Your business website is the face of your product and services. It represents your business at global level. If website design and digital marketing done correctly, you can make millions from your website sales. But if it is not done in proper way, you may end up loosing your time and money.
Website always proves to be an asset for one man shops, small businesses and even fortune companies. Often you come across terms like revamp your website for better conversions and increase in sales.
What exactly is revamping your ecommerce website?
It is often thought revamping a website is to redesign the website. But a website revamp is beyond just changing the design of your website.
Revamp website meaning
Revamping a website means finding ideas to increase your sales, generate more subscribers, giving an over all boost to your website conversions.
There are a lot of things to consider for a website revamp. It is not just the redesign alone. You should think about the improvements in website functionality in conjunction with a solid marketing plan. When you have an ecommerce store the job becomes a little difficult.
Should you revamp your ecommerce website?
Often small business owners keep the website revamps on the back burner. They keep on doing with the existing ecommerce website because they never check the overall website performance and just track orders from their website.
They are not aware of the technical stuff involved in website performance. It is obvious because it is not their niche. For example how would a restaurant owner know about the CSS of the web page or the Google search console.
Below are the important reasons for website revamp
1) Your ecommerce website loads slowly
Earlier this year Google announced the ranking factors for website for mobile. Website load speed is one of the major factors. Relevant and meaningful content still will be the most important factor for ranking of the websites but page speed will also boost the website rankings is also true.
Moreover it is not just about Google ranking factors. How often do you wait for a website to load if it is slow. Even if your website ranks on first page of Google due to amazing content visitors will go away in seconds if it loads slow.
There is no point doing all the hard work to bring users to your website and they leave in a very short time without doing anything on your website.
However, if your website loads fast then there is every chance that you get a sale. Page speed also improves the overall user experience of your website. It is very important you do page speed optimization of your website.
You can check your website page speed using a free tool provided by Google for page speed test.
2) Your website has a clumsy and cluttered navigation
You should never confuse your customers. Navigation is another important part of your ecommerce website. There should be a smooth experience for your website users to browse through your products and different products categories.
They could very easily jump to the shopping cart, account settings, use filters on product pages, add and remove products from your website. They should also be able to access your website’s privacy policy and terms and conditions page easily.
With so many ecommerce companies around, you can’t expect your customers that they will fill up a complain form on your website letting you know about the poor navigation issue. They will switch you another ecommerce website with a blink of an eye.
This is because they are not bothered about how your website functions. They just need to buy a product at that moment. The ecommerce websites which provide a smooth experience those will get credit in terms of sales.
Also read our Ecommerce FAQs
3) Your website design is out of date
You may also be loosing sales because you have an outdated design. As I said in the beginning of this article that redesign alone is not website revamping. But no doubts that it is also a very important factor to consider when you plan a website revamp.
You can also read about a separate article on how to increase sales by redesigning your website.
The design of your website should represent your brand and should be done after a research of the buying habits, color psychology and market trends of your target market.
It is important that your website designer and your marketing experts should sit together with you and discuss about how and why redesign the complete website or maybe you just need to redesign certain pages your you ecommerce website.
4) Your website is not SEO friendly
Along with your customers, your ecommerce website should also equally impress search engines especially Google.
Ecommerce SEO is not just about strong product descriptions and meta descriptions. For that matter no SEO is just about that. SEO also involves a lot of other important things than content and meta content.
A few things to mention are, checking broken links, sitemaps, search engine submissions, link building, image optimizations and many others. Even website security also plays an important role in your website’s search engine rankings.
It is often assumed that SEO is done post your website launch but the fact is SEO starts right from stage of wireframes. If you haven’t taken care of the SEO in the beginning then you must do it now.
You can read our complete beginners guide for ecommerce SEO
If you want you can contact us for a SEO audit of your ecommerce website.
5) Your website has a high bounce rate
Another reason you should consider website revamp for your ecommerce website is the high bounce rate. In technical language bounce rate can be defined as percentage of all sessions made on your website in which your customers spent time on a single page and sends a single request to Google analytics.
In simple words bounce rate is the rate at which users spend time on your website pages or leave your website. You can get the bounce rate report of your website from free Google analytics tool.
If the bounce rate shows a high value then it is a matter of concern. High bounce rate shows that your website visitors are leaving your website pages without giving you anything.
This is of high importance as people leave a website either because slow speed, bad user experience or bad content. You need to analyse everything about your website in order to decrease the bounce rate.
You can read all about bounce rate in this comprehensive bounce rate guide.
6) Your website is not optimized for mobile phones
Mobile searches have increase by more than 500% in last few years. From 2009 till now that is 2018 50.2% of internet traffic is generated via mobile phone. According to a report from Google more than 50% of search queries comes from mobile phones.
So it is extremely important to optimize your website for mobile phones and tablets also in order to remain in competition. Your website should provide the same shopping experience to mobile phone users as it does for desktop users.
The UX design, website security, user experience, website flow and brand trust should be excellent on mobile phones. Only then you can reap the benefits of increasing mobile phone searches.
A report from Salesforce and Demandware gives you insights on how customers behave on ecommerce websites on mobile phones.
To retain your customers you can also get an iOS and Android application developed for your ecommerce website. For this you can talk to your existing website designing company or you can also hire dedicated mobile phone application developer
7) Website content is not presented properly
Content on your ecommerce website is a combination of images, products names, category names, products descriptions etc. If all this information is presented in a haphazard way on your website. Or the images looks unevenly chopped off or they appear blurry then there are chances your customers might leave your website.
Make sure the the content is presented systematically. Include multiple descriptive images of products, products names and description should be prominent. Include a short description too. Call to actions should not be annoying to customers and should be strategically placed.
Not only presentation but the content should also be written good. You can take the help of a professional content writing company for your ecommerce website content or it will be wise to hire a dedicated content writer with experience in ecommerce content writing.
8) You might be on the wrong ecommerce platform
It is very important which ecommerce platform you choose for your ecommerce website. If fixing all of the above things doesn’t work then you might need to change your ecommerce platform.
There could be many limitations of different ecommerce platforms.
It may not provide flexible customization features.
It may not provide easy CMS pr doen’t provides CMS at all.
It doesn’t provides SEO features.
It is not upgradable as per the latest technology changes.
It is not able to handle large number of user data.
Keeping all these in mind you may need to talk to your ecommerce development company about which ecommerce platform to use.
9) Your website doesn’t works for your business objectives
This one is the most important of all. If your websites doesn’t works for your business objectives and goals then there is every reason to revamp it and give it complete overhaul.
Your website should reduce your marketing costs and always act as your most trusted sales person. If it is not attracting your target customers then you should immediately consider a revamp.
How to revamp your existing ecommerce website?
After reading the above points, you must be thinking about working on all of them. There may be so many website revamp ideas popping up in your mind.
But you may not need to work on all of them. Revamp process for your ecommerce website starts with analyzing your website. You can check all these points one by one and fix only what is required.
If you start changing things without testing, you may end up messing up with those part which are already working fine. It is better to hire an ecommerce specialist or consult a leading ecommerce website development company in India or wherever you are comfortable with.
How much does it costs to revamp a website?
Website revamp cost may vary depending upon the experts you hire and amount of work needed to fix the website.
A complete revamp might cost you as much as building a new website from scratch. But if you need to fix a few parts then it may cost less.
Hiring an in house ecommerce expert is anytime an expensive deal as you may incur many other management costs apart from paying salary. You may also need to hire a project manager to check the work done.
If you hire an ecommerce website development company then you can save a lot of cost and mental stress of managing the resource.
You can save more than 50% of your cost if you decide to outsource your ecommerce development overseas. You can hire dedicate web developers and web designers at a fraction of a cost. You also get a project manager as a bonus.
Read more about outsourcing
FAQs On Offshore Outsourcing Of Web Designing Work To ICO Webtech
How To Choose Your Website Design Outsourcing Partner
How Will Outsourcing Help Your Business?
Benefits Of Outsourcing
SEO Outsourcing Offshore Will Get Your Website Penalized By Google: Really??
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