8 Signs Your Website Needs a Facelift

Jan 15, 2020

Does Your Website Need a Facelift (or Even a Complete Overhaul)?

Sometimes it’s hard to know if your website needs a refresh. A comprehensive evaluation takes time, skills, and tools to perform an in-depth analysis.

Ask yourself a few simple questions:

When was the last time you looked at your website with a critical eye?

  • Is it attracting the right visitors?
  • Is it converting visitors into leads?
  • Does it represent your brand today?
  • How does it compare to your competition?
  • Would an AI tool like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews understand what you do if it tried to summarize your website?

We developed an 8-point checklist to help you determine if it’s time to refresh your website.  Or if you prefer, we can perform a free website evaluation.

8-Point Website Performance Checklist

Before starting your assessment, write down a list of your main competitors and companies you admire from any industry, because you may find inspiration from outside of your industry.

From there, try to look at your website through fresh eyes and ask yourself the following:

1. Does My Website Make Sense to New Visitors?

We use the 5-second and 8-second tests to ensure we can grab a visitor’s attention immediately.

  • 5-Second Test: Can people understand what you do in less than 5 seconds? If not, they are highly likely to bounce.
  • 8-Second Test: Do visitors know what to do next? Is the website logically laid out so that they can get the information they need quickly? Are all your products, services, and offers clearly defined?

It also helps to understand how people scan websites. People typically look top left first. So that’s where you will want to place a prominent image or your logo. From there, high-priority content will flow left to right. We explain this “F-Shape” or “F-Pattern” design structure in further detail in our article 5 Keys to Excellent GovCon Website Design.

Worth noting: the same clarity that helps a human visitor pass the 5-second test also helps AI tools summarize your site accurately. If your messaging is vague or buried, or information hard to find, both audiences struggle to figure out what you actually do.

2. Is My Website Likely to Convert Visitors?

Conversion means getting visitors to interact with your website and share their information—name, phone number, and/or email. For more sophisticated websites, it could also include building a profile around the visitor, including their title, their immediate challenges, and product interests—all extremely useful when qualifying leads into sales opportunities.

Things to look for:

  • Do you have multiple conversion pages where people can request or download compelling, relevant information, in return for their contact information?
  • Do these pages feature differentiators that set you apart from your competition?
  • What are your conversion rates and how do they compare to industry standards?
  • Do your advertisements, offers, text, and images match the images and content on your landing pages (the information must be directly related)?

3. Is My Website Mobile-Friendly?

How does your website look on different devices with various aspects, sizes, and ratios? It needs flexibility or responsiveness built into the code to present quickly and correctly, no matter the device. This technical element of website design is known as mobile-friendliness and is a critical component of your website.

Find out how Google sees your website using the Google test at https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.

You can use the Google Chrome extension to simulate the different devices (although viewing on a real device is better): https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/device-mode/

4. How Fast Does Your Website Load?

No one likes waiting, and that is especially true when it comes to websites loading. Intuitively, it makes sense that visitors will get bored waiting and simply click away. What’s less obvious is that speed also affects how well your site performs with both search engines and AI tools.

Google has long used page load times as a ranking signal, measured through Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics covering how fast your content loads, how quickly the page becomes interactive, and how stable the layout is while it loads. You can check where your site stands with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Speed matters for AI discoverability too. Slow, bloated pages are harder for AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews to crawl and reference efficiently. This is just another reason why a fast site supports SEO, AEO, and GEO alike.

Here are a couple of tools you might want to try to evaluate your load speeds:

5. Is Your Website Engaging?

Engagement can seem subjective, but it’s measurable in your analytics using bounce rate (the % of people who leave your site without visiting another page) and time on each page (more time suggests more interest). Although these are imperfect measurements, you will want to look for positive trends.

Questions to ask:

  • Does your website feature designs, graphics, and images that draw attention to the most important information?
  • How accurate and current are the images and photos of your products?
  • What is your bounce rate and time on page? How quickly do visitors leave your site?

6. How do You Fare Against the Competition?

There are 2 types of competition: other companies that do what you do, and the daily experience people have on a website. We spend our days researching websites, both for business and personal, and know when we see a good vs. bad website.

Review your competitor’s website and rank it using the same critical eye you use on your own website. How do you compare to the competition?

7. Do All the Links Work?

Nothing says “we don’t pay attention to details” like a 404 error code (the error code for broken links).

Check for:

  • Can visitors click the phone number on a mobile device and place a call?
  • Can the phone number be copied and pasted so that people can call from their computers?
  • Are there any broken links that don’t go anywhere (404s)?

8. Is it Difficult to Make Website Updates?

Modern websites are built on a Content Management System (CMS). While there are many, WordPress is the most commonly used and a good choice for most medium-sized organizations.

WordPress websites are easy to edit, technically robust, and, since there are many WordPress developers, give the website owner flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in.

Questions to ask:

  • Is my website easy to change (or is it frustrating)?
  • Can I do simple edits myself (if I wanted to)?
  • Does my current website vendor have me trapped?

BONUS POINT: Can AI Tools Find and Understand You?

It’s a newer sign, but an increasingly important one: search engines are no longer the only way people (and now AI tools) discover you online. Federal buyers, teaming partners, and prospective hires are starting to use AI-powered search and answer tools, like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, as part of their research. Being easy to find by those tools involves a mix of disciplines:

  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – the traditional practice of ranking well in search engines like Google.
  • AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) – structuring content so AI tools can pull clear, accurate answers from it.
  • GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) – optimizing content so generative AI tools are more likely to cite your company when summarizing a topic.

Ask yourself: is your content clear and well-organized enough for an AI tool to accurately describe what you do and who you do it for? For more on how these three disciplines relate, read AEO vs GEO: What Content and Digital Marketers Need to Know.

The Bottom Line

If any of these early warning signs apply to your website, it’s likely time to consider a redesign.

If the federal government is your target market, we’ve created the Website Checklist for Government Contractors for you with a few other must-haves to consider.

This checklist takes a closer look at messaging, brand trust, content, and AI & search discoverability (SEO/AEO/GEO). It’s definitely worth a look if government contracts are part of your business.

What’s Next?

If you are unsure what to do next, we are offering a FREE website evaluation. We’ll let you know how your website looks today and what your options are moving forward.

Ocean 5 Builds Outstanding Websites for Business

Ocean 5 creates fully custom, technically advanced, responsive (mobile-friendly), professionally designed websites that provide an outstanding user experience. We use Growth Driven Design to build a digital platform for accelerated lead generation.

 

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