Website Refresh? The Fall-out of Keeping that Dinosaur of a Website.

February 17, 2023

How visitors feel on a website that needs a refresh.

From the unfiltered thoughts of children…

Monica: Aveleen, how do you feel when you go to a website and it’s not pretty? Like it looks ugly? How do you feel?

Aveleen: I’m sad because I like pretty things.

Monica: Ellis, how do you feel when you go to a website that looks old and outdated? 

Ellis: Bleagh

Monica: How do you feel when you go to a website and it takes a really long time to load?

Aveleen: I hate it because I just want to get on with it. For goodness sake.

Monica: How about you, Ellis? How do you feel? 

Ellis: I feel like [sad trombone sound]

Monica: Okay. How do you feel when you go to a website and it’s broken?

Aveleen: I want to call my mom and tell her to fix it. 

Monica: Oh, thanks for the lead, Aveleen. What about you, Ellis? When you go to a website, and you’re excited about what’s going on, and it’s broken? 

Ellis: Like, “you people need to get it fixed now.” 

Monica: When Minecraft keeps kicking you out and running really slow, how do you feel? 

Ellis: Like punching Aveleen in the face.  

Monica: Oh my gosh, we can’t punch our sister in the face. 

Okay, friends, there you have it. 

Outdated, un-updated websites make you feel like punching your sister in the face. 

The only thing my daughters know about building websites is that their mom does it. But even they’ve picked up an understanding of what happens when you don’t refresh that dinosaur of a website. 

Part of what happens is what you just heard them say. It affects your audience’s experience with your website. The audience experience impacts other things too, which people don’t always realize. 

Let’s take a look at why websites need a refresh from a technical perspective. 

💔 Things on Your Website Begin to Break

The first thing that happens when you let your website go for too long is things break. My girls don’t like it when the websites they use are broken, and neither does anyone else. 

Links break often. 

This happens because people switch their websites around, build new websites, or take stuff off their sites. The good news for links is there are broken link checkers. You can install plugins on your website to monitor links for you, or there are security programs that will monitor this for you. Keeping your links in tip-top shape is not the most complicated task. 

Functionality issues cause frustration.

When your functionality breaks, things don’t work the right way on your website anymore. Maybe someone goes to submit an email form because they want to do business with you. However, instead of sending them to a success page, it just spins forever. They don’t think their form went through, so they submit it again, again, and again. 

Now, they’re frustrated, and this is not the first experience that you want them to have with your company. It’s also possible the email form just didn’t go through, period, so you didn’t get the lead at all. 

People DO judge a website by its cover.

The third thing that can break on an old website is how it looks. Browsers are continually pushing the envelope on how we need to code to be able to get things to load faster, lighter and work better for our users. 

If the site is built the old way, it will probably not look right the new way. Information can be out of context or look terrible on a mobile phone. The bummer is we don’t look at our websites every day. We don’t know it’s broken until a user tells us, and that stinks. 

If you keep your website updated and modern and rebuild it every four to five years, then you don’t run into this type of breakage issue. 

☠️ Your Website Can’t Extend Any Further

The second thing that happens when you go too long without a website refresh is not being able to extend your site. Because your site is no longer up to date, you can’t add new features because the new features aren’t compatible with the old code in your website. Even if you wanted to add a shopping cart to your site or if you wanted to add a payment system, you couldn’t because you wouldn’t be able to integrate it with your site. 

Here’s the deal, though, friends; even if you could integrate these features with your site, if your site doesn’t look trustworthy, people will not want to pay online through it. They’re just not going to. 

It’s a trust thing. 

I have run ad campaigns for companies that are like, “we just have to get more traffic to our site.” And I respond, “No, no, no, your website is old, loads very slowly, doesn’t work right and doesn’t function correctly. People are not going to buy things on it.”

You know what these companies do? They spend 1000s of dollars on ads, and people do not buy things on the site because they don’t trust it. It’s a trust thing. It’s not just a new feature thing. It’s not just a how it looks thing. It’s a trust thing. 

🐢 Your Website Would Lose to a Turtle in a Foot Race

The third thing that happens when you let your site become a dinosaur is it starts loading like a turtle. I see this all the time on old sites and, heck, in myself. I don’t run as fast as I used to run. Part of it is because I don’t want to run that fast anymore, but also because walking seems pretty okay sometimes. Your website is feeling the same way. 

When your website starts loading like a turtle, it drops in search rankings because Google cares how fast it loads. Google looks at your site, sees it’s slow and decides it must not be very good. So it won’t show your site to as many people. Then, people leave because they’re impatient, which causes you to lose business. 

🙈 Google is Ignoring Your Site

My kids, they’re super impatient. They will leave your site. I might leave your site, though I’m a little more patient because I get it. It happens. But, because people are abandoning your site before it fully loads and not behaving on your website the way they should, Google sees that, and it affects your search rankings.

User behavior on your site shows Google whether your website is more or less relevant. I have seen this happen on my own site, and it is depressing. I hate it. Google may also stop showing your content if it feels like the content is too old. That’s why bloggers are always going out and updating and refreshing their blog posts, because, after a certain point, Google will stop showing the content. 

If people are leaving your site before it’s loading, or if they’re not staying there for very long, if they’re having a bad user experience because your website isn’t interacting with them the way it’s supposed to, then that sends a signal to Google. 

Essentially, it tells Google you’re throwing a lame party that no one wants to go to. 

(💰→🚽) You will lose business.

Welcome to the blog gloom and doom Monica. If I go for too long without doing a website refresh, and I have in the past, our website will start dropping in search rankings. Then people don’t hang out on our site. They don’t submit that contact form to make a first appointment and learn what a cool company we are and why we do such great websites. Leads drop. We’ll go from having multiple good leads a month to slowly dwindling. 

That’s the crappy thing. It’s a slow, slippery drop-off.

You don’t notice the drop-off until one day, you’re in the shower going, “why don’t we have enough business, and what happened to those web leads? You begin to ponder the matter and notice that your site hasn’t seen a website refresh in quite some time. You let it go for too long. 

Your dinosaur of a website is killing you. 🦕

Fewer people can find you. Those that do find you can’t get your site to work or it takes forever to load. When they finally get in, things are broken, and you don’t offer the same features as your competition. All in all, you’re not making your best first impression, and you lose business. 

Here’s the deal. I’m not calling you out.

Well I guess I sort of am but I’m not judging you. I can 100% sympathize. I have let my own website get to this point. I just think you deserve to hear what happens when we put off taking the step we don’t want to take. 

Taking on a website project costs money and it costs time.

I own a web design company so I understand that better than most. People will put off re-doing their site until they’re in so much pain they absolutely can’t do anything else. By then, it’s too late because even with a new site, they won’t see an immediate uptick.

It takes time, and you don’t want to lose the momentum you already built up with Google. We want to hold on to it like it’s a breakable little baby egg. That’s pretty and covered in glitter. That’s not easy to get. It’s why search engine optimization experts get paid the big bucks. 

Not sure if it’s time for a rebuild yet?

Now, if you don’t know if it’s time for a website refresh, I would encourage you to go out and use some free online reporting tools to see how your website stacks up. 

One of my favorites is GTmetrix. I call GTmetrix my boyfriend because he is so cool. He will tell you all kinds of cool things about your website, like how it loads and what’s slowing it down and what you need to do. He’ll give you suggestions.

You could also use PageSpeed Insights. It can be tricky to decode but it can give pretty in-depth information about how your site loads. I also like Uptrends as well. They have a free mobile report that will break stuff down and tell you how your website is performing on a mobile phone, which is really important. 

And if your website is a dinosaur and you need a new one… just know you don’t have to DIY all on your own.

If you need to build your site yourself, you can hang out with me for click-by-click training in our Better than DIY Website Program. We even do free intake conversations. That way, we can ensure you get the website you need to grow your company out of this program. You’ll get expert design and click-by-click instructions to get your site together. You won’t even have to learn how to code. So, it might be right for you. Or maybe not. Either way, go check it out. You’ll never know unless you look.