5 Signs It’s Time to Redesign Your Online Store

A website is one of the key tools for generating sales and promoting your brand. However, for your website to be truly successful, you need to optimise it on a regular basis. If at some point the website stops bringing in revenue, this might have happened for a number of reasons, depending on the website’s current state. In most cases, subtle pinpoint adjustments will be just enough to improve the key performance indicators of your online store. 

Website performance largely depends on its design. According to Adobe, 38% of website visitors won’t interact with a website if its content and appearance are unattractive. In this post, we cover 5 signs that it’s time for you to redesign your online store.

 

1. The mobile version of the website doesn’t work correctly

Problem: a small number of transactions via mobile devices, high bounce rate.

The number of mobile device users is growing every year. As a rule, mobile users generate a significant percentage of the total traffic to websites. According to STATISTA, the share of mobile traffic worldwide has increased to 52.2% by 2018.

According to an ecommerce research by Promodo, the revenue generated by mobile device users has increased by 45%. If your website’s mobile version doesn’t work correctly, you’ll inevitably lose potential customers among the annually growing mobile audience.

 

How can you identify the problem?

To make sure the mobile version of your website works correctly, you’ll need to check the website yourself on the following points:

  • Cross-browser compatibility. Test your website on different devices and with different browsers. The mobile version should be displayed correctly no matter what device or browser you’re using.
  • Performance. Navigate through the website yourself, from the home page to completing a purchase. All the website’s features and elements should work correctly at each step, without any failures and time lags.

In addition, you can test your website using the following services:

 

2. The exit rate for key web pages is increasing

Problem: users leave the website before proceeding to the next stage of the purchase funnel.

 

Exit Rate is the percentage of users that stop interacting with your website on a given page. The further a user goes down within the purchase funnel, the lower the exit rate should be. Otherwise, this would indicate that users aren’t satisfied with the content of the page they’re at, and they leave your website. We recommend that you monitor the exit rate for the following pages:

  • product catalog;
  • product page;
  • checkout/shopping cart..

 

How can you identify the problem?

  • You can check this performance indicator using Google Analytics reports. To do that, navigate to Behavior — Site Content — All Pages:
  • Next, check the % Exit column to analyze this rate for each of the key pages.
  • For convenience, you can see the pages by their titles, by clicking the Page Title tab in the report.

 

3. Conversion rate for navigation between pages is dropping 

This metric is an alternative to the exit rates for the key pages on your website. By checking the conversion rates for navigation between the pages, you’ll be able to see which pages are problematic. A drop in the conversion rate would mean that for some reason users can’t or don’t want to move on to the next stage. Based on this, you will have an understanding of which page is worth working on first.

You should monitor conversion rates between the same pages as when evaluating the exit rates. You can get this data yourself in Google Analytics, or ask your web analyst to share the data with you.

 

How can you identify the problem?  

To determine the conversion rate for each of the stages, you’ll need to find out the number of sessions in which a page was visited, or the number of users who’ve visited the page. You can see this data in the All Users report or by enabling the Advanced Segments feature in Google Analytics.

After you get the number of users or sessions for each page in the purchase funnel, you can see the conversion rate for each of the pages. To do this, divide the number for the page you’re analyzing by the number for the prior page and multiply the resulting number by 100%.

Take, for example, your product catalog page is visited in 1,500 sessions a day while an individual product page gets 30 visits.

30 / 1,500 * 100 = 2%

The conversion rate for navigation to this particular product page is 2%.

 

How to determine the normal rates?

Since every niche and product has their own unique features, here's what you can do:

  • determine the average conversion rate for all product categories in general;
  • look for benchmarks available in open access. For example, you can see shopping cart abandonment rate by industry in a report by Statista.
  • determine the lowest and the highest conversion rates for product categories on your website.

Armed with this data, you'll be able to look at individual products by category and understand whether they convert well or not.

 

4. The cart abandonment rate is getting higher

Problem: users leave the website without completing their purchases, though products have been added to their shopping carts.

Abandoned carts are carts where products were added to the cart but the order wasn’t completed.

There are many reasons why people may abandon carts without completing their orders. Such as:

  • mandatory signup;
  • time-consuming and complex process of filling out fields and verification;
  • the absence of additional information about the order, such as shipping details or total cost.

 

How can you identify the problem?

To calculate your shopping cart abandonment rate, you’ll need to find the ratio of buyers to users who navigated to their shopping cart and placed an order. On average, 30% of abandoned carts is considered a good indicator. An abandonment rate of 50% is acceptable, but a number of about 70% would signal that something is wrong.

 

5. Website visitors don't achieve their goals

Problem: users spend time on the website but cannot achieve their objectives.

Studying user behavior on your website is not an easy process. From Google Analytics to heat maps, there’s a range of tools to help you solve this task. Heat maps, in particular, allow you to get a complete picture of user interactions with your website, including the links people clicked on, things that grabbed their attention, and page scroll depth. With the help of such tools, you can get a full view of the difficulties visitors might encounter on your website and the way they actually use it. In most cases, users have the following goals:

Studying users' behavior on the site is not an easy process, and there are many tools for solving this problem, ranging from Google Analytics to heat maps. The latter allows you to get a complete picture of the users' behavior on the site: where the user clicked, what he kept his attention on, until what point he cracked. With the help of such tools, you can get a complete picture of the difficulties that users encounter on the site and how they actually use it. In most cases, users have the following goals:

  • find a product or service they need;
  • get shipping or payment details;
  • find contact details and information about a company;
  • get advice;
  • compare different products.

 

How can you identify the problem?

As for obvious problems, you can identify them yourself. To do that, you’ll need to take the same steps your users are expected to take and test the key tasks. However, you’ll need a UX specialist to run a more detailed analysis.

There are services designed to help you analyze the behavior of your users, such as Hotjar or UXCam.

 

Must-have reasons: the four pillars of redesign

There are also other factors providing objective reasons for you to redesign your online store, though not directly related to user behavior.

 

1. Your website has grown and become too complex and cumbersome 

As companies grow, websites also evolve. Over time, as you add new website sections or services or develop new features, website navigation becomes more complex. If becomes increasingly difficult for users to achieve their goals. In such situations, your customers risk missing the priority information and features. For a detailed evaluation of your project, you’ll need help from a UX-specialist.

Yet you can test your website yourself. To do that, follow the ‘three-click’ rule — a user should be able to navigate to the webpage they need in no more than three clicks. This is not a desired dogma, but if this number is significantly larger, this is a clear sign that it’s time to change something.

 

2. The style of the website no longer matches your brand.

Let's say you've changed the design of your logo, updated your brand book or revamped the brand style of your website. Even if all you do is add a new brand font, your website will already look different from its previous version and your audience may struggle to connect it to your business. To maintain a consistent feel, all brand touchpoints should be designed in one uniform style. If your website is stylistically different from your brand's style, your customers may find it misleading, which will negatively affect the overall image of your company.

 

3. The website doesn’t comply with technical and visual trends

Updates are often due to the fact that many older technologies become deprecated and lose their relevance from a technical standpoint. Websites that use older versions of formats, CMS systems and platforms will eventually stop working properly.

Moreover, the design trends are changing rapidly. Website visitors start to act in a different way, and yesterday’s trends become the norm. All this makes good website usability one of the key requirements for any project.

If you haven’t updated your website for more than 3-4 years, there’s a good reason for a redesign. You can measure your website’s performance using the services listed in paragraph 2. To evaluate the visual components of your website, you’ll need help from a UI specialist.

The resources you can use to follow web design trends include BehanceDribbble, and Awwwards.

 

4. Competitors are regularly updating their websites

Try to keep up with your competitors in the niche. Pay attention to whether and how often they update their websites’ functionality, publish new updates, optimize the websites for better user experience. Your website should also keep up, otherwise, you risk losing a significant number of customers. In order to understand how relevant your website is to visitors against the competition, visit your competitors’ websites regularly and compare them to your website. With that, you should focus on the key webpages such as product catalog pages, product pages, shopping carts and checkout pages. Pay attention to the available functionality, page elements, working principles and the way they’re implemented. In doing so, you should understand what is really useful for your customers. Don't just copy everything without giving it a thought. Keep notes and introduce only the best solutions to stay in trend.

The tips in this post will help you see for yourself if your website needs a redesign. If the list of tasks turns out to be quite lengthy, it would make sense to redesign your website completely rather than making subtle changes. If your website only requires minor modifications, you may be able to manage with small local changes resulting in better usability of the website and better performance metrics.