How do you know when it’s time to redesign your website?

It’s that creeping feeling all marketing and communications people know: Your website works, but something’s off — the colors and the font choices are outdated, it’s hard to navigate, and it takes all afternoon to change a photo in your content management system (you call that a content management system?).

For months — years? — you’ve wanted to add something new to the staff bios, like pronouns or a favorite food, just to make things more human. Forget about it. The site was built five (or six, or seven) years ago, and using it feels like driving an old Subaru. There are broken links. You still have stock photos of hands holding a seedling. Your staff fields calls from people who can’t find what they’re looking for on the website. You can’t even find it. You’re not getting the traffic you want, or the conversions. All the tinkering in the world won’t let you tell your real story.

When will there be a right time for this project? You need to justify the budget and time investment, and meanwhile, there are annual reports to get out, social media accounts to feed, and a presentation to the board that needs to be polished. How do you know that the situation is dire enough to take action and start reaching out to design agencies?

We’ve identified three areas to investigate. If you’re struggling with any one, that is likely enough of a reason to consider redoing your website. If you’re checking all of the boxes, well, give us a call.

Brand Experience

We look at everything through the lens of brand: Every touchpoint, whether you like it or not, contributes to your audiences’ images of you in their heads. Your organization’s website is usually the first place your audiences get a fully curated story. It doesn’t matter if this is their first or eighteenth impression of you. Every time they come to your website, it reflects upon you and your work. Every single visit is an opportunity to reinforce that brand idea. So take a close look at your website and ask yourself what messages you’re sending.

Of course, your website copy is the easiest thing to change (if your content management system works well — more on that in a bit). You can look at the voice and tone of your copy and pretty easily bring that into line with your story. Photography and other imagery should also be easy to swap out (though having a solid strategy behind the type of photography you use to represent your brand is as critical as messaging and tone of voice).

Other elements of a website are just as important, but send subtler brand messages that are not easy to change. For example, if you are trying to come across as warm and inviting to visitors, then having a stark, severe design can create a false image. If you’re trying to create a somber, urgent mood, and your site is using Comic Sans, that’s a disconnect.

Take a look at the overall design, including elements such as iconography, color, and typography. If it’s out of date and isn’t reflecting the caliber of your work, it is very likely turning away visitors or customers and you should consider an overhaul. In our work, we’re always thinking toward the future. Accuracy, authenticity, and flexibility are the most important aspects of a web design, in part because the financial and time investment is so high. The longer a site can last, the better it will be for your organization.

Pathways to Action

Perhaps more important than visual design and messaging is how useful your site is. Remember — your website is a tool. If nobody can find what they’re looking for, the website is failing at its core purpose. Your information architecture — which is how the pages on your site are arranged hierarchically and internally connected — is the backbone of your website. So forget design for a moment and imagine stripping your site to the HTML studs, so it looks like Craigslist. Can people navigate to what they are looking for quickly and easily and get the gist of your story? That should be your first and most important test.

You might know what you want them to do (donate, purchase, get in touch, download something), and you can easily know, by that metric, if things are working — first, check your website’s analytics. If people are going where you want them to go and your brand communications are on point, then you can probably stay the course. If they are not doing what you want them to do, then it is time for a change.

Test your assumptions

One big mistake we see is clients assuming that they know what their audiences are looking for and what is motivating them. A website redesign is typically one of the biggest financial- and time-intensive endeavors for an organization (as it should be, considering it’s your most valuable and cohesive communications tool). Taking a self-centric approach to a website redesign is a big mistake. This is a tool you’re providing for people. Your audiences don’t care about the way you’re structured. They have fears, wants, and needs, and your job is to meet them where they are with an engaging, clear experience that answers their needs. In short: Websites should be audience-centric.

The best way of learning what motivates your audiences is simply to ask them. Just ask. They’ll tell you. You can start with feedback on the site. You can also do user testing. Or you can have your design partner conduct brief interviews. Ask them what they’re looking to do, and then ask if they can do it easily. Do a Zoom meeting, have them share their screen, and watch them navigate your site while they narrate their choice. It’s always a fascinating and illuminating exercise that helps you get out of your own head and into theirs.

But you can go further than that. In our discovery process, we go deeper to understand what unsaid goals audiences are trying to achieve. People want to be heroes, to be seen, to feel good about themselves, to avoid discomfort. How does your site help them achieve some of these implicit goals?

It’s all in the details

Finally, think through the lens of user experience (UX), which is an umbrella term for all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways people interact with your site. What happens when they hover on an image or button? How does scrolling feel? Are there small interactive gestures or movements throughout the site that convey something about your unique approach or personality? Is your mobile experience tailored to how people browse content on their phones or does it simply present the same long pages of content as your desktop site does? These small UX details can make a huge difference in communicating your relevance and credibility as a brand. How your audiences feel when they interact with you online. The more that you can delight visitors in the details, the more likely they’ll feel excited about your organization.

Technology

Another important reason to consider redoing your website is if the technology isn’t working for you. Your site might be slow, features might be broken, or it might not be accessible to people with disabilities. It might sound obvious to say, but all of these issues will be clear because they affect the user experience. As we’ve said, a great user experience, because it reflects on your brand, is of vital importance.

However, remember that you are also a user of your site — almost certainly the most frequent user. What is your experience as a content manager? Is your website like an old car that only you can turn on with a special screwdriver with duct tape on the handle? How easy is it for you to update content? Do you have the flexibility to tell the story you want to tell with the tools you have?

One of the things we hear most often from clients after we relaunch their website is how much easier it is to do their jobs. With a new or revamped content management system, your site can grow with your organization and do the job you need it to do (making it easy for visitors to do what they want). When you’re considering whether you should redo your website, consider that you and your fellow communications professionals can spend less time wrestling with the tools and more time making impactful things.

What if you can’t do it now?

If you don’t have the budget or inclination to do a complete website overhaul, there’s still a lot you can do. I stand behind my comment above, that brand is the most important thing. Consider scaling back your website so that you can control the brand experience. Feel free to prune the tree. Archive pages. Update imagery. Make sure that you use the medium of the web properly and provide visitors with text hierarchy: Look for long paragraphs that people are not going to read online when they’re looking for something. Cut them down, or even better, create headers so that visitors can scan the text as they scroll to get the gist of the content. They can scroll back up and read what they want to read, and it speaks to the fact that you care about their experience. Create clear calls-to-action to help people navigate easily to the next step in their pathway.

Also, consider what you can do with the imagery on the site. Can you make the photography more authentic to who you are? Can you get rid of or find better stock photography? You’d be surprised how much better a site can feel when you have better imagery.

Of course, you don’t want people coming to a site that you don’t believe in, but you still have business to conduct, so if you’re struggling to get traffic, consider tuning up your search engine marketing. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be highly effective, even a light touch. There are technical and content changes you can make that might not require a new website (though you might need a developer). Similarly, you can do a lot without a major overhaul to improve your site’s accessibility to people with disabilities. Consider whether your site’s experience matches your organization’s values, and if there’s a gap, then you can tweak your site without a complete redo.

What if you’re not sure what you need?

Conducting a website audit will help you map out the issues of your website, including where you’re falling short of best practices and standards and what kind of investment you might need to make to improve it. Our audits include collaborative discovery sessions with teams and leadership to understand goals and issues, as well as looking under the hood (Google Analytics, the CMS, and a thorough review of your website content). We deliver an audit report that offers a gap analysis and summary of insights and next steps based on data as well as the organization’s budget and goals. It’s a roadmap forward with either a phased approach or an overhaul. It’s a great way to suss out all of the issues and figure out if you should jump into a full redesign now or later.