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Oudated site(i2tutorials.com)

8 signs of an outdated site

The site fell in the search results began to bring fewer applications? Check it out on this eight-point checklist to see if your text, design, and functionality are up to modern internet marketing standards.

Bulky structure:

Over time, the business expands: the company has new departments and directions, goods and services are added. And the site is cluttered with content and additional pages. If innovations are not structured, it will be harder for visitors to navigate. They will not search for the necessary information or product for a long time, forcing their way through an intricate structure, but simply leave the site.

Make it easy to search the site by distributing products and content into sections that can be accessed from any page. Do not overload the site with distracting design elements and unnecessary information to bring the right information to more users.

To understand how well users are guided by the site, ask friends you know to find a specific section or product on your site. If this task takes a lot of time from them, it is better to alter the structure. And if you have set up a ” Webvisor “, look at the records of the actions of visitors.

Lack of adaptive layout:

Six years ago, the share of mobile users on the Internet was about 15%. Then not all developers bother with the adaptation of pages for phones. Now, according to a study, more than half of people surf the Internet from smartphones. If the site is poorly adapted, you lose up to 50% of the audience.

It should be convenient for visitors to use your site from a smartphone, so simply reducing the page to the screen of the device will not work. We’ll have to draw a mobile version separately by rebuilding the blocks on the pages and making the images and text large enough so that they can be easily seen without approximation.

But the resource should be correctly displayed not only on phones, but also on monitors and other devices with different diagonal. What is good when the content is not just stretched or compressed, but also rebuilt depending on the screen format.

Limited functionality:

Modern technologies allow to introduce functionality that helps potential buyers with the choice of products and the search for information.

To find out what functionality is used in your niche, study the sites of competitors. And you can understand what works best only after carrying out A / B testing of various features.

Re-optimized text:

Previously, search engines ranked sites based on the number and density of keywords, so most of the texts were written in a similar way Such texts are usually uninformative. They do not help a person with a choice. And in connection with the update of the algorithms of Google and Yandex, sites with over-optimized content will be dropped in the issue.

Now for search engines criterion number one was the usefulness of the content for readers, and not the exact entry of phrases.

Outdated design:

According to a study 46% of respondents build trust in information on a site based on design. If it is very outdated, then visitors may decide that its owners do not care about business development and the convenience of their customers.

To identify the signs of outdated web design, a little plunge into trends. In the 2000s, a realistic design was based on maximum similarity with the real world.

Lack of brand identity:

If your company has a corporate identity – reflect it on the site. A guide to the use of corporate identity will help in the design.

Use of identity elements in the network:

  • increase awareness and credibility of the company;
  • helps to convey the ideas and emotions of the brand, which were laid in the corporate identity;
  • highlight the site among competitors.

If over time the style has changed, for example, you have updated the colors or redrawn the logo – make the site all the latest changes.

Flash content:

Sites with flash are blocked by most browsers and do not open from phones on Android and iOS. And in the search results, Google warns in the description of the site that the resource uses flash-content and may not display correctly on the device. Adobe has also declined to support this technology.

Now most of the flash-content has already been transferred to the HTML5 platform, designed to create websites with video, graphics and animation. On it, sites weigh much less and load faster. In addition, HTML5 and CSS3 provide much more opportunities to create effects on the site: parallax, hovers, animations, etc.

Slow loading:

57% of visitors will not wait for the site to load for more than three seconds. They will close the tab and go to competitors. Slow loading increases the percentage of failures, which leads to a decrease in conversion and ranking in search results.

Check the download speed, you can use the service Google PageSpeed ​​insights . It will show how much your site runs and give recommendations for optimization.

To reduce load times:

  1. Reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and JS code by compressing the data in the HTTP protocol.
  2. Use the browser’s cache to load copies of page elements from the hard disk, not from the server.
  3. Publish images in JPG format, photos in it weigh at least five times less than in PNG.
  4. Simplify JS and CSS code with jscompress.com or refresh-sf.com .

What if the site does not update

The percentage of failures will increase:

If visitors do not immediately find what they came for, they will leave the site. To understand the reasons for the refusal, look at the “ Webvisor ” how users behave on the pages. Look at “ Cards . Clicks ” and “ Cards . Scrolling ” to find out what content is not viewed or read and which pages are not being used.

Conversion decrease:

Fewer people start submitting applications when it becomes difficult to navigate on the site, visually it looks worse than competitors or there is no offer that distinguishes you in the market. To choose you, find a powerful UTP, create a clear navigation and make a redesign.

The site will lose its position in the search results:

The place in the issue is influenced by behavioral factors, such as time spent on the page or percentage of the depth of views. Make the content more useful, and the design is clear and responsive – then the search engines will regard your resource as more valuable to users and will raise in the search.

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