You Probably Don’t Need a New Website
Here’s my website redesign advice for many small businesses: don’t do it. Years ago, I worked for a web design agency. When I would meet with a potential client to find out what they were looking for, the most common response was that they just wanted to update their website because the old one was “dated”. Knowing what I know now I would have told most of them to save their money. I probably would have been fired, but such is life.
The truth is they didn’t have enough traffic to know whether their site was good or bad. It was just out there – not doing anything. It would be like changing the decor in a restaurant that no one goes to. They should have taken the money for the redesign and put towards other marketing efforts driving traffic to the site. If you have fewer than 100 unique visitors a day – it doesn’t really matter what your website looks like.
So here is my checklist of things to do before hiring an agency for a website redesign:
- Install Google Analytics
- Setup Google Search Console
- Gather email addresses from customers and prospects
- Start creating content (hire content marketing agency)
- Run search and social ads (hire digital ad agency)
- Social Ads
- Send emails to your database
- SEO
Side note: it is very rare that web design agencies are also experts at content creation, running paid ads, and SEO – although they will try to sell it. Break out the items above and hire agencies that specialize in a particular area.
When you’re getting steady traffic to your site, you can then worry about the design. Better yet, you will now have the data to help guide that redesign.
