It’s time to really reflect on the past 10 years and take a good hard look at your business. Has the website seen as much progress as your brand? If not, now in the New Year is the best time to get a new website. Here are some good reasons why.

New Year = new you and new business

The New Year is filled with possibilities galore. New customers can be met offline and on, new products will be introduced, new businesses will start up based on new ideas. With all of this potential, your business’s website should reflect that sense of rejuvenation and confidence of what lies ahead of us in the future. It’s both part of your toolkit for online marketing as well as the first impression people make about your company and its brand.

Do you want your website to represent your company at its best? If so, but the site hasn’t looked like it’s been upgraded since the early 2000s, it’s time to catch up! Otherwise all of those great new possibilities we mentioned won’t be coming anywhere near you in the New Year. No one likes visiting a website that looks and feels out of date.

It makes a great marketing strategy

January can be a slow month for some businesses. After the massive sales made during the holidays, it can feel like a drag to see sales slow down to a near crawl after the rush is over.

In our eyes, January is the perfect opportunity to introduce a new website as part of your marketing strategy. Everyone is more inclined to browse social media when things are quiet, and some businesses offer great post-holiday deals. By introducing your new website during a slower month of the year, you can in fact draw in more attention and build better brand awareness than you would by clamouring with the rest of the competition during the busiest time of the year.

Your competition has gotten new websites

Holding off from getting a new website or updating your current old one to something better is not only deterring customers. What this action does is deter customers and convince them that your competitors are more likely to help them with their needs. While you’re not doing much to tweak or improve your website, your competitors are staying in touch with the latest trends in customer service and web design both. They are engaging on social media in your absence, and listening to their customers in the process. They have updated their websites while you have done nothing.

Do you want to get ahead of the competition for once? You can start with these tips in our blog post; getting a new website and being active about engaging with your customers are also highly recommended.

Your site’s getting complaints

Or rather a high bounce rate, which can technically be considered a silent complaint…but a high bounce rate means something is wrong with your website regardless. We’ve talked about what high bounce rate is and what it means, but ultimately it can mean more than one thing:

  • The site loads too slowly
  • The site doesn’t respond to commands, i.e. it’s not responsive
  • The design is out of date
  • Images on your site won’t load at all or you only see half an image loaded
  • Call to actions are unclear and too demanding of your customers’ time
  • You’re not responding either! (i.e. you’re not engaging with comments or complaints made)

A high bounce rate is bad enough, but too many complaints means a very badly damaged online reputation—something no business owner wants. You may not see the complaints on your website, but that’s because most people won’t leave their negative feedback there—they will go to other websites where their messages are impossible to take down. If you want to avoid all of this in the coming year, address all of these underlying issues by getting a new website built.

We recommend that over updating your current website because some sites have way too many broken issues that a simple update won’t fix. It’s like painting a fresh coat on a car on its last legs; you wouldn’t want it on the road no matter how new it looks. So why do that for a website?

Your time is running out

There are several updates coming in 2020 that business owners can no longer avoid. There is Windows 7’s end of life; the official farewell to Flash across all browsers and devices; brand new plugins and software galore. Time is running out to catch up and update the computers you use at your company, the software your website runs on, and the plugins and features your website uses daily.

If you ignore the clock and think it’s no big deal, then it will cost you—quite literally. Windows 7 in particular may still be offered past its expiration date, but according to one source, business owners will have to pay $50 for extended security updates after the end of life date passes, which will escalate in price the longer it’s kept around. It will cost you less to upgrade to Windows 10—you’d pay a one-time fee, as opposed to an annual charge.

For all of these reasons, it’s a good year to get a new website. Give V3 Media a call if you want a great website that is responsive, fast loading, beautifully designed, and more than qualified to last throughout 2020 and beyond.