An Inconvenient Truth
You’re happy with your branding, your adverts are running well, plenty of click throughs, and you know your product is good, plus your copy is a work of art. Still, you wonder why your conversions aren’t all that great. The answer is, quite possibly, that your website just isn’t up to scratch.
Websites can be expensive, hard to update, easy to break and even easier to fall out of fashion. Try this quick exercise. Visit the Wayback Machine and type in your favourite website. Scroll the timeline back 5-10 years. It might not feel like a long time ago, but the website you’re now looking at might as well be a cave painting for how current it looks.
The inconvenient truth of it is that websites have a shelf life, technology and design moves on and the best way to compete is to move with it. Users quickly come to expect the latest UI and UX when browsing, and can quickly bounce out of sites that feel clunky, slow and spammy. And there is no better solution to reduce this bounce rate than to update or even replace your website.
But websites are expensive, you said it yourself.
I did, and good ones are.
But, if it makes you more money and allows you to scale up your business, it isn’t an expense, it’s an investment. Your website is your number one selling tool, it’s what all of your socials, marketing and advertising are pointing towards. It’s your showroom, your portfolio, your storefront. If you’re going to spend money anywhere, this is the place to do it.
If it costs you $40k, as an example, for a fully optimised all singing and dancing website, that can seem like a lot, but how much is your neglected, hard to navigate, out dated website losing you monthly, quarterly, annually? I’d bet you are missing out on much more than $40k through lack of optimisation alone.
So how long should I get out of my website?
I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t know how quickly trends will change, buuuuuuuut…3-5 years is a good ball park.
Now you can get longer out of a website by choosing to build with an easy to update CMS (content management system) like Shopify or WordPress. This delays the eventual day when you would need a complete site overhaul, by providing ample space to safely and cleanly improve, build on and optimise your website, products and content to keep track with user expectations.
Should I stop running ads until I get my website updated?
No…but. Really this is case by case situation.
A super fast metaphor. Your website is in this instance a physical storefront, and it’s seen better days. Now it might have a cracked window and the AC is broken. People can still shop there, all be it a little less willingly than they had been, if you tape up the window and buy a fan. Or it could be worse, your store roof may have caved in, you might need a temporary set up whilst your store is rebuilt.
Basically, the ads are driving business to you, and cutting them off dead is rarely the right call. There’s lots of speedy fixes that can be done to keep the ads running, get the conversions building and keep the lights on whilst your new website is being built.
