We live in the technological age, when almost everything can be found and ordered online. No company can go without a website where one may find whatever he or she wants. In order to attract new clients and build trust from the first acquaintance with your business, your web page should be easy to access and fast to load. In a word, it should provide your online audience with the most enjoyable experience on the web.

New trends come and go. In order for your web resource not to look outdated, it needs some redesign. Technology, as well as interaction with social media, is changing all the time. So, keeping track of the latest innovations in your field is a must.

If you think that redesigning a website means only changing the way it looks and feels, I need to assume that is not quite right. Website redesign goes much deeper into the functionality, structure, and presentation of your web resource. It also greatly changes the way your website loads and how fast you’ll be able to update it on a daily basis.

Reasons for Redesigning a Website

So, how to decide whether your website needs a redesign? Consider these basic questions that should help you with decision-making.

Does your company page have a modern look?

Have you ever thought that web design and fashion have many things in common? People follow the latest trends on the catwalk, borrow some ideas and apply these to their web projects. The same deals with web design. In order to engage new clients in and make people stay on your web page, you need to keep it up-to-date, bringing some trendy hues to the look of your brainchild. A website with modern look will help you build trust much faster than an outdated resource with poor graphics and a few catchy elements.

Is it visible to search engines?

How to find it out? Simply go to Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine and try to find the products or services you are selling or simply put your company name in the search bar. Did your company page show up on the first page of search results? If not, then you might need some effective search engine optimization for your website.

Does is take much time to load your page? Modern users won’t wait for longer than five seconds for a website to load. They will simply get bored and disinterested, and leave for another web resource that is much faster to load and more user-friendly.

Try to find out the reason of slow page load or just hire a pro web master to help you manage this. In most cases, web resources that take too much time to load simply need a redesign that would allow for less loading of elements like imagery, fonts, etc.

Is your website responsive? It is no longer enough to develop a site for desktop devices only. With the growing popularity of various handheld gadgets, we need to make our web resources device-friendly as well. Otherwise, this would result in poor conversions and fewer visitors.

Is your site properly working on different gadgets? Can its content be equally seen by people using smartphones and tablets? If you can’t give positive answers to these questions, then it’s high time to think about redesign.

How easy do you find it to update your site?

Do you update your web resource on a daily basis? Can you recollect the last time you did it? If you don’t have time, money or patience to update your website, maybe you should better consider switching CMS? Picking the right content managing system you will forget about paying thousands of dollars to your web master and waiting for weeks and months in queue.

If your website meets some of the aforementioned points, then most likely you will need to contact a web master to help you find out what slows down your page loads or what makes people leave. Maybe it’s all about the content you’ve shared and updating it with something more relevant for your readers would help solve this issue. As practice shows, if you positively answered two or more questions from this list, a website redesign is a way to go to achieve success.

Does Site Redesign Mean CMS Switch?

It’s a common practice that clients ask web masters to redesign their website just because those look outdated or don’t seem to be user friendly. In such a case, they are often advised to change for a better CMS that would provide them with faster load speeds and better functionality than a custom-built one. Not many of us agree to that, claiming that it is must simpler to apply changes to the current design with a click of a button, without the need to go through a range of new, unknown steps. So, does website redesign really equal switching CMS or one can easily upgrade the old one?

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Many people are afraid of switching to a new CMS since this would mean that they would have to start from scratch, learn about its functionality, and find out how to make their websites based on it look smarter and more up-to-date. However, a brand new CMS would bring you much more long term benefits, like spending less time on uploading new content, refreshing your website design in a few clicks, customizing it the way you wish, etc. The majority of the modern popular content managing systems have a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) layout, which is really convenient in work.

Reasons to make a CMS switch include:

If you are using an outdated table-based layout, than it’s time to look for something new. Search engines prefer the clean source code of CSS layouts as well as mobile friendly websites built with fully responsive designs.

Your CMS is not mobile-friendly.

If your old CMS is hard to use and your marketing team is unhappy with that.

Your company has grown bigger and you need a more advanced version of CMS for your website.

Anyway, it’s always up to you to decide whether it’s time to switch for a new CMS or a common redesign with a few minor changes would be enough to refresh the feel and look of your web resource.

How do you feel about changing CMS? Do you think it would have more benefits or pitfalls for your business? We’ll be happy to see your feedback in the comments section below.