How to Keep Your Web Site to Up to Date – All About Rejuvenating a Web Site
Your company, ten years ago, invested in the development of the site significant funds, and at the very least the site has repulsed them. This was expressed both in new customers who came through the site and in the ability to quickly inform existing customers about your products and services.
- But, like any modern technology, the technology of production of websites is developing rapidly. Your customers no longer sit at the computers, they began to travel with tablets and watch the sites on the screens of smartphones. To adapt to the new habits of your customers, the old site needs to be rejuvenated.
There are conservative businesses for which rejuvenation is not required. For example, the site of the world’s richest private company in the world Berkshire Hathaway, and froze in 1996, because it does an excellent job of providing the annual report to investors, and nothing more is required from the site.
- But, if your company does not belong to Warren Buffett, you need to somehow manage. And how do you know that it’s time to lead your website to the webmaster!
1) Increasing the Number of “Bounces”
- High bounce rate, means a low level of involvement of site visitors. If the audience of the site has not changed significantly over the past years, and this can be seen in the section of the characteristics of the audience, for example, in Google Analytics, increasing the level of refusals from viewing it is a bell! In Google Analytics, we look at Acquisition > Overview and evaluate the nature of the involvement through the traffic channels.
2) Increase in the Number of Technical Errors
- Look at Google Search Console, in the section Crawl Errors, if there is a tendency of the site to accumulate server errors, 404 and the results of incorrect redirects, you need to do something.
- For example, to hire an admin to fix all this. And not so that “we note errors as fixed” in the same Search Console, but for real. With the technical audit of the site and the analysis of problems for each section.
3) Low Relative Page Load Speed
- Google favors the detailed content of the pages, which quickly falls into the user’s browser. They don’t like if you forget to fix FOUC * and just comes to the pessimizing position of your anger if you forget to optimize the size of the images and give users blown up to megabytes of pages where you can do bytes.
But the mood of Google is not as scary as your impact on the patience of your users. If your site for filtering for vacuum cleaners is loaded slower than 4 seconds (and you need 2), the client will go to a faster site with a high probability.
You can check the health of the site in this sense using the Chrome PageSpeed Insights Tool, and for internal documentation, you can generate a report on GTMetrix.
4) Friendly to Smartphone Users
- Yes, the mobile-first paradigm alas – triumphs. More than 60% of searches on the Internet today are performed from smartphones. And your site is ready for the changed situation? Learn this will help Google’s excellent tool for assessing the “mobilization” of your site – testmysite.withgoogle.com.
Figure.4 6 seconds is a long time for 3G, this site should be loaded for 3s.
If you received a poor rating, it’s time for your site to change clothes not only for adaptive, but also adapted for mobile data networks.
5) Obsolete Design – Diagnosis of the Need to Rejuvenate the Web Site
- Without going into details, the design depends on the business function of the site, as the brand of your car depends on why you need it in principle. If the site of the multi-million-dollar fund Berkshire Hathaway can afford the style of crumpled A4 paper, this does not mean that your users will be happy with this approach.
The rule of thumb – if the site is bad you can get to where with the thumb of a working hand on the smartphone screen, and the font is too small and tedious to read – it’s time to think about the redesign.
It is better to refer to the specialists for the redesign, with the experience of adaptive development and a test laboratory with real devices. The times of the webmaster single have ended. In our time, few people are able to pull the volume of testing alone on a large number of tablets and smartphones, even typical ones.
6) Does the Old Web Site Meet Your Current Business Processes?
And how well does the site meet the needs of your business compared with the situation ten years ago? If your needs change quickly enough, and you want the site to “keep up” with them, it’s worth hinting to your contractor about changing the approach based on a more modern methodology of accelerated development. And also, think about implementing a business process that aligns the site with your internal needs. Otherwise, developers, no matter how beautiful they are, will not be able to help you in full.
- If you have significantly changed the processes, and the site has remained a “visiting card with contacts”, you should think about the redesign of the site in terms of “what else can bring my business to my business?”. In the end, Internet sites are being built just for this, to help your business in our rapidly changing circumstances.
FOUC – Flash of Unstyled Content – bug UI/UX, when the user is shown unformed content because the output control styles and scripts load longer than prescribed by the rules.
Even a WordPress site can be provided with a development package for the MVC pattern, transforming it from a procedural framework into an OOP framework, obtaining the Laravel logic, Magic magic and the convenience of ACF for free and in one bottle.
