We witness the dynamic and ever-changing nature of technology, especially the technology of web design. Therefore, web developers are constantly challenged to upgrade their knowledge and be up-to-date with the latest technology changes.
Your potential customers, who are searching for your services online, can also tell if your website is outdated or not. Outdated websites usually have bugs, are extremely slow, have a poor user experience, and are lacking many options that exist on modern websites. Therefore, if they land on an outdated website, it’s likely that they won’t convert into paying customers, due to a sense that the purchasing experience will also be unfavourable.
How to know if your website is outdated?
Here’s our list of the top signs your website is indeed outdated, and what to do in that case.
1. The navigation is difficult
It’s hard to navigate from page to page, and it’s not clear what to click to enter the desired page. Also, user unfriendly navigation can be cluttered, with too many options that create confusion among the users.
2. Website is extremely slow
It seems like it takes forever to load a page. Waiting for a page to load is a huge dealbreaker for your customers. They can easily go somewhere else and have a more enjoyable online experience. Usually, the website is slow due to uncompressed code, or the page source code is just too heavy, which is usually the case with outdated websites.
3. The design is very outdated
Needles to describe—the site can be too colourful, with some outdated practice you can easily recognize that date from the early 2000s. Those websites give the impression that no one is taking care of them. Those websites cannot be taken seriously.
4. The content is not accurate and updated long time ago
If you see that no one is updating the content on the website, and that the website is full of outdated information, your potential customers won’t continue with their purchase. Sharing outdated information is not a good way to create trust with your users. A good example of this is when you see in the website footer the copyright “2017”, or similar. It generally means that the website isn’t being taken care of.
5. It’s hard to make edits on the site
Due to the robust design, and outdated web technology used on the site, sometimes webmasters have go back and forth to do even the simplest edits. Modern websites are usually very easy to navigate, make edits, and create updates, so there is another reason for you to think about the redesign.
6. No clear call to action
Websites need to be optimized for users. By doing this, we need to provide them a pleasant user experience, and provide them with relevant information. Ideally, we want them to click on our Call-to-Action buttons. If it’s not set up on the site, we’re missing out. We need to help users get what they want, and Call to Actions are a perfect way to do that.
7. Too many broken pages
If you have numerous pages that can’t open, or show a 404 error, it can be frustrating to your users. If they can’t get the content they want, they will promptly leave, and our bounce rate will increase, which is a bad sign in the eyes of Google. To avoid this, we need to fix our broken pages, and avoid obsolete technologies with bugs that can automatically create lots of broken pages.
8. CSS or JS is not loading properly
Sometimes, some website resources won’t load, such as the dynamic content, sliders, accordions, and even some image and text sections on the website. It needs to be resolved, as CSS and JavaScript are now integral parts of modern websites. HTML is no longer enough to provide all the functionality your users need.
9. Website is not mobile friendly
Needless to say that the mobile friendliness is a hallmark of a high quality website. Since users are increasingly searching via mobile, mobile responsiveness is very important. Old web design technologies usually focused on optimising a website for one viewpoint, and it was usually for desktop version.
10. The website is not secure
If you don’t have an SSL certificate on your website, it is a sign that your website cannot be trusted, and in some cases, users will be notified that the website is insecure. Some browsers don’t allow users to visit sites without SSL automatically. An SSL certificate is especially significant for an e-commerce site, where you require encryption to transfer credit card data securely.
What to do if your website is outdated?
The first and maybe the only right solution would be to redesign the website completely. If you take some partial edits and do some partial fixes, the problem might be reduced, but not resolved. Nowadays, it’s possible to develop a website from scratch in no time, with the latest technology and with some free platforms like WordPress or Shopify.
There is no need to hang on to the obsolete technologies that are prone to hacking, where you can have your website designed with modern and more secure technologies. Moreover, with the latest technology developments and page builders, you can get fast, secure and customized websites in less than a week. Page builders provide quick and easy content editing, and they look modern and easy to navigate from users’ perspective.
How DesignQ can help
We’ve been in the business for almost 20 years, and we incorporated responsive web design since the very beginning of their use. We helped hundreds of businesses increase sales and drive traffic with our customised and professional solutions. You can check out our web design portfolio here or click here to book a 30 minute consultation to discuss your requirements.
