A website is no longer a luxury in smart online marketing. It’s your virtual home, the first step most clients will take on their journey to trusting you as an industry expert. Without an excellent website, lead conversion will be sluggish and results dull.Your website must sell your brand like you need it to- hitting all SEO benchmarks, drawing in traffic, and converting those leads. Undertaking a full web redesign can be a lengthy and difficult process- but you can often power up your web performance with some simple refreshes instead. Today we look at the art of keeping a site fresh and tantalizing- and how to do it as hassle-free as possible!

Do You Need a Website Redesign?

If your site is failing to perform at all, it may be time to rip it back to brass tacks and rebuild. But if you already have a website with great performance bones- smart CMS, a solid design, a functional e-store working well- then there’s no need to reinvent the wheel just to give it a facelift. 

Website refresh projects instead freshen up your SEO, tweak your setup to modern standards, and improve your overall look and feel without interfering with the core setup. You’re focusing on the graphics, design, and any improvement updates you need to incorporate, without the lengthy process of a full redesign. It’s a great way to stay competitive, but keep the infrastructure that’s working for you. 

Things to Consider in a Website Refresh

A Website refresh will look different depending on your needs, but here’s some key thoughts to consider.

The Flow

Even if you once had a sharp funnel through your site, it’s easy for extra pages and older information to start cluttering it up. Rethink how you’ve built the site. Is your conversion funnel still clear and precise? Do your search features still work well? Is checkout easy? Rework the flow, or the customer’s journey through the site, to be as simple and clear as possible. 

The Flash

Graphic trends come in and out of fashion. Stock photos were where it was all at a few years ago, and are handy for startups to hit the ground running. But the modern customer is jaded on them. Now you want personalized, compelling images that speak to who you are, not some stock photo idea of it. Develop your own clear and consistent style with the images you use- and update them once in a while, ok?

The Feel

Gone are the days of text-heavy websites. To accommodate mobile customers, todays sites should be clean, open, and graphical in nature. Keep plenty of open space, and use a modern design. It could be as simple as an update to your template, or you could go big, but make sure you’re running a modernized, minimal interface with the world.

Other Key Elements of a Modernized Website

With those basics in place, it’s time to update how you look at your website, too. Over-formal, bland, and impersonal are out. Instead, rework your text content so it tells a clear story- yours. Not just a dull founding story weighed down with your ‘corporate values’, either. Something humanizing and real that visitors can connect with.

Then consider their convenience. Do you use web tools and widgets to help provide a live, interactive guide through the site? Simple things that provide real value to your clients can make or break a web experience. Now think about support. Chatbots are all the rage today, making help easy to find and responsive. It’s also a great point-of-contact for your ‘real’ customer service team if things get tricky. Consider building an app to match the page, so users have multiple convenient ways to access your services. 

Now look at your content strategy. Is it still in line with current online marketing tips? Can you republish your best pages, and make a better strategy based on what users are already interacting with?

Last, but certainly not least, make sure you have clear calls to action throughout your site. While it’s still not great to be outright pushy, today’s CTAs are much clearer and more present than in the past. Make sure these fit with your flow well, moving customers on in each step of the sales funnel.

Getting Technical

Of course, how your website looks is only part of the package. The other half is making sure your site can perform well. It’s a given that all software and plug-ins you use should be updated as they arrive. This helps keep your site safe and secure from cybercrime, as well as increasing your performance.

A good website refresh should hunt down errors like broken links and missing images, and fix them. SEO needs change almost annually, so they need to be revisited frequently. And you should always attempt to deliver the best speed and performance benchmarks possible- users will no longer wait around for pages to load or links to work. 

Web pages should be refreshed at least annually to keep them performing at their best, with a great user experience and modern approaches to digital marketing. If yours is in need of some extra love, why not let the team at Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency help you with a website refresh that will soon have you meeting all your online marketing goals and more?