When Is It Time to Redesign Your Business Website?

Growing a business tends to change quite a lot for the better. Teams get bigger, projects get more ambitious and you start working with a whole different calibre of client.

But there’s one thing that often gets pushed to the side whilst all of that is happening.

The website.

While the business keeps growing and evolving, the website can end up representing a version of the company that no longer exists. And the longer that goes on, the more the gap starts to matter.

You can have the most beautiful website in your industry, but if it’s attracting the wrong people, hiding your best work or leaving visitors scratching their heads about what you actually do, there’s still a problem.

Good design should make a business easier to understand, not just nicer to look at.

Why your website needs to evolve with your business

When your website was built, it was built for a particular version of your business.

Maybe its job was simply to make you look the part. Explain what you did without making people work too hard for it. Turn a few curious visitors into enquiries. Give that word-of-mouth referral somewhere reassuring to land before they picked up the phone.

And at the time, that was probably exactly what you needed.

But then the business grew.

Now you’re trying to attract larger clients. Sell more strategic work. Recruit better people. Enter new markets. Become less dependent on referrals.

As the business changes, the job of your website changes with it. And at some point, the thinking behind your website design and development needs to catch up too.

The business has spent the last few years growing, changing and getting clearer about where it wants to go. But the website is still doing the job it was originally built to do.

Neither is necessarily wrong. They’re just no longer quite in sync.

4 signs your business needs a website rethink

Not every website that’s showing its age needs tearing down and starting again. But there are a few signs that suggest yours could do with a proper rethink.

• Your best work is nowhere to be seen on your website.
• You’ve found your niche, but your website hasn’t got the memo
• Your website takes three pages to explain what your team can explain in thirty seconds.
• You’ve got your sights set on the next stage of growth, but your website is still focused on the last one.

Your website might have been the bee’s knees when you launched it. But you’ve spent years building a reputation as a global leader, and if your website doesn’t reflect that, you’re asking your audience to take your word for it.

That’s where we came in with Cennox. We rethought the digital experience around the people actually using it, introducing clearer navigation and more purposeful calls to action.

The result? A website that doesn’t just make them look like a global leader. It makes sure the digital experience lives up to the reputation.

Your next customer could be making their mind up right now

By the time a potential customer lands on your website, they may already be well into their buying journey.

Research from 6sense found that B2B buyers were around 69% of the way through their buying journey before speaking to a seller. And 81% already had a preferred vendor in mind before that first conversation.

That first enquiry might be news to you, but chances are they’ve been sizing up your business for weeks. Googling you, having a look through your LinkedIn, nosing around a case study or two and seeing whether you’re the sort of people they’d want to work with.

Your website has had plenty of opportunities to make an impression, long before you’ve had the chance to introduce yourself.

And that’s where an outdated website can become a real problem.

Imagine spending five years building a better business, only for someone to judge you on what it looked like before you’d done any of it.

Your website needs brains as well as beauty

You’d expect us to say good design matters. And you’d be absolutely right. But we’re not interested in making things look pretty just for the sake of it.

Stanford’s research into web credibility showed just how much weight people place on visual design when judging a website. First impressions count, and your website is often making them on your behalf.

That idea sits at the heart of how we work at Giant Peach: beautiful design, backed by a clear brand strategy.

Because before you decide what the website should look like, you need to know what it’s actually trying to achieve. 

Who are you trying to attract? 

What do you want to be known for? 

Which parts of the business are you trying to grow? 

That’s where design and strategy have to work together.

Strategy gives you direction. Design brings it to life in a way people can actually see, understand and believe in.

Get the two right and your website does more than make the business look good. It makes sure people see the business you’ve become — not the business you left behind three years ago.

And when you’re trying to grow, that difference is everything.

A new website can’t fix a bad strategy

When a website starts to feel behind the business, it’s tempting to jump straight into building a shiny new one.

We’d start a little further back.

Before jumping into a website redesign, it’s worth understanding where the business is now, where it wants to go and what’s currently getting lost somewhere in between.

So before we ever touch the website, we need to understand the business behind it. 

From there, we can work out how the website needs to be structured, what it needs to say, where the opportunities are in search and how people should move through it.

Then we get to the good-looking bit.

Get strategy, content, SEO, UX and design working together and your website can do far more than look the part. It can actually support where the business is trying to go.

Because your website shouldn’t just keep up with growth. It should be part of what drives it.

Before you rebuild anything, ask yourself these five questions

1. If somebody visited your website today, would they understand what makes your business different?
2. Are your best case studies and most valuable services actually the easiest things to find?
3. Does the website attract the type of enquiries you want more of?
4. Are people finding you through relevant searches, or only when they already know your name?
5. Does your website reflect where you want the business to be in three years, rather than where it was three years ago?

Your Website should be winning you business, not holding you back

At Giant Peach, we’re not interested in making things look pretty for the sake of it. We’re interested in helping ambitious businesses grow.

As your Growth Partner, we bring strategy, design, creative and everything in between together, making sure every part of your digital presence is working towards the same goal.

Because when everything’s pulling in the same direction, there’s no telling how far you can grow.

Fancy seeing what we could do together?