You probably already understand the importance of having a website for your business. If your company runs through an e-commerce site, then it is vital to have an easy to find website. You may think that you have spent enough time and capital on your company’s web design, but have you really? If the last time you updated your website was during the Bush administration, then you are probably not seeing the amount of traffic you should. Maybe you have invested in SEO, but you have a high bounce rate, its probably because the design of your website is not what it should be for today’s world. Let’s look at some ways you can bring your website up to date and in turn, gain customers.

Was Your Website Designed Before the iPad and when Blackberries Were the Rage?

If it’s been a decade since you updated your website, the world has moved on without it. The biggest reason your website is causing you to lose customers is that it is not optimized for mobile devices. Smartphones were not around in 2005, so if your website is that old, then you are way behind the times. In the last few years, mobile use has grown to the point where it makes up half of all internet traffic. If a customer comes to your website on their mobile device and can’t get it to load properly, they will go somewhere else.

Older Websites are Security Risk

An older website has security in place for the time it was designed. Since then, if it has not been updated, it becomes a target for hackers to exploit. The older your website’s design, the easier it is for it to be hacked. You may think because your company is not a multi-national conglomerate that you are safe from a 17-year-old kid in his basement in Sweden, but you would be wrong. Hackers look for older web design, no matter the size of the company. Once they have hacked you, then they can get vital customer information from you. Things like as addresses, credit card numbers, phone numbers, date of birth, and in some cases social security numbers (with companies such as employment agencies) can be stolen. No one want’s to be the customer of a company that doesn’t protect their personal data.

Your Website is Stagnate and Ugly

If your website is pixelated and does not have any eye-catching animations, videos, or vibrant colors, then it will be hard to hold a customer’s attention when they visit.  Clean, sleek looking design along with interesting and engaging content is the way to grab a customer’s attention in the digital age. If your website looks like Windows 95, then it not only will it bore the customer, it will also make your company look unprofessional, even cheap. Remember your website is your number one inbound marketing tool. Do you want the layout and design to say “we are behind the times and don’t care,” or do you want to have a web design that grabs and holds a customer’s attention?

You’re Just Too Slow

Part of having a good website design is to have faster load times. Studies show that if a website does not load instantly, then customers will leave in that same instant.  Attention spans have shrunk over the last decade, and if your site takes the same time to load as AOL did on dial-up, then you can count on losing potential customers. Be sure that the site host you use can keep up with fast load times, and that your server is up to date as well. Using cheap, or free site hosts can lead to slower load rates and worse, downtime when your site can’t be visited at all.

So, if you want to ensure that you can bring in new customers then it is a clear choice, you need to update your website to an engaging, secure, and swift loading one. Once you have updated your site,  then you will be ready to compete in the digital age