From a consumer standpoint, 88% research product information before they make a purchase, online or in-store. And like it or not, your website is the backbone of your product information, whether you are a B2B or B2C company, e-commerce brand or not. Sure, you may be active on social – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok – but those sites all come with public-facing content because they’re shared media platforms.
The website, however, like the blog, is owned media, which means you control the message and keep it clean of public sentiment. Given that, most companies optimize their site for that very reason.
Of course, almost everyone knows that. The big question regarding refreshing your website is, how often should it be done before the UX/UI is tired, the content is dated and the imagery fails to capture the brand’s personality today?
While we are sensitive to spending money on work that has already been done, our recommendation is every two years, give or take. Of course, there are many ways to approach it, like renovating a house. Start with the exterior or work on a room at a time versus taking on the entire house.
On occasion, you will discover your website is a teardown. And the first question to ask is, should you change your CMS? Is it time to move from, say WordPress to a more effective lead-gen platform like HubSpot? Let’s return to that in a future issue.
So, we will assume you are remaining on your CMS platform. Our recommendation is to start with the home page. A home page refresh can be done for $4,000-$7,000, depending on the amount of content, animation and customization desired. One way to cut costs is by using design templates. Instead of giving each page a unique design, you apply a uniform look across all your navigational pages. This presents a more unified vision of your brand and cuts down on website maintenance. You can utilize a second or third template to add some variety and denote your smaller pages if you have a larger site. A template page can be done for $2,000-$3,000 and then applied to new pages for around $1,000 per page. You can update the overall look of a 12-to-15-page site for $18,000-$25,000.
Take full advantage of your site’s new look by doing a reboot of your SEO as well. And you will also want to reboot your SEO for about $2,500 to maximize this shiny upgrade of a site. Want to know how it’s performing? Spend about $750 a month to track performance, first benchmarking the previous design against the refresh. If done right, you should see a dramatic lift in traffic and site time, ultimately translating to increased sales.