Seven Signs Your Website Needs a Makeover

While there’s no strict rule on how often you should redesign your website, technology and design trends evolve constantly, and it’s important to stay relevant. Most of us spend a great deal of time online, so we’ve become quite critical of the websites we visit. If it doesn’t look good, load fast, and work well, we generally won’t give a website more than a few seconds of our precious time before leaving it—and the business it represents.

Your business’s website is crucial to your marketing strategy, so it (literally) pays to keep it fresh. With that in mind, here are seven signs your website is due for a redesign…

As of 2021, 28 percent of small businesses did not have a website. Not only does the lack of a website make it harder for potential guests to find you online, it forces you to rely solely on OTAs for your bookings, which charge significant commissions. In today’s competitive hospitality industry, not having a website is not an option.

Outdated websites stand out like a sore thumb—and are just as cringe worthy. If your website seems like a relic from the 90s or 2000s with garish colours, small images, underlined blue links, Times New Roman font, tiled backgrounds, animated gifs, and such, it’s overdue for a makeover. Take a look at your competitors’ sites for comparison and be honest about your own.

Remember, first impressions matter, and 50 percent of consumers assert that their impression is reliant on the company’s web design. While we agree that you can’t always judge a book by its cover, consumers are naturally drawn to businesses that offer a pleasing digital experience.

Design trends may come and go, however, certain principles remain timeless. Your website should be easily scannable and uncluttered with plenty of negative space and a prominent yet unobtrusive booking engine link.

Things can break on any site—old or new—such as links, images and videos, plugins, widgets, and forms, which is why it’s important to monitor your website to catch bugs that need fixing as soon as they occur. However, if such issues crop up frequently, it may be a sign that your site’s technology is out of date, and it’s time for a redesign.

Go through your website from a customer’s perspective (or ask a friend or family member to visit your site) to get an objective view. Do pages load quickly? Is it easy to find information? Confusing navigation and slow load times put visitors off. Forty percent of those visitors will exit a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

You should also ask yourself if your site is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. If you’re unsure where to start, an accessibility widget such as accessiBe can handle this on your behalf. Design clients of World Web Technologies are eligible for a 20 percent accessiBe discount.

Last but not least, it is crucial to maintain a high level of security. Your users will be a lot less friendly if their credit card information gets stolen! At a minimum, your website should be secured by an SSL/TLS certificate and a PCI-compliant payment gateway. Review your site security regularly to ensure no vulnerabilities creep in.

If you have to rely on your web designer to update basic content like blog posts, images, prices, and packages, you could save money (and definitely time) by investing in a website that comes with an easy-to-use content management system (CMS). A CMS allows you to log in to the back-end of your website and update content as often as you like. This means you don’t have to pay your designer to update descriptions, images, pricing, or your blog, and updates can be timed more effectively.

Here at World Web Technologies, all of our redesigns come with an easy-to-use WordPress CMS to give our clients more control over their content.

Search engines consider sites with regularly updated content to be current and rank them better for it. With a user-friendly CMS, there are no excuses for not keeping your website fresh.

Over the past years, mobile has grown to usurp desktop as the primary source of web traffic. As of 2024, mobile devices (excluding tablets) accounted for 62.5 percent of internet traffic around the globe. That number rises even higher for the travel and hospitality industries at 67.8 percent in 2023.

Google has recognized the importance of mobile traffic by implementing mobile-first indexing, which uses the mobile version of a site to determine its ranking. The point is: if your website is not responsive—in other words, it does not automatically adapt layout and functionality to the device it is being viewed on for an optimal cross-device user experience—it’s time for one that is.

Declining or steadily low website traffic is a strong indicator that major changes are required. If your website is not ranking in search engine results and not expanding your customer base, it’s not fulfilling its purpose. Using a tool like Google Analytics that tracks your site’s statistics helps determine whether or not it’s effective. In addition to total traffic, other important metrics to assess include traffic sources (organic, referred, direct, and social), bounce rates, exit pages, and, of course, the conversion rate.

If you use WebRezPro’s online booking engine, you can automatically track your website bookings and even those of which were made on mobile.

There could be any number of reasons why your site doesn’t reflect your unique business. Perhaps it was made by a well-meaning friend with a big heart but little or outdated web design skills. Maybe the content strategy is off, or your property has been recently renovated. Whatever the reason, it’s important to revamp your website so that it reflects your business’s unique selling proposition and the actual customer experience, because that’s what travelers seek—genuine experiences.

Look at your website through the eyes of a potential customer who has no previous knowledge of your business or enlist a friend again. Is your website an accurate representation of the actual experience?