That faithful website that has been around since you started your business just isn’t working the way it used to, we completely understand. That website is standing as a venerable testament to how Malvern PA Web Design and SEO used to be. Eventually there will come a time where that website just isn’t up to par with your competition and what the market demands. Being in a fast moving field like website design, we see this happen a lot faster than people think. But how are you supposed to know when that moment is, you’re not a web designer? Don’t worry, that’s why your friends here at Caveni are writing this article, specifically for you and your ancient website. We are the leading Philadelphia web design firm, so when it comes to upgrading websites we have a slight bias. If you aren’t interested in hearing what we have to say, just go up to the menu and click that big, “Quote” button for some help with your website. If you would like some more information; we want to give you some metrics that will let you make a decision in spite of our natural bias as the guys that build the websites. Here are some ways for you to cut through the sales stuff and get a good idea about how to really tell if it is time to upgrade your website:

Shopify eCommerce Sales in Trillions

By 2021, global retail ecommerce sales will reach $4.5 trillion (Shopify)

Poor Feedback From Customers

Are your customers telling you that your website looks dated or is difficult to use? They are probably right, listen to what people are telling you about your website. Your customers and their input is a great way to have an early warning system about the quality of your website. If you’re still unsure because you don’t know if you can trust your customer, there are loads of alternative ways to get eyeballs onto your website to give you an opinion about whether you need to update or not. You can ask friends or acquaintances to give you feedback on if they think your website looks outdated. You can also ask them to navigate to specific places and see if your website is difficult to navigate.

Trouble with navigation is an easy way to be losing customers if they come to your website. So if you are not able to find people that would be willing to provide feedback on your website there are a number of tools that would allow you to hire professionals to take a look on your behalf. We would almost always recommend you have a service take a look at your website. Service providers will normally find things that a layman won’t pick up on. But, occasionally finding and justifying the budget for this sort of thing can be pretty difficult. We’ve listed a couple that we think would help you most:

User Testing Image Example

Sales Numbers Are Falling

Online retail sales have grown by 24% this year; your sales numbers shouldn’t be going down on your website. Sales effectiveness is a sure fire way to decide whether you need a new website. We’ve written a blog on optimizing your website for conversions, try out some of our methods. If you implement all of our suggestions and are still having trouble, that is a sign that it may the moment to get started on a redesign. Even If you’re being careful and assume it is for some other reason, you will still need to rethink your online sales strategy. The first step in a new sales strategy is always a new website. Of course, we recognize that sales numbers can fall for any number of reasons. Your sales numbers falling are just a piece of the puzzle, combined with one or two other factors from this article you can start to get a clear picture about whether it is time to upgrade the website.


We just want to reiterate how essential online sales are to your business. The whole point of having a website is to facilitate sales to your customers. Now for the service industry, this may mean that your website is more like a hub to collect potential sales, but it is still an incredibly important piece in the puzzle for your sales strategy in 2019. In a decade there will only be two types of companies, those that utilized the internet to their advantage, and those that no longer exist. We would like to be in that first category, we hope that we can help you stay there with us!

A graph depiction of total retail sales in the UK.

Sourced from RetailMarketing.com

Bounce Rate Is High

Bounce rate refers to the number of users going to your website and leaving after only browsing one page. High bounce rates are a common problem in Malvern PA Web Design. Your bounce rate is one of the best indicators of website health, having an unnaturally high bounce rate (normally above 70%). Is a good indicator to you and to search engines like Google, that your site is not a high quality or well performing website. Bounce rate is normally one of our first KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) we look at when we get a new customer, you can’t get more sales if people are leaving your website right away! If you’re not sure how to check you bounce rate, the easiest way is using Google Analytics. You can see all of the relevant metrics using Google’s analytical tools which allows you to make a more informed decision on when to update your website. Check out our recent article on installing Google Analytics and Search Console. This important for web design as well as things like Malvern PA SEO, which refers to search engine optimization (Ranking higher on Google).

Having Difficulty Ranking on Google

Are your rankings just not going up? Have you paid and still not seen any growth? If you believe you’ve been using a service or have been creating quality content but still aren’t growing, there may be some serious problems with your website that are dragging down your rankings. Google recently launched a massive update that places mobile functionality as one of the key ranking factors for websites. If you have an older site you may not be ranking at all because of the changes as to how websites function on mobile . Mobile functionality concerns are only one part of what may be hindering your older website in your rankings. We recently wrote an article about website speed and how important it is for the health of your sales and search engine rankings. Your website may be having difficulty ranking because it is running so poorly. You can read more in our recent article about the basic SEO ranking factors

Older websites have a tendency to have a lot of broken or dead links that are dragging down the rest of the website. Finding these links can often be impossible as they are so buried into a massive site that it just isn’t worth the time or the manpower to fix them. In cases like this it is often cheaper to just completely redesign the website and remove those links completely, one of the sad truths of Malvern PA Web Design. Occasionally redirecting these links with a 301 redirect will fix this issues. But having so many broken or deadweight pages is also a good indicator that it is time to update and fix all those broken pages.

Google SEO Keyword Finder

Sourced from Mangool.com

Website Age (2-5 Years old)

Your website age is the first indicator that we would look at, we’ve seen a lot of old websites in Malvern PA Web Design. Was it built in the last 2 years? If the answer is “no” you will need a redesign as soon as possible. We’ve already mentioned the Google algorithm change in 2016, if your website wasn’t built after that change you are especially susceptible to having code that is no longer working properly. Malvern PA Web Design and general web design moves forward in leaps and bounds, a lot of the techniques and methods used today are far more efficient than methods used in the past. We can all remember the days of flashplayer and 15 minute loading times on the older internet. We are way past those days to the point that if your website isn’t loading in 2-4 seconds you are being penalized by search engines like Google.

You are getting a lot more bang for your buck when you buy a website in 2019. Malvern PA Web Design has advanced at every stage and there is a very clear distinction between older websites and newer ones. This becomes even more clear when looking at website sales and conversion rates compared between older websites and websites updated in the last year. We have access to more data now than we ever have in human history and our ability to drive interested consumers into buying comes from that fundamental understanding of human habits. Modern data analytics techniques have completely buried other methods in irrelevancy. At Caveni, we hold website age to be the most important test for whether it is time to update. We could count on one hand how many 3+ year old websites actually functioned as well as they should. If there is any indicator that you should really look it, this is the one.  

https://scstylecaster.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/old-websites.png?resize=960%2C540

Sourced from Style Caster

Malvern PA Web Design Conclusion

Knowing when to upgrade your website can be difficult, there is a lot of cost and time that goes into redoing your website design. One of the most common answers we hear is, “Well, I don’t get any business from my website, so why would I update?” Our answer to this is always, “That is probably because you need to update it.” If electronic commerce is growing by more than 24% every year, your business should be growing by at least 10% online annually. If you aren’t making conversions, if you aren’t increasing in rank, if your users are complaining about your website, and if your website is old; now is the time to upgrade to a newer, cleaner, and optimized version of that faithful old Malvern PA Web Design. Don’t ignore how important your online optimization is, the internet isn’t going away anytime soon.  

One Comment

  • Prince says:

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