Let’s face it—the last couple of years have changed how we all do business. Whether your business has overcome the challenges of the pandemic or is a new startup, the odds are that the landscape of your particular market has changed drastically.
Long-standing competitors may have fallen away while new competitors have risen up. Additionally, many businesses in the Chicago metro have shifted towards a hybrid work environment, meaning that foot traffic may not be a reliable source of business for retail stores. What’s more, consumer needs have shifted and everyone has an increased reliance on web-based interactions.
In short, your website is more important than ever. Here are the top five reasons why a website redesign may be the perfect way to take advantage of the changing 2023 marketplace.
1. Reinvigorate Your Brand
A new website is a great way to reinvigorate and promote your brand. At a base level, your business’ brand helps customers identify your products and services and differentiate them from your competitors. Along with serving as an identifier, a brand can also communicate an experience or promise of excellence to your customers. The recent changes in the marketplace provide an excellent opportunity for you to reestablish or reinforce your brand in your clients’ eyes through a website redesign.
As you consider your business’ brand, focus on your unique contribution to customers. How do you help your customers achieve their goals and objectives? In answering that question, you can identify some key concepts that form the foundation of your brand. If your current website doesn’t fully reflect those value propositions, you may want to consider a website redesign.
2. Refresh Your Site’s Content
Another fantastic benefit of a website redesign is the ability to refresh and update your site’s content. Google and other search engines have indicated that sites that regularly provide informative content that meets the needs of searchers will have increased organic search rankings. You can take advantage of changes in the marketplace by providing fresh content that not only clearly communicates your brand but also provides valuable insights and information helping to solidify your expertise on a given subject.
In addition to providing content that helps your customers engage with you and your products and services, you may want to consider updating your business’ location and hours of operation or service areas if they’ve changed.
3. Become Mobile-Friendly
Having a mobile-friendly and responsive website isn’t just nice to have—it’s a must. Being responsive means that your website fits every screen size, looks good, and still has a great user experience. This is important with so many people viewing websites on their phones and the fact that Google is now using mobile-first indexing. This means that when they index and rank your website for Google searches, they mainly use the mobile version to do this.
Now that Google is using this method, having mobile options is a necessity. Many experts are even recommending that when you build your website, you build it for mobile first.
4. Improve Your Website Load Times
In today’s fast-paced world, many people don’t like having to wait on things. If they have to wait five seconds for even one page to load, they are more likely to decide that it’s not worth the trouble and will go somewhere else to get what they need. This is a big cause of bounce rate, which is when someone only visits one page on your site and then leaves.
Page speed is also used by Google to help it rank websites in organic search. Slow-loading websites lead to a bad user experience and Google knows this, so it takes that into account when ranking websites for searches. Google wants to provide the best experience for those who search with them, and having to wait a long time for a website is not a good experience.
5. Add New Features
A website redesign will allow you to take advantage of new features and design trends. Features such as parallax scrolling, dark mode, micro-interactions, and full-height homepage hero images are some trending features that can help set your business apart from the competition.
Work With an Award-Winning Team of Chicago Web Designers
If your 2023 marketing to-do list includes a new website, work with the right team to make it happen. Get in touch with our local Chicago web designers and WordPress developers. We’d love to hear all about your website needs!