

If the answer to any of the above questions is no, you have to remove the barriers that are keeping your audience from converting on mobile.

Seeing the signs?

If your reaction to this article is OMG, this is my business, that’s okay! It just means it’s time to shake things up in a very good way. Starting is the easy part… you just get to vent about your website. Make a list of the visual and functional issues and knock out the easy stuff first? Still stuck? Schedule a free initial consultation with us, or consider requesting a complete website audit. The only way from here is up!