Is Your Outdated Website Costing Your Business Revenue?

 

If your website is out-of-date, it can prevent your business from growing by turning away clients and potential employees or even making it hard for your company to be found on the web. 

Reevaluating and replacing old, outdated or bad parts of your business should come naturally to you. It’s obvious that if your equipment breaks down or starts to perform badly, you replace it with something better and that works. Your website shouldn’t be any different. When you find a better process or your current process is holding the company back, you reassess and go a different way. The same line of thinking should be applied towards your company website. In today’s digital world, an outdated website could be costing you money, and big time. Keep reading to learn why. 

Don’t Want to Update Your Website?
It can be easy to just leave your website alone and let it get older and older without any updates. You may think:

• “I feel like we just redesigned it a few years ago.” 
• “It cost us a bunch of money the last time.” 
• “We just have one because we felt like we should – most of our business comes from referrals anyway.”

Unfortunately, the more out-of-date your website becomes, the more it could be costing you revenue. Now a days people use the internet to make most, if not all, of their big decisions and purchases, even for their businesses. This makes your company’s website and online presence extremely important if you want to be successful as technology advances. You could be making a lot more money than you’d think.

Also, when your website is outdated, old, or not able to be updated, it can actively hurt your ability to grow as a business. There are two major ways in which your outdated website could be costing you money and business: either you can’t be found, or when you are found, you’re repelling customers.

You’re Losing Revenue Because of Your SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a general term used for a variety of optimization strategies that help your website rank well in internet search engines. Unless you have no competitors at all, SEO for your website is necessary to help your rank and be found. If your website is older or outdated, it can really affect your SEO. There can be many reasons for this. Maybe your current platform makes SEO impossible, or your site is too slow or its non-responsive or not mobile-friendly. It could also be at risk of hackers. Check out these points explained more in detail below:

1) Your Platform Makes SEO Impossible

Ask yourself this question: if you wanted to change something on the website as it is now, could you? Do you have a webmaster who makes updates for you? Has your site been quiet for some time? Can anyone access the site right now?

If it’s been years since you built or updated your website it might be so old that it just doesn’t work with how website are currently designed. Your site might also be built on a platform that makes it hard for even experienced search engine optimizers to attempt to optimize the website. Or maybe no one at your company even remembers how to log in and change anything. 

Being able to update information and add content is essential to SEO and for your website to be easily searchable. When your site is too old or built on a bad platform, no one is going to find your business.

How Can I Tell if My Website’s Platform is Outdated?

Well, ask yourself and your staff this: have we logged in and changed anything in the last month? Six months? Year or more? The longer that period is, the more likely your site is outdated and if no one can remember the log in info to get into the website, that’s a problem. 

2) Your Site Loads Slowly 

No one likes a slow-loading website. It’s happened to us all. You go to a website and have to wait ages for it to finally load, or even worse, you think it’s loaded and go to click but the page jumps because something else finally loaded – it’s incredibly frustrating!

Well, slow loading times on your company’s website aren’t just annoying for your visitors, it’s also bad for search rankings. Search engines like Google want to show only the best websites to their users, so if they show sites that are too slow and take too long to load, their users will get annoyed and go use another search engine like Yahoo instead. 

This means that if your site loads slowly, Google will prioritize other websites over your slow one. As your competitors update and refresh their websites, they’ll get faster, basically leaving you behind while yours gets slower and slower. Eventually your site may be pushed down to the second or third pages of search results and that’s not good considering sites ranking on page 1 see nearly 95% of traffic. You want to be on page 1!

How Can I Tell if My Website is Too Slow?

The easiest way is to use Google’s PageSpeed Tool. Type in the URL of your website and click “Analyze.” This will give you an analysis of the speed of your website from Google themselves. If the number they give you is lower than 60, you need to do a website update.

 

3) Your Website Is Not Responsive or Mobile-Friendly


“Mobile responsive” or “mobile-friendly” are terms that describe sites that react and resize themselves to navigation on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.

Mobile responsive sites started to become popular with the rise in mobile devices and mobile browsing. Over the last few years mobile responsive websites have gone from an option to a must. 

Why? In 2015, the majority of internet traffic went from desktop to mobile, and that changed how Google ranks websites. Google prioritizes sites that are mobile-friendly or mobile responsive over ones that are not. While Google lists mobile sites over desktop-only sites, it is making it harder and harder for your non-mobile-friendly website to be found. 

How Can I Tell if My Website is Mobile Responsive or Mobile-Friendly?

Pull up your website on your smartphone’s browser. If everything is small and if you have to zoom in to look at anything, and if all of the links are hard to select with your fingers – basically if it looks like your desktop website but shrunken – your site is not mobile-friendly or responsive. 

4) Your Site Can Be Easily Hacked

Website hacking didn’t end in the 1990s with movies like Hackers. Even today hackers are still a potential threat to your website. 

What’s a hack? If your company website has been hacked, it means that someone outside the company has gained access to your site illegally and with the intent to install malicious code on your site, on other’s computers, or to even hold your website for ransom. They can also gain access to your clients or customers data. Big trouble.

Hacks can be done many ways, but two of the easiest ways for your website to be hacked is either through giving out private security information to unverified parties or by letting your site get old, making it easier for hackers to get past its outdated security features.

So what does getting hacked have to do with being shown in the search engines? Due to this rise in hacked websites, Google has started to prioritize secured websites over unsecured ones. Websites can be secured with the installation of an SSL certificate, which encrypts the data on your site through a secure remote server, and protects both you and your visitors’ private information. This is why 2017 was referred to sometimes as the “year of SSL certificates” as Google started to prioritize websites that had an SSL certificate over unsecured sites that did not.

How Can I Tell if My Website Has an SSL Certificate?

That’s easy. Take a look at the URL – if it says “https” at the beginning instead of just “http” you have an SSL certificate installed. If you don’t have an SSL certificate, have your IT department install one, and stat. 

You’re Losing Revenue Because Your Site is Repelling Customers

If by some miracle your outdated website does land on the page 1 of Google, or another search engine, people still may be leaving your site to look for a better one. Out-of-date or even ugly looking websites can turn off visitors for several reasons: either because the old look is unappealing or dated, it’s hard to navigate the site, or the site doesn’t provide the answers for which they were looking for. 

5) Your Website Is Ugly or Old-Looking:


We all know that appearance is important, even though it might be uncool to say so. If you are hiring someone to do a job and they show up in dirty clothes with bloodshot eyes and smelling like a brewery, it probably wouldn’t matter how great their resume looked, you just wouldn’t hire them. Even in professions where you do get dirty and smelly, it’s still expected that job candidates at least look presentable during the interview process. 

The same can be said with the appearance of your company website. If your site looks ugly or even dated, your potential customers will not want to work with you no matter how great your deals are or how convincing your content is. Your site must be an extension of your professionality so you should keep it modern and appealing. Add video content as well. With all the social media channels out there, people are all about visuals these days. 

It is especially important for businesses who have updated the look and appearance of their brand to also update their website. Customers expect a flawless transition between all branches of a business’ rebranding marketing materials. That means that the sign outside your building, the ads you buy, the commercials you run, the business cards you hand out, and especially your company website should all look as though they go together. 

How Can I Tell If My Website Looks Ugly?

Look at a competitor that has updated their website. Compare your site to theirs. Does it look more inviting and attractive? Is it easier to read? Are you jealous of how it looks? Are you kind of embarrassed to give customers your URL? If so, you might have an ugly website.

6) Your Website is Hard To Navigate:

Website navigation is tricky: when it’s great, you don’t notice it and when it’s bad, it’s bad and can ruin everything. By navigation, we’re talking about the links on the page that help users get from one page to another. Bad or broken links on your website means that your users can’t get to the information that they need or can’t get back to pages that they’ve already seen.

A well-designed navigation will appear organized, structured, and gives your users a roadmap throughout your website. They have sticky menus on every page that hold the more important links on the site and will correctly show the parent pages if you’ve navigated through several levels of content. 

Common on older, outdated websites are broken links. Broken links can occur from many issues – either content gets moved to a new URL and the links aren’t redirected or an update happens that messes up how the links were put in. Regardless, a website that’s full of broken links is annoying and unattractive to a user. They will more than likely be aggravated and go find a competitors’ website to deal with.

How Can I Tell If My Website is Hard to Navigate?

Ask a friend who has never used your site to try it out and find something on the page. They’ll tell you pretty quickly if it’s hard to use or difficult to navigate through.

7)Your Website Doesn’t Deliver on Its Promise:

Broken promises are super frustrating! In the same way, if the content on your website is incorrect, outdated or doesn’t provide answers customers are promised, it can be frustrating to the customer. It also creates negative feelings associated with your company and brand. 

Think about this: suppose you’d clicked on an article titled “Is Your Outdated Website Costing You Revenue?” Based on the title, you’d expect that the article would tell you about the ways in which an outdated website would cost your business revenue and why, right? But if you clicked on that article and all it said was “older websites will cost you revenue, but if you contact us, we’ll make you a better website!” you would feel deceived and as though you were only being sold something – this leaves the user with negative feelings towards your company.

Outdated or bad content, video or writing, on your site can draw people in, but it can deter them just as quickly. Even worse, if your website shows that it’s been a while since it was updated, everyone will think that you aren’t trying when it comes to your website’s content. Customers will wonder what’s going on with you or if you’re even open anymore.

Nobody wants to hire the company that’s behind the times, and when your website is older-looking with outdated platforms or trends and bad content from years ago, it makes your business look unknowledgeable and out of date. 

How Can I Tell if My Website’s Content is Out of Date?

It’s pretty obvious. If you know your website hasn’t been updated in a while, say six months or longer, then it’s pretty safe to say that it’s content is out of date. But, if your industry’s practices tend to change from time to time, it’s always a good idea to review your content periodically to check if anything is incorrect or obsolete.

Be honest with yourself. Your website is out of date. Updating the look, the SEO, and the content of your site can have significant and positive results on your revenue. Updating your dated website doesn’t need to be hard. You just need to get started. 

For any and all of your video marketing needs, visit us at ultimo-media.com.