You might be kidding yourself and thinking that it’s still a long time until Christmas but the reality is 2018 is fast approaching and you should now be planning your digital marketing strategy for the next 12 months.

If you’re not, what’s holding you back? Is it your website?

There are a variety of reasons for investing in a new one but how do you know when its time is up and you’re ready for a completely new look?

You’ve outgrown it

Every business evolves and grows, or at least it should do, and as a result websites tend to follow suit and can lose focus, become cluttered and fail to reflect the right message.

It’s also easy for a website to no longer reflect the market and the marketing trends and that’s when it’s easier to start again with a blank canvas and only repurpose the content you need and not just take everything with you.

Just as moving house is the perfect time to declutter and take a trip to the tip a new website is a great time to fill the trash can.

A new website can also be the line in the sand and opportunity to re-evaluate your message, giving you a great starting point to move forward and flourish.

Your reason for a new website could be something as simple as your business has changed and you’re planning a rebrand. If that is the case it’s unlikely your old online offering will match your new vision, logo and feel, so why not rip it up and start again?

It’s too slow and old

A fast-moving technological age is great for consumers but not so much for businesses, as websites and apps quickly date and reach the end of their shelf life.

When a new website is built by web developers, it’s to the top spec, has the fastest speeds and uses the latest technology but that sparkly feel doesn’t last long, if it’s left to stagnate, with developers constantly working to take things to the next level.

Research by Kissmetrics found that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, while 40% of people abandon sites that take more than five seconds.

So how does yours rank? Run a speed check at tools.pingdom.com

Despite the statistics about phone and tablet usage accounting for such a high proportion of web searches, there are still thousands of websites using outdated and incompatible technology. Flash players are the perfect example, they require computer users to download a player, iPads and iPhones don’t support it and Google, Yahoo and Bing can’t read it!

It’s also going to be more important than ever in 2018 for your website to be completely responsive. Not only will more people be accessing the web on mobile phones and tablets but search engines will continue with their hard line of penalising sites which are not adhering to the new rules.

Google has already changed their algorithms, using a mobile-first index which means rankings will weigh in favour of the mobile version first.

It’s ranking too low

There’s no point having a great website if no one can find it and if a site was built without using the current SEO trends you will constantly be battling with the bots to get up those reach rankings.

Employing the services of an SEO expert is a potentially cheaper and easier option than a whole new site but any success will depend massively on how the site has been set up in the first place.

If vital opportunities were missed or shortcuts including old-school SEO tricks used, you could be paying the price now – not only will you struggle against your competitors, you could even be being penalised and it will be hard now to discover if this is, in fact, the case.

Starting a new site will allow you to determine and set the right keywords, write the content properly, add and edit links in the right way and use meta tags and alt attributes correctly from the outset.

No clear strategy

If 2018 is the year you crack your digital strategy then your website needs to be an all-singing, all-dancing central hub.

It should be where all of your social media activity drives people, it should house all of your excellent content and attract new clients/customers.

According to Stamford University, 75% of people judge the credibility of a company based on the design of their website – so if you’ve not got it right then you could be putting off as many as ¾ of potential customers.

We’ve talked before about the importance of content, and regular posting not only gives you something to post on social media and in e-mail newsletters but also gives more reason for Google bots to crawl your website, resulting in a better ranking.

But it’s not just words that count, Google loves video (especially if it’s hosted on their own platform YouTube) and so it seems do you, with video now accounting for as much as 69% of all web traffic.

At least sixty hours of new videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute; while there are as many as one billion individual users each month.

Embracing video really is a no-brainer; whether it’s an introduction to your business, product guides or a promotional video, the results can hugely impact your business – but is your website ready to host it?

You’ve fallen out of love

If you’ve got to the stage where you don’t want to look at your website or tell people the URL then it’s time to take action and get a new website.

Your website should be something you’re proud of, it should showcase your business, whatever that is, and it should be the best tool you have to attract new custom because it’s available 24/7.

If that’s not the case though and it’s not converting as you think it should then it’s time to sit down with your website developer and go back to the drawing board.

Conclusion

A new year is a great time to start afresh, so make 2018 the year you conquer the internet and make your business boom.

If you think a new website is what you need, make sure you get the site you want with our easy guide.