Is it time for a new website?
Is your website getting old? When is it time for a new website? We discuss the lifespan of a website and what makes it age. We also see when it is time to actually go ahead and redesign your website.
This is the video transcript:
Hi guys welcome back to The Marketing Techy and today you’re going to learn something about websites and how they age.
Okay so I get the question often. When is it a good time to redesign my website or to refresh my website? How old can a website get before it gets to be too dated?
Now there’s a couple of different things we have to look at:
Firstly the technical side of it. So if you’ve got a really old website, some of the software, some of the plugins, some of the things that you use on that website. Even the HTML that’s in there could be dated and it might be starting to break your website for modern browsers, modern computers and modern cell phones or mobile phones. Okay so the technical side is one side. If things are starting to break or getting to be slow or unusable or not user friendly it’s definitely time for an update to your website.
Secondly if your website is starting to look dated so maybe in your industry the other companies are refreshing their websites often and now your website actually looks dated compared to some of the other websites in your industry. Maybe not even in your industry because design trends are always evolving after a few years your website will just look old. Another thing that you have to look at is if it’s not displaying well on mobile phones. If things like buttons and menus are too small to really touch on a mobile phone screen or if it’s not user friendly on a mobile phone then it’s definitely time for an update to your website.
A general rule of thumb is if you’re in a cutting-edge technology sort of space with your company or if you’re in the design or fashion industries then you would probably redesign or refresh your website look and feel about every two years. If you’re not in a cutting-edge fashion or design industry you might be able to get away with every three to five years. Places like guest houses or restaurants maybe could get away with every five years if they’ve got a really classic, nice looking website. So anything between two and five years. That’s the life time for a website.
The good news is if your website is WordPress based it’s not starting from scratch when you’re going to do the new redesign. You can keep all your content your blog posts your photos. Everything that you’ve accumulated on your website inside of WordPress we can still use and we just change the look and feel and you’ve got a brand new website, but it’s only the way it looks and feels. It’s not what’s behind and that is WordPress and all the other software and plugins that you’re using so we just check that everything is still supported that everything is updated that it’s still secure that nobody can hack into your website. Things like that and then on top of that we change the look and feel and you’ve got a brand new website. Okay and it’s a lot more cost effective than starting from scratch and designing a new website from scratch because you get to move a lot of your old website over. As I said it doesn’t look anything like your old website because everything on top that does things like color schemes, layouts, fonts, font sizes, where everything goes, all of that you can customise within WordPress. So basically the options are unlimited as to what the new website looks like, but you can reuse a lot of what was on the old one. Okay so that saves a lot of time and money.
I hope that answers your question. if you’ve got any other questions feel free to comment or to contact me with your questions. I might make another video or just answer you directly thanks for watching this one and stay tuned for the next video.