About website rejuvenation - decision criteria
Ten years ago, your company invested substantial funds in the development of the site, and at the very least over the years the site beat them off. This was reflected both in new customers who came through the site and in the ability to quickly inform existing customers about your products and services.
But, like any modern technology, the technology of production of websites is developing rapidly. Your customers are no longer sitting at computers, they began to travel with tablets and watch websites on the screens of smartphones. To adapt to your customers' new habits, the old site needs to be rejuvenated. Or maybe not?
Who argues, there are conservative businesses for which rejuvenation is not required. For example, the site of the richest private company in the world, Berkshire Hathaway, froze in 1996, because it copes well with the main task - providing an annual report to investors, and nothing more is required of the site.
But, if your company does not yet belong to Warren Buffet, you need to somehow cope. And how do you know that it is time to lead your website to a beautician, ugh ... to the webmaster?
')
High bounce rate, for some reason in the Russian-language literature, referred to as "bounce rate" means a low level of involvement of site visitors. If the audience of the site has not changed significantly over the past years, and this can be seen in the section of the characteristics of the audience, for example in Google Analytics, an increase in the level of refusals to view is a bell! In Google Analytics, we look at Aquisition> Overview and evaluate the nature of involvement through traffic channels.
Figure 1. Blessed picture. No traffic, no failures.
Figure 2. And here in the summer something went wrong!
Look in the Google Search Console, in the section Crawl Errors, if there is a tendency of the site to accumulate server errors, 404 and the results of incorrect redirects, you need to do something. For example, hire an admin to fix it all. And not so that “we note errors as fixed” in the same Search Console, but for real. With a technical audit of the site and analysis of problems for each section.
Fig.3 Here we had problems, but we fixed everything. Almost, but not quite.
Google favors the detailed content of the pages, which quickly falls into the user's brozuer. He frowns if you forget to fix FOUC * , and he just comes to the rage that is pessimizing your position, if you forget to optimize the size of the pictures and give the users inflated pages to megabytes where it can be bypassed.
But the mood of Google is not as bad as your impact on the patience of your users. If your site for the selection of filters for vacuum cleaners loads slower than 4 seconds (and you need 2), the client will go to a faster site with a high probability.
You can check the health of the site in this sense with the help of the Chrome PageSpeed ​​Insights Tool, and for internal documentation, you can generate a report on GTMetrix.
Yes, the mobile-first paradigm unfortunately triumphs. More than 60% of Internet searches today are performed from smartphones. Is your website ready for a changed situation? Find out this will help Google a great tool for assessing the "mobilization" of your site - testmysite.withgoogle.com .
If you get a bad mark with it, it's time for your site to change clothes not only for adaptive, but also adapted for mobile data networks.
Fig.4 6 seconds is a long time for 3G, this site should load in 3s.
Without going into details, the design depends on the business function of the site, how the brand of your car depends on why you need it in principle. If the Berkshire Hathaway multimillionaire website can afford the style of crumpled A4 paper, this does not mean that it is your users who will be delighted with this approach.
Rule of thumb - if the site is bad you can get where you need with the help of the thumb of the working hand on the smartphone screen, and the font is too small and tedious to read - it's time to think about redesign.
For redesign, it is better to contact specialists with experience in adaptive development and a test lab with real devices. Times single webmasters are over. Nowadays, few people alone are able to pull the amount of testing on a large number of tablets and smartphones, even typical ones.
And how well does the site meet the needs of your business compared to the situation a decade ago? If your needs change quickly enough, and you want the site to “keep up”, you should hint to your contractor about changing the approach based on a more modern accelerated development methodology ** . And also, think about implementing a business process that brings the site in line with your internal needs. Otherwise, the developers, no matter how beautiful they are, will not be able to help you fully.
If your processes have changed significantly, and the site has remained a “business card with contacts,” you should think about redesigning the site in terms of “what else can my website bring to my business?”. In the end, Internet sites are being built just for this, to help your business in our rapidly changing circumstances.
* FOUC - Flash of Unstyled Content - a UI / UX bug when unformed content is shown to the user, since the output-controlling styles and scripts load longer than expected by the rules.
** Even a WordPress site can be provided with a MVC pattern development package, transforming it from a procedural framework into an OOP framework, receiving the Laravel logic, Magic Magic and ACF convenience in one bottle.
But, like any modern technology, the technology of production of websites is developing rapidly. Your customers are no longer sitting at computers, they began to travel with tablets and watch websites on the screens of smartphones. To adapt to your customers' new habits, the old site needs to be rejuvenated. Or maybe not?
Who argues, there are conservative businesses for which rejuvenation is not required. For example, the site of the richest private company in the world, Berkshire Hathaway, froze in 1996, because it copes well with the main task - providing an annual report to investors, and nothing more is required of the site.
But, if your company does not yet belong to Warren Buffet, you need to somehow cope. And how do you know that it is time to lead your website to a beautician, ugh ... to the webmaster?
')
1) Increasing the number of "rebounds"
High bounce rate, for some reason in the Russian-language literature, referred to as "bounce rate" means a low level of involvement of site visitors. If the audience of the site has not changed significantly over the past years, and this can be seen in the section of the characteristics of the audience, for example in Google Analytics, an increase in the level of refusals to view is a bell! In Google Analytics, we look at Aquisition> Overview and evaluate the nature of involvement through traffic channels.
Figure 1. Blessed picture. No traffic, no failures.
Figure 2. And here in the summer something went wrong!
2) Increasing the number of technical errors
Look in the Google Search Console, in the section Crawl Errors, if there is a tendency of the site to accumulate server errors, 404 and the results of incorrect redirects, you need to do something. For example, hire an admin to fix it all. And not so that “we note errors as fixed” in the same Search Console, but for real. With a technical audit of the site and analysis of problems for each section.
Fig.3 Here we had problems, but we fixed everything. Almost, but not quite.
3) Low relative page loading speed
Google favors the detailed content of the pages, which quickly falls into the user's brozuer. He frowns if you forget to fix FOUC * , and he just comes to the rage that is pessimizing your position, if you forget to optimize the size of the pictures and give the users inflated pages to megabytes where it can be bypassed.
But the mood of Google is not as bad as your impact on the patience of your users. If your site for the selection of filters for vacuum cleaners loads slower than 4 seconds (and you need 2), the client will go to a faster site with a high probability.
You can check the health of the site in this sense with the help of the Chrome PageSpeed ​​Insights Tool, and for internal documentation, you can generate a report on GTMetrix.
4) Friendliness to smartphone users
Yes, the mobile-first paradigm unfortunately triumphs. More than 60% of Internet searches today are performed from smartphones. Is your website ready for a changed situation? Find out this will help Google a great tool for assessing the "mobilization" of your site - testmysite.withgoogle.com .
If you get a bad mark with it, it's time for your site to change clothes not only for adaptive, but also adapted for mobile data networks.
Fig.4 6 seconds is a long time for 3G, this site should load in 3s.
5) Outdated design - the diagnosis of the need to rejuvenate the site
Without going into details, the design depends on the business function of the site, how the brand of your car depends on why you need it in principle. If the Berkshire Hathaway multimillionaire website can afford the style of crumpled A4 paper, this does not mean that it is your users who will be delighted with this approach.
Rule of thumb - if the site is bad you can get where you need with the help of the thumb of the working hand on the smartphone screen, and the font is too small and tedious to read - it's time to think about redesign.
For redesign, it is better to contact specialists with experience in adaptive development and a test lab with real devices. Times single webmasters are over. Nowadays, few people alone are able to pull the amount of testing on a large number of tablets and smartphones, even typical ones.
6) Does the old site respond to your current business processes?
And how well does the site meet the needs of your business compared to the situation a decade ago? If your needs change quickly enough, and you want the site to “keep up”, you should hint to your contractor about changing the approach based on a more modern accelerated development methodology ** . And also, think about implementing a business process that brings the site in line with your internal needs. Otherwise, the developers, no matter how beautiful they are, will not be able to help you fully.
If your processes have changed significantly, and the site has remained a “business card with contacts,” you should think about redesigning the site in terms of “what else can my website bring to my business?”. In the end, Internet sites are being built just for this, to help your business in our rapidly changing circumstances.
* FOUC - Flash of Unstyled Content - a UI / UX bug when unformed content is shown to the user, since the output-controlling styles and scripts load longer than expected by the rules.
** Even a WordPress site can be provided with a MVC pattern development package, transforming it from a procedural framework into an OOP framework, receiving the Laravel logic, Magic Magic and ACF convenience in one bottle.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/335976/
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