How a Poor Website Can Damage your Business

Website design in Toronto is constantly evolving. Once, only the biggest companies had websites. Now, they are a must-have marketing element for businesses of all sizes and play a huge role in shaping customer perceptions.

If you have not updated your company’s website in some time, it may be giving people a negative impression of your company. This is a problem that no small business can afford to have. To help you protect your enterprise, here are 5 aspects of your website that may be damaging your business’ reputation and some suggestions to help you resolve these issues.

5 Factors That Signal Your Website Needs a Redesign

Your Website Looks Outdated

Web design has come a long way since the first website was launched in 1991. In the old days, some simple text, a picture or two, and maybe a navigation bar was all you needed to make your site look respectable. Today, 94% of first impressions of websites are based on the attractiveness of their appearance and design. Customers expect websites to serve as the faces of the brands they interact with. This is especially true for smaller brands that lack the name recognition of industry titans like Coca Cola and Disney.

Your brand’s website should look sleek, modern, and attractive. It should include multimedia elements like graphics and video to boost user engagement and offer your audience more ways to connect with your products or services. Hiring a web design company is the easiest way to establish the look and feel your website needs to compete in today’s markets. Remember, first impressions are everything! If your website does not impress your leads immediately, you are unlikely to be able to convert them to customers.

Your Website Is Not Responsive or Is Poorly Optimized for Mobile

Millions of Canadians primarily browse the web using their mobile phones, and more are joining them every day. However, many business websites are still built with desktop use in mind. Some maintain a stripped-down version of the site for mobile use, but some do not even go this far to accommodate mobile use. Instead, they force mobile users to struggle with a version of their website that was designed for a completely different screen size and set of control inputs.

To capture as many leads as possible, your website needs to put mobile users first. Ideally, it should be built using responsive design principles. These principles allow websites to automatically adjust the elements of their design to any device’s screen size, handily accommodating desktop, smartphone, and tablet users with a single version of your website.

Your Website Offers a Poor User Experience (UX)

User experience, or UX, is one of the most important aspects of web design today. Users typically come to a business website with a specific goal in mind, and they want to accomplish it quickly without having to spend valuable time figuring out how to do it. If they cannot do thus, they will leave. Poor website design causes approximately 50% of users to leave a website and head to a competitor’s instead.

Your website’s navigation, design, and usability (all key UX elements) should collectively work toward getting users where they need to go. Keep your site relatively simple with as few pages as possible while still delivering sufficient detail. Streamline your navigation to make it easy to access each of these pages. Make sure that your company’s name, location, and contact information are all clearly displayed in the footer so your leads can always find them.

Your Website Has Features That Do Not Work Properly

Features like an embedded map display or a live chat box can significantly enhance your website’s UX, but only if they work as intended. These features can easily become buggy and unusable with just a few errors in their code. When this happens, not only will your users not be able to access the features, but your website might slow to a crawl or crash altogether. Adding too many features on a site without optimizing the entire design can also make the site extremely slow, even if they all work as intended.

If you are experiencing difficulties with your website’s features, consider hiring a web design company in Toronto to have a look at them. Your site may need a complete coding overhaul to ensure it will function properly in the future. There may also be better features available to replace the ones that do not work, such as newer e-commerce plugins to help you run an online store on your website.

Your Website Is Too Slow

With today’s technology behind you, there is no excuse for a slow website. Users increasingly expect to see websites load quickly and smoothly regardless of which device they are using to browse. Half of all users will abandon their shopping cart on an e-commerce website if the site loads too slowly, and more than half of users think a site should load in 3 seconds or less.

To remedy this problem, use tools like Google’s Core Web Vitals report to determine what is causing it. You can also hire a professional web design company in Toronto to optimize your site. You may need to remove some features, change your hosting service, create more efficient website code, or make any number of other changes to keep things running smoothly behind the scenes. Aim to meet or fall below that critical 3-second mark on both desktop and mobile.

Trust WSI Comandix for Stellar Web Design in Toronto

Do not let your website give people the wrong impression of your company. WSI Comandix is an experienced web design agency in Toronto with the talent you need to bring your website up to date. Contact us today to discuss your website redesign needs and begin working out the scope of your project.