5 Reasons You Should Not Get a New Website
Do you really need a new, fancy website for your business? While it may seem like the best place to spend your effort, and your marketing budget, it isn’t always effective. Here’s what you need to know.
Smart business people understand how incredibly critical it is to have a big online presence. As a result, most business owners feel like they constantly need to be increasing their web presence and doing more online. The first way business owners tend do this is by launching a new website. While this is a good way to show your current customers that you are making changes within your company, it’s certainly not the answer to getting more leads or additional business. Unfortunately, most business owners spend their online marketing budget on developing a very nice website, without realizing that this is very rarely the answer to their marketing problems. Here are five reasons you should not invest in a new website.
Reason #1: Your current website was not done properly
This might be true, but didn’t you already go through this at least once before? You had a website that wasn’t doing what you needed, so you hired a company to design you a new one. Your new website went online and you dreamt it would completely change your online presence. But it didn’t get you the results you wanted. That’s because a new website was not the solution you needed then, and it’s not the solution you need now.
You see, when you launch a new website today, you’re going to repeat all the same mistakes you made last time round. Take time to resolve the issues with your current website and learn from those mistakes, then you can focus on creating a better website. Don’t end up with a brand new, prettier version the same flawed site you already have.
Reason #2: It’s technical factors that are failing you, not the design of your site
Your website isn’t getting you what you want, so you assume the design must wrong. But research shows that design plays a very, very small role in the leads you get from your website. The easiest way to think about it is this: if you developed the most beautiful and highly optimized website in the world and could break every record in the books by converting 25% of your visitors, you could potentially convert 25% of the 10 daily visitors you currently get.
But what if there was a website that was not pretty and did not convert anywhere near as well as the perfect website. Instead of 10 visitors, it received 1,000 visitors per day? Imagine if this website only converted 5% of the time. That would still amount to 50 conversions every day, which is far greater than the perfectly designed website. The reality is even more exaggerated than this, because the design of your website seldom has a 500% impact on conversions. But getting technical details of your website right can easily get you more than a 500% boost in traffic.
Reason #3: It’s content, not design, that will increase your conversions
While conversions can be increased all sorts of changes to a website, it turns out that content is by far the most effective, and the easiest. Luckily for you, content is the least expensive thing to adjust on a website. Instead of focusing on the fancy pictures, menus and layout, focus on having the right content first and think about the design later. Whatever content you create for your current website will easily roll over into a new design when you upgrade. Design changes are almost never something you can carry over, so think of your content as an asset and the design as a liability.
Reason #4: Less Than 5% of your web presence is on your site
Most of what people see about your business is outside of your website, not on it. Almost 98% of your potential prospects are bound to see something else about you before they ever see your actual website. If the first impression is paramount, and most potential prospects see your off-website presence first, it doesn’t make sense to focus on your website initially. Most potential prospects are going to see Google search results, Social Media Posts and articles about your company long before they visit your site.
Reason #5: You can’t afford a new website
This is the one I love talking about, because I tell businesses they can’t afford a new website and they immediately tell me I’m wrong! They then typically tell me about some proposal they received from a marketing company, offering to build them a new website that is going to give them everything they need, and more.
What you need to remember when looking at your budget is the 10/90 rule. Anything new you spend money on should take only 10% of your total budget for that project. The other 90% needs to be spent on promoting it. An amazing new product won’t make you any money if you’ve spent every penny developing it, and have nothing left to spend on telling people about it!
In one instance a very smart businessman told me that he was going to upgrade his website. He had a proposal for $10,000! He felt that he could afford the expense and that it would be a great investment. I proceeded to tell him about the 10/90 rule and the fact that if he was going to spend $10,000 on building his website, that would mean he needs to spend $90,000 promoting that website over the next six months. It was at this point that I congratulated him for wanting to make a $100,000 investment in his website. He stopped me and said that he didn’t have a $100,000 budget and that’s when I explained to him that is why he could not afford a $10,000 website.
Whatever budget you are going to put forward for redesigning your website, make sure that it only includes 10% of your total online marketing budget for the next six months. If you have a $10,000 budget, spend $1,000 on a website and $9,000 on promoting that website.
So you can see that there are many reasons you shouldn’t get a new website! Nevertheless, if it’s truly time for you to upgrade your website, make sure that you fix the technical issues with your current website first. This is essential. Once they are fixed, have a different company do an analysis of your site to see if they can poke holes in the work that Company #1 did for you. This is great test of Company #1! If they can’t fix your current site, they aren’t capable of building you a robust new one.
However, if Company #2 can’t poke holes in Company #1’s work, you’ve found a good company to partner with for your new site. If Company #1 was able to fix your old website, they will undoubtedly deliver you an even better and more technically sound new website.
If a company gives you excuses about why they can’t work with your current website and how you absolutely must pay for a new one, consider getting multiple opinions. A new website is almost never the answer, unless you already have a website that is getting great traffic and is technically sound and just requires an updated look and feel.
The final reason that fixing your old website before upgrading is a great approach is that Google will notice your technically sound website right now, as opposed to you waiting several months for the new website to be rolled out.
Use the 10/90 rule and stop focusing on a shiny new website. Instead, put your focus on having a technically sound site to which you are driving more traffic and watch your leads grow exponentially.