A significant part of any effective business model involves the creation of a website. But what many prospective business owners get wrong is the time and effort that they should devote to developing it. They assume that just so long as they are present in the digital universe that their work is done. In reality, simply making a website is not enough. If you really want to expand your clientele and remain competitive, you don’t have much choice but to develop your site as best you can. Neglecting to do so is to cut out an inordinate percentage of potential buyers. If you’re feeling a bit unsure whether you need some additional web design services, here are some signs to look out for.

Speed

Why It’s A Problem: How much of a difference a matter of seconds can make goes unnoticed to the uninformed. Wal-Mart release a study showing a dramatic drop in user traffic when their website loading time went from 1 to 4 seconds. They also said that with every second of improvement that there was a 2% increase in conversions. That doesn’t just pertain to the conglomerates either. Load time can have a tremendous impact on the effectiveness of your website, no matter the size of your business. For an accurate assessment of your site’s speed, use Website Grader.

How To Fix It: First check the images and make sure that they are optimized. That entails inserting focus keywords in their alt tags and that they are of a big enough size, usually over 200×200 pixels. Also, if you have an excess of videos, you should consider removing some. As good as videos are for SEO, they can be counterproductive if they slow things down to the point of losing users’ interest. A 3 second load time should be the objective. A bit longer is acceptable, but bear in mind that with each second you are alienating a portion of your traffic.

Mobile Unfriendliness

Why It’s A Problem: The percentage of people who make transactions on mobile devices has steadily increased every year since the inception of the smartphone. Sooner or later everything will be done on mobile devices. Get ahead now or pay the price.

How To Fix It: You must change the design so that you have a responsive website. If you don’t how to do that you can always seek out web design services from Jubilant Web.

Age

Why It’s A Problem: Technology, and more specifically, the Internet, changes. A lot. Every year new updates, programs, operating systems, etc. are released, presumably making things run faster and smoother than they did before, which is why adapting to the times is so crucial to the health of your website. Another reason is that Google’s algorithms are designed to reward new and original content in place of that which is old and unattended. So if you haven’t refreshed within the past 5 years, now’s the time to do it.

How To Fix It: In case you need some motivation for parting ways with an old design, just check your competitors and watch as they pull ahead. The longer you wait with an outdated design, the closer you are to being put out of business. Check what they’re doing and then adapt it to make your own version of a design you like that is getting results. For those who don’t have a dependent web designer, hiring a web development company is the quickest and most effective way of producing the most modern website available.

Bounce Rate

Why It’s A Problem: The objective of having a website is to inform users about your product or service, and hopefully for said information to lead to some sort of sale. That can’t happen if users are interacting with your web pages. Bounce rate is when people go to your site, do nothing, and leave. That’s bad. In order to check, go to your website’s Google Analytics dashboard, which can be found with a simple Google search.

How To Fix It: Keep an eye on the color scheme. You want no more than 3 complementary colors. Also keep the content accessible and concise. If a user feels overwhelmed, it’s all too easy for them to move onto something else. The most important page is the homepage so aim to get its bounce rate under 45%.

Hopefully this has been informative enough to inspire some changes. If you ignore it, your site will suffer, and so will your business. Are you ready to make that website pop the way it should? Contact Jubilant Web, the best web development company in New York by calling us at (845) 790-0420.