A website is central to any Inbound Marketing campaign. Because of this, it’s important that you keep it current. An out-of-date website design can be incredibly detrimental to your Inbound Marketing efforts. The following are 10 signs that your website design is outdated:
1. Your website is slow as a snail
If your website is taking 5 or more seconds to load each page, then it’s much too slow.
2. Your content is outdated
Your website should provide new content to your visitors on a regular basis. If the last piece of content you posted was about Y2K, then your website is seriously outdated.
3. Your website looks small
Unlike responsive websites we have today, websites were built for smaller screen resolution years ago. If your website looks small, it’s because it hasn’t been optimized for newer, widescreen, HD monitors that are commonplace these days.
4. Your website isn’t mobile-friendly
If your website appears too large on mobile devices, resulting in the need to scroll up, down, left and right, then you need to make your website "responsive"- meaning the content will "respond" to various devices so the content is optimized for viewing on phones or tablets.
5. Your website isn’t integrated with your social media
Social media should be a huge part of your Inbound Marketing strategy, which means it needs to be linked to your website and vice versa.
6. Your design isn’t consistent
If each webpage is using different colors and font styles, then your website design is a mess! In order to increase brand identity, your color and font styles need to be consistent with the look and feel of your brand.
7. You have an animated intro
Animated intros were all the rage in the late 90s. Now, they typically simply annoy visitors. Even if they stay through the animation, they won’t want to be forced to watch it every time they return to your website.
8. Your website contains a hit counter
There’s nothing more amateurish and outdated than a hit counter on the front page of your website. Get rid of it!
9. Your website is built from Flash
Flash is actually detrimental to your search ranking and won’t work on many mobile devices.
10. Your website doesn’t direct visitors
If your visitors don’t know what to do, then what’s the point of your site? Your site needs to be easy to navigate and have calls to action to direct visitors.
If you recognize any of these warning signs, we hate to break the news to you, but your website needs to be updated!
