7 Things That Mean Your Website Needs to be Upgraded in 2024
In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, a website is often the first point of contact between businesses and their potential customers. However, as technology advances and user expectations evolve, maintaining a modern and functional website is crucial for staying competitive and engaging your audience effectively. Using an outdated website with outdated scripts and elements will not only adversely affect the performance of your website, but an outdated website will also directly impact the brand image of your company, portraying it as outdated, irrelevant and unreliable (Whysall, 2022).
The fact is, nowadays people will jump into the web first, to look for a company’s website to get more information before deciding on doing business. If your website is no longer working as well as it should – or worse: portraying an otherwise negative image of your company – then you should take immediate action and do a re-development project of your digital presence, starting with your website. To help you decide, here are 7 things that if one or more of them still exists on your website, is a very big sign that you need to upgrade your website.
#1 – You still use Flash
Flash used to be a very popular tool for creating interactive elements on a website. However, nowadays most major browsers have discontinued the support for Flash, and even Adobe themselves have pulled the plug on their Adobe Flash player plugin. The reason is because Flash has some major drawbacks in web development. According to America’s Cyber Defense Agency (ACDA), Flash has security vulnerabilities that would allow a remote attacker to exploit them and execute arbitrary code (ACDA, 2013). Moreover, Flash has poor mobile compatibility and very limited support across modern browsers.
#2 – You still use images for icons
Using images as icons used to be the only option to get cool graphical icons. However, nowadays using icon images instead of font libraries like Font Awesome or Icofont can lead to several issues. Icon images often increase page load times (very significantly) due to additional HTTP requests being required for each image, as opposed to only one request being required to load one font file. Font libraries are also extremely lightweight compared to a images since they are vector, infinitely scalable, completely resolution independent graphics, and can be easily styled using CSS (Tardive, 2016).
#3 – There are broken links in your website
Broken links are links in your website that no longer work. If a website hasn’t been updated for a very long time, chances are broken links may exist as the links are pointing to pages or resources that probably no longer exists, or has changed. Broken links negatively impact the user experience, hinder search engine crawling, and may decrease search rankings and overall website credibility (Bell, 2023). Users encountering broken links may perceive the site as outdated or poorly maintained, leading to increased bounce rates and decreased engagement.
#4 – Your website loads slow
The loading speed of a website significantly impacts user experience and engagement. Among study findings regarding website load speed are: 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load, and people would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load (Anderson, 2024). Furthermore, Google’s PageSpeed Insights emphasizes the importance of fast loading times for mobile devices, where users often have slower internet connections. Factors contributing to slow loading speeds include large image sizes, excessive scripts, and server performance issues. Websites that fail to meet users’ expectations for loading speed risk higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates.
#5 – Your website is not “responsive”
A responsive website is a website that can automatically adapt its design and layout to different screen sizes of the various different devices with which users visit a website – and it is the golden standard in modern website design. With the proliferation of mobile devices, having a non-responsive website design can lead to a poor user experience especially on smartphones and tablets. Nowadays, mobile devices accounted for over 60% of website traffic (Howarth, 2024), which means that website responsiveness is very crucial.
#6 – Your website has an outdated look and feel
An outdated appearance can detract from a website’s credibility and relevance. Visually appealing website design captures people’s attention, makes them want to stick around, and ultimately turns them into customers (Josh, 2023). Outdated elements such as old-fashioned fonts, colors, and layouts can convey a message that the company is stagnant and not keeping up to date with latest advancements. Additionally, using outdated scripts or coding practices may result in compatibility issues with newer browsers and devices.
#7 – Your website does not convey your corporate brand
As an entrepreneur you should have already understood the critical importance of branding. According the a digital marketing expert, a business that doesn’t really have any cohesive branding isn’t going to stay in someone’s mind for very long (Jones, 2021). If you have an old website with multiple web developers working on it over time, that may lead to inconsistencies in your web design, messaging, and user experience. An easy sign of this is that some of your pages may have an entirely different look and feel from other pages.
So, if your website have one or more of the things mentioned above, then it’s a good sign that you need to start upgrading your website to maintain your website’s relevance, usability, and competitiveness in today’s digital landscape. By leveraging modern technologies, design principles, and branding strategies into your website upgrade project, your new website can enhance user experience, drive higher engagement, and help achieve your business objectives effectively. If you need help to determine whether your website needs an upgrade, contact us for a free website audit.
