If your company has been around for a while, chances are your website is out of date. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens slowly but surely, a bit of deprecated code or out of date styling, and before you know it you have one of the dreaded “outdated” websites. You might think to yourself, “It’s not that big of a deal!”, but you’d be wrong. With outdated templates, old user interfaces, broken links, outdated security measures and multiple other problems, your outdated website is costing you much more money than you think.
A Recent study shows that you only have about 1/20th of a second to make a good first impression with viewers on your website. Your site visitors, after that tiny amount of time, will form a favorable or unfavorable opinion based on your site. That impression will transfer to their opinion of your business. That’s a lot riding on your website!
How to Know if your Website is Out of Date?
So, what can you do to make a good impression? Start by evaluating the current status of your website. Here are some clues that your site might need to get into the twenty-first century:
- Your website takes a long time to load
- Your site has a variety of different fonts, colors, and distractions that make it difficult to look at.
- Your website has large amounts of small font text that nobody wants to take the time to read
- Your website is full of broken links to old websites, news articles from years ago, or to redirect messages within your website
- Your website has outdated contact or company information and is hard to navigate
- You’re not optimizing your site for mobile devices or other devices with smaller screen
Why Don’t Business Owners Update their Site?
The fact of the matter is this: If your website is old, outdated, and hard to navigate, or just plain ugly, your leads will start to assume things. When people go to a website that looks like it’s from the 90’s, they usually assume that the company who runs it doesn’t care about keeping up with the times has questionable quality, or is even out of business!
There are several reasons business owners don’t update their site.
- You don’t have time
- Web Design costs too much money
- You don’t know how to do it
Tips for Updating Your Website
Whatever reason you have for keeping your site relegated to the 90’s, it’s time to let that go and take some action! Here’s what to consider when updating your own website:
- Pick a nice, readable font and use uniform colors and fonts across your website
- Utilize white space to make your site easier to read and navigate
- Use professional photos on your website, not clip art or stock photos
- Make your website mobile friendly
- Get rid of things like animations and background music that prolong your site’s load time and annoy your site visitors
Now that you know, it’s time to do a quick evaluation of your site and face the facts. If it’s out of date, you’re losing money. Make the decision today to say goodbye to the 90’s and stop letting money slip through your fingers because of your outdated site that gives a bad first impression!
