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In the past six months, has your website:

• Run or load slowly?
• Not converted well?
• Crashed frequently?
• Become difficult to edit?
• Doesn't show up in search results?
• Had declining traffic?

If so, 2021 may be the year to overhaul your website.

Regardless of how well a website is maintained, it will ultimately need an overhaul. Technology, both software and hardware, keeps advancing. Just as newer TVs can provide better quality images and sound, new websites are better able to work on today's internet and meet customer expectations. Eventually, an upgrade won't be enough.

Step 1 – Figure out What's Wrong

More important than knowing how your website is misbehaving is why. Invest in identifying issues so you can determine if you need updates or a complete overhaul.

Get A Website Audit

Website audits go straight to the source – the code that runs your website.

Performance issues, such as load times, crashes, and malfunctioning features are often the result of bad or outdated code. A website audit looks at the different layers of code your site uses: how it communicates with servers, how it behaves on consumer browsers, how its widgets interact with each other, and the site's stylesheet.

An audit can say what specifically is making your business's website load slow or crash and give you a list, in order of priority, of what to fix.

Get A SEO Audit

SEO audits investigate why consumers aren't visiting your website or convert the way you want.

How your business ranks on Google, Bing, or Yahoo depends not only how relevant it is to a search query, but also how the content on your website is displayed, stored, and organized. From image storage to metadata, what search engines see plays a large role in rankings.

An SEO audit pinpoints the discontent between what your website says and what consumers are searching for in addition to identifying how to make your site more friendly to web crawlers.

Step 2 – Decide What Type Of Overhaul You Need

You know your website needs serious work, but once you have the results of your audits it's time to put together a plan to fix it. Depending on the results, consider one of two options.

A Design Refresh

If your SEO audit revealed more issues than your website audit, or if the website audit issues were minor, a design refresh may be all you need.

A design refresh is primarily focused on the appearance and content of your website, bringing it up to current standards to improve the consumer experience and increase SEO. Depending on the findings, a refresh can be a different design aesthetic, an improved SEO strategy, or switching your CMS.

There are a lot of elements to a design refresh, so keep your audit results and business goals in mind as you work to update the visuals, layout, content, and underlying structure.

A Rebuild

If your audits expose multiple mid-level concerns or a few large ones, it's time to scrap your current website and build a new one.

Rebuilds are the number one solution to serious performance issues. It's a hard reset for your business's website, a combination of upgrading software, protocols, databases, design, and rethinking a company's content and SEO strategy.

A rebuild not only saves your website from becoming obsolete, they're also a good time to realign all aspects of your business. Unify offline and online objectives to help your company grow.

Launching a website overhaul is not an easy choice, but your business's online presence needs to be relatable and reliable. With business and consumers relying more and more on the Internet to conduct business, purchase, play and relax, 2021 may be the year to invest in overhauling your web marketing presence. Discover what is preventing your website from converting and develop a plan to turn it into your strongest asset.